IPCC - "No Upper Limit" On Projections Of Rising Temperatures

[hatrack]

THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will warn the world's politicians that the Earth's temperature could rise far higher in response to greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought.

A secret draft version of the next report by the United Nation's influential panel of climate experts, to be given to governments in April, will say a reliable upper limit can no longer be put on how quickly the world will warm, according to the British newspaper The Guardian.

Australian scientists said the reported warning reflected a growing body of recent research showing that climate change was occurring more rapidly than expected. Some computer models had forseen temperature increases of as much as 11 degrees from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The climate change panel had assumed a doubling of carbon dioxide levels would lead to a temperature rise of between 1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees.

Dr Barrie Pittock, a retired CSIRO researcher and the author of Climate Change, Turning up the Heat, said models of climate change always involved a range of uncertainty, but the possibility of a large increase in temperature had to be taken very seriously. "If you're taking a risk-management approach and want to avoid what is disastrous you have got to go to the upper end of the range and avoid that," he said.

EDIT

http://www.ecoearth.info/articles/reader.asp?linkid=53210

[NNadir]

1. Isn't that a comforting thought?

The IPCC, while being completely ignored, has been excellent in this crisis, telling it more or less, exactly as it is, based on what is known.

I wish they garnered more attention.

[phantom power]

2. Time to offer them early retirement packages.

[NNadir]

11. Yeah, no sense having people who actually know what's going on around.

They only upset you.

Hatrack? ;-)

[phantom power]

12. Hey, you're right... According to Rovian epistemology...

Hatrack is the cause of climate catastrophe, because he brings it to our attention.

[NNadir]

14. I always thought Hatrack had something to do with it..

If he would just stop pointing all this stuff out, it would go away.

[phantom power]

15. Then the solution is clear. If we all redirect our charity donations...

into the new "bribe Hatrack for not posting bad news" fund, we will have saved the earth!

Not bad for a day's work. Tomorrow let's disband this forum and work on world peace.

[hatrack]

20. That's it! 86 enviro articles, bring on the Jessica & Britney threads!!!

Or perhaps I could spend my time posting obsessively in the Lounge on "Lucha Libre"!

[NNadir]

23. Done.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x4818093

[phantom power]

24. That made me feel all funny inside. Global what?

[hatrack]

5. Yes, but they're sponsored by the evil EVIL YEWW-NAHTED NAYSHUNS!!

Therefore, any and all of their conclusions are suspect - at least, here in Bushworld.

[phantom power]

6. And they're surpessing all the good news: carbon markets in 2012!

[hatrack]

7. WOOOOOOO!!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!! USA! USA! USA!

:eyes:

[NNadir]

16. We're number 213! We're number 213!

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls

[phantom power]

3. I just pooped in my diapers.

[megatherium]

32. TMI! But I know what you mean. nt

[Ezlivin]

4. Temperatures, sea levels rise - and we are surrounded by the clueless

Just last week after the snow storms struck NYC, a local LTTE sneeringly referred to "global warming" and challenged the "bunk science."

It is unfortunate that we have a bunch of people who refuse to believe the science.

I fear that when climate calamity finally occurs I'll be unable to refrain from bitch-slapping some of these ignorant folks. Or force-baptizing them in the surging waters.

[SongOfTheRayne]

8. yup.....

when they all start dying and realizing how doomed they are, i will look down upon them from my little flat in a French mountain village and laugh, laugh, laugh.....If i ever actually move to France, that is...maybe Cambridge instead?

oooh! To Kill a Mockingbird quote!

[Ezlivin]

9. I agree with everything that Sheriff Tate said

To Kill a Mockingbird is to me what civil rights were to the blacks; it freed my mind from the prejudices sown there by ignorant southerners, my father foremost among them.

I don't know if I will laugh or cry at the world's predicament once the shit starts hitting the fan. I do know that I'll be mightily pissed at the widespread and unnecessary ignorance.

[RaleighNCDUer]

10. "...you have got to go to the upper end of the range and avoid that..."

And what does our administration do? It excises references to climate change from environmental reports.

[phantom power]

13. Interesting, that statement appearing in an article whose point is..

that no upper limit can be determined. How the $@#@#!! do we plan for that?

[Dead_Parrot]

17. Live on a big hill

And hope.

[RaleighNCDUer]

19. I think it was making the point that there are powers that be that

minimize the problem, planning for the least possible rather than the greatest possible.

While the minimalists plan for a 2 degree rise, and scientists predict a 5 - 20 degree rise, we should be planning for 20, rather than 2.

