The Coming 'Instant Planetary Emergency'.
How will climate change affect the future of the planet? Scientists predict it will be nothing short of a nightmare.
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“We’ve Never Been Here as a Species”
“We as a species have never experienced 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and ecology at the University of Arizona and a climate change expert of twenty-five years, told me. “We’ve never been on a planet with no Arctic ice, and we will hit the average of 400 ppm…within the next couple of years. At that time, we’ll also see the loss of Arctic ice in the summers.… This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at least the last three million years.”
For the uninitiated, in the simplest terms, here’s what an ice-free Arctic would mean when it comes to heating the planet: minus the reflective ice cover on Arctic waters, solar radiation would be absorbed, not reflected, by the Arctic Ocean. That would heat those waters, and hence the planet, further. This effect has the potential to change global weather patterns, vary the flow of winds, and even someday possibly alter the position of the jet stream. Polar jet streams are fast flowing rivers of wind positioned high in the earth’s atmosphere that push cold and warm air masses around, playing a critical role in determining the weather of our planet.
McPherson, who maintains the blog Nature Bats Last, added, “We’ve never been here as a species and the implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of the living planet.”
While his perspective is more extreme than that of the mainstream scientific community, which sees true disaster many decades into our future, he’s far from the only scientist expressing such concerns. Professor Peter Wadhams, a leading Arctic expert at Cambridge University, has been measuring Arctic ice for forty years, and his findings underscore McPherson’s fears. “The fall-off in ice volume is so fast it is going to bring us to zero very quickly,” Wadhams told a reporter. According to current data, he estimates “with 95% confidence” that the Arctic will have completely ice-free summers by 2018. (US Navy researchers have predicted an ice-free Arctic even earlier—by 2016.)
The rest: http://www.thenation.com/article/177614/coming-instant-planetary-emergency#
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Last edited Sun Dec 22, 2013, 02:07 PM - Edit history (1)
Hard to read but to the left is Alaska and the top left is Siberia. Europe on the right. US in the middle.
Note the temps around Siberia. Not conducive to ice formation. Ice however is hugging the Canadian continent and that could be why we are getting these blasts of cold air. Seems the warmer Siberian air is expanding up and over the Arctic right toward the US. Pushing cold air down onto the US.
Siberia, according to reports is almost snow free for the first time ever.
IOW, the weather is already being changed due to lack of Arctic ice..
... again?
Also, if the atmosphere fills with methane, I'm blaming the cat.
But I'd consider attempting to locate a 'middle' by taking into account anything GOP-related very 'wacky' 
If you don't mind me saying so.
in the world and the first in the UK, from the then Plymouth Polytechnic 1973-76, 2.1 Honours CNAA now Open University, then spent two years researching at the U. of Bath in relation to 'environmentalism' in the areas of sociology and philosophy of science and of knowledge and the associated economics and politics (before finding my finance withdrawn for radicalism, meeting a French woman on the ferry leaving Ireland one evening and dropping out for a couple of years, then becoming an analyst programmer in London with an MSc from Essex); so although I've never been employed in that field I've been following, and thinking, and preaching to deaf ears for a long time.
Now I watch my back and help to build local community and make music: http://aridisland.com/records 
Glad to see you too putting your thinking-cap on, cilla4progress, thank you.
TV News and Extreme Weather: Don't Mention Climate Change
Dramatic weather-related disasters are ready made for TV news. But what's not on the screen? The human-made climate change that is affecting, and in some cases exacerbating, that extreme weather.
A new FAIR survey of the national network newscasts (CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News) finds that extreme weather is big news. In the first nine months of 2013, there were 450 segments of 200 words or more that covered extreme weather: flooding, forest fires, tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes and heat waves.
But of that total, just a tiny fraction--16 segments, or 4 percent of the total--so much as mentioned the words "climate change," "global warming" or "greenhouse gases."
So in what was an unusually active weather year in the United States--a massive tornado in Oklahoma, deadly flooding in Colorado, massive wildfires across several Western states and bouts of unseasonable temperatures across the country--96 percent of extreme weather stories never discussed the human impact on the climate that is contributing to these outcomes.
It's almost as if the altered climate and the weather were happening on two different planets.
The FAIR survey appears in the December 2013 issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!.
Is this like, second nature for climate doomers? Sure seems like it.
In any case, you'll have to note that my criticism was mainly centered on the usage of fringe crazies for some of his sources(McPherson & Wasdell in particular), and as well as outlier-type scenarios being falsely presented as "conservative"
no way are we going to plausibly reach 3.5*C by 2035 or even 5*C by 2050, even under the worst possible scenarios; and yes, this even assumes that the all the worst possible feedbacks occur, and in the shortest possible terms at that).....and this isn't so much directed at the faulty researchers themselves, whomever they may be, but rather, at those people who take these extreme predictions, and pass them off as the Gospels, or whatever.
In short, this Jamail fellow didn't do very good job at finding quality research. Half-assed effort at a half-assed article.....
In regards to sea level rise they've already revised their 2004 IPCC Report to a more negative outlook.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/10/sea-level-in-the-5th-ipcc-report/
For an unmitigated future rise in emissions (RCP8.5), IPCC now expects between a half metre and a metre of sea-level rise by the end of this century. The best estimate here is 74 cm.
On the low end, the range for the RCP2.6 scenario is 28-61 cm rise by 2100, with a best estimate of 44 cm. Now that is very remarkable, given that this is a scenario with drastic emissions reductions starting in a few years from now, with the world reaching zero emissions by 2070 and after that succeeding in active carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere. Even so, the expected sea-level rise will be almost three times as large as that experienced over the 20th Century (17 cm). This reflects the large inertia in the sea-level response – it is very difficult to make sea-level rise slow down again once it has been initiated. This inertia is also the reason for the relatively small difference in sea-level rise by 2100 between the highest and lowest emissions scenario (the ranges even overlap) – the major difference will only be seen in the 22nd century.
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The range up to 98 cm is the IPCC’s “likely” range, i.e. the risk of exceeding 98 cm is considered to be 17%, and IPCC adds in the SPM that “several tenths of a meter of sea level rise during the 21st century” could be added to this if a collapse of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic ice sheet is initiated. It is thus clear that a meter is not the upper limit.
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4. Greenland might melt faster than current models capture, due to the “dark snow” effect. Jason Box, a glaciologist who studies this issue, has said:
There was controversy after AR4 that sea level rise estimates were too low. Now, we have the same problem for AR5 [that they are still too low].
Here's more from the IPCC regarding methane release from fracking.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/10/02/2708911/fracking-ipcc-methane/
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that methane (CH4) is far more potent a greenhouse gas than we had previously realized.
This matters to the fracking debate because methane leaks throughout the lifecycle of unconventional gas. Natural gas is, after all, mostly methane (CH4).
We learned last month that the best fracked wells appear to have low emissions of methane, but that study likely missed the high-emitting wells that result in the vast majority of methane leakage. Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas.
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But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25.
With developments like this I believe the IPCC will be revising their reports again and not for the better.
Having said that even under your scenario it's not going to be "business as usual."
I used to criticize the format rather than the content too... but then I learned how to read better, and to keep my petulance to myself.
Good luck!
Since the whole denial thing isn't working so well, it's time to bring out the "it's not as bad as all that" meme.
& 
& R
Nothing to be worried about, move along now, move along... 
Big KICK & Recommend!
It does sucker some folks. But it does not change the ugly reality they work so hard to deny and disguise.