[jpak]

18. IPCC = Internationalist Proletariat Communist Conspiracy

Only Our Popular War President can protect us from these evil doers....

:evilgrin:

[Dead_Parrot]

21. There probably is an upper limit

Historically, the Earth tends to max out at 22°c (avg), so I don't see any reason why it should go above that. Before you get hopefull, I should remind you we started with a 12°c avg: We haven't seen 22° for around 50 million years. Antartica was a nice lush forest at the time, so it probaly will be again.

Incidentally, this isn't the first time the CO2 has climbed from 300ppm: It did so in the Permian, after the Carboniferous had finished draining lots of CO2 from the air (about 275 million years ago). There was a corresponding hike in temperature from, err, 12°c to, err, 22°c.

Google "Permian-Triassic mass extinction" for a real belly-laugh, although that may be coincidence.

[phantom power]

22. I laughed, a little.

[Dead_Parrot]

25. well you've got to, really

If we are in the opening stages of P-T type ELE, there's probably fuck all else we can do. Think I'll go and get a polar bear skin rug while I still can.

AbE: It would solve the voting problems in FL:

[Massacure]

26. lmao, that map in the first link looks like a fetus.

[Dead_Parrot]

27. first link?

:shrug:

[Massacure]

29. I'll post it:

Edit: I suppose I had best upload it myself instead of stealing bandwidth.

[Dead_Parrot]

31. lol. I guess it was, in a way...

(pinched from the pangaea wiki)

[Odin2005]

28. 22C? Oh God, I don't want to live in the Cretaceous steam bath.

I don't think it will get that high, though. Our current Icehouse conitions are maintained by the EAIS (East Antarctic Ice Sheet) refrigerating the deep ocean to near the freezing point. The EAIS is extremely stable and we will, hopefully, have fusion power making coal power plants obsolete before it gets warm enough for the EAIS to start melting (the Greenland ice sheet and the WAIS, will be gone, though).

[Dead_Parrot]

30. Well, you're getting the special "Doomer Combo Deal"...

...on this one. :D It's (almost) a worst-case scenario: But the EAIS wasn't there 3 million years ago, and the CO2 we've got at the moment is the highest it's been for 23 million years (google Pearson and and Palmer's work).

The question is how long it takes to melt. In human terms it should be a long time, but geologically...

I'm not placing any bets.

[Odin2005]

40. I thought the EAIS has been around for almost 40 million years.

[Dead_Parrot]

44. Ahem. Correct.

I either had a brain-fart or (if my google results are anything to go by) I'm channeling aliens from the Pleides. :crazy:

37 million years is the correct answer - although according to the back of my envelope, that corresponds to 450 ppm of CO2, which we're a massive 30 years away from. So still a bit of Doom in the air... :)

[NNadir]

34. It would seem to me that almost all of earth's oxygen was once tied up

in CO₂.

We know that there was a period in earth's history when there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. How did it get here, then?

I think the answer to this question is tied up in the answer to the question of how much carbon dioxide we could have in our atmosphere.

I think the limit is much, much higher than several percent.

[Dead_Parrot]

35. CO2 has been sky high

The highest measured figures I've seen have been in the 7-8000 ppm area. But the corresponding temp rise seems to break down: the average global temp just doesn't seem to get over 22 degrees. It might be that a melted pole in winter is such a good black-body emitter that we hit a hot equilibrium, or it may be something else entirely. I really can't be sure. It might even be just crap data.

I'll let you know if I work it out: Don't hold your breath, though - I've been trying to get my head around this for a while...

[htuttle]

36. I think you'd have to take life processes into account

The current atmosphere is as much as product of the biosphere over the last few billion years as anything else. Don't ask me the details exactly, but it seems like it would play a part in long term atmospheric composition (and thus climate).

[Dead_Parrot]

39. Indeed...

All our oxygen is biologically produced, for instance, so I would hesitate to pluck any examples from the Archean (if there were any) since although there was (technically) life the was no oxygen to speak of - it was produced by the slime that grew in this period. From the Carboniferous onwards, however, life had pretty much settled down to a familiar pattern - trees, bushes, things going squeak in the undergrowth - so I thinks it's a good parallel. The absorbtion of CO2 during the Carboniferous has been mirrored in the subsequent periods, and seems to be suddenly reversing in a similar way (albeit for different reasons).

[Odin2005]

42. Life must have something to do with the 22C maxing out.

The only time that that was exceeded in the last 500 million years, IIRC, was the Permian extinction. It might have something to do with how land plants punp CO2 from the atmosphere to the soil (and from the soil to a river, and from a river to the ocean floor as limestone) as a side effect of root respiration.


By my understanding, the Permian extinction was started by massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia, and a rapid drop in sea level caused by a decrease of mid ocean ridge activity, the eruptions caused global warming which destabilized ocean floor methane deposits, causing even more global warming and killing marine life. It became too hot at the lower elevations for most plant life and the methane and exposed anoxic sea floor sediments reacted with oxygen causing the O2 levels to drop below 15%, causing land animals to suffocate.

[Dead_Parrot]

43. not sure...

The max goes back at least as far as the Precambrian - and at that point, life was still in the oceans. Certainly there were no trees, grasses or ferns: Possibly a patch of mould here and there, but that's about it for land.

Edited for clarity. And if it helps anyone, here's the thing we're talking about:

[Odin2005]

45. Nice graph

Some stuff from Wiki:

The Permian extinction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_event

Methane hydrate gasification

In 2002 a BBC2 'Horizon' documentary, 'The Day the Earth Nearly Died,' summarized some recent findings and speculation concerning the Permian extinction event. Paul Wignall examined Permian strata in Greenland, where the rock layers devoid of marine life are tens of meters thick. With such an expanded scale, he could judge the timing of deposition more accurately and ascertained that the entire extinction lasted merely 80,000 years and showed three distinctive phases in the plant and animal fossils they contained. The extinction appeared to kill land and marine life selectively at different times. Two periods of extinctions of terrestrial life were separated by a brief, sharp, almost total extinction of marine life. Such a process seemed too long, however, to be accounted for by a meteorite strike. His best clue was the carbon isotope balance in the rock, which showed an increase in carbon-12 over time. The standard explanation for such a spike – rotting vegetation – seemed insufficient.

Geologist Gerry Dickens suggested that the increased carbon-12 could have been rapidly released by upwellings of frozen methane hydrate from the seabeds. Experiments to assess how large a rise in deep sea temperature would be required to sublimate solid methane hydrate suggested that a rise of 5°C would be sufficient. Released from the pressures of the ocean depths, methane hydrate expands to create huge volumes of methane gas, one of the most powerful of the greenhouse gases. The resulting additional 5°C rise in average temperatures would have been sufficient to kill off most of the life on earth.

Edit- there are some nice graphs here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology

[Dead_Parrot]

47. One of my main concerns

(said he, donning the Helmet of Doom) is that our emissions of CO2 will warm the oceans enough to do this again. I doubt there's as much methane as there was then, but things could still get very funky. I'd much rather speculate about hydrate releases from a safe distance, given the option...

I don't think we know about them to accurately model them either. Maybe we'll find out...

[Odin2005]

48. I wouldn't think there was much methane as then.

the deep oceans were warm and stagnant in the late Permian, making them, one would think, a much better enviroment for the buildup of methane then the cold, oxygen rich deep ocean of the last 37 million years. But I agree, it's one event I would not like to see happen.

:yoiks:

[Dead_Parrot]

49. Guess we'll find out eventually...

:popcorn::beer:

[NNadir]

50. As I understand it, pre-photosynthesis, the earth's atmosphere is presumed

to have been dominated by carbon dioxide as well as reducing compounds like methane. (The presence of an oxidizing atmosphere is unknown anywhere except on earth, since the universe is dominated by hydrogen, although the atmosphere of Venus is oxidized, it not really not oxidizing.)

(That the earth once had a reducing atmosphere is consistent with the many sulfide ores found on the planet and with the composition of meteorites from which the earth formed.)

The oxidizing potential of the earth is only possible because of the great deal of reduced matter deposited away from its atmosphere, notably the methane (natural gas), the carbon (coal), and the hydrocarbons (oil.) If we assume that these materials are all biotic in origin, and I certainly do, their deposition probably accounts for a considerable portion of the earth's oxygen.

I almost never hear this discussed.

Planetary evolution is tied to solar evolution. The solar output is changing as the sun moves along the main sequence, although certainly not at a rate to account for global climate change. I believe that Venus is believed to once have had water, when the sun was cooler. However as the sun's temperature increased, the intense UV radiation led to the scission of water. The slightly higher temperatures, and slightly lower gravity, allowed for the hydrogen, and indeed some of the water, to boil off, because a significant fraction of these light gases had molecular speeds (according to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution) to exceed the planet's escape velocity. The resulting oxygen (left behind in the UV scission of water, oxidized any reducing carbon on the planet, ultimately creating a runaway greenhouse effect. As the temperatures increased even more of the light gases boiled off into space. That this boil off is likely to have occurred is evidenced by the high deuterium to hydrogen ratio in what water still remains on that planet. The ration is 140 times as large as on earth.

Planetary atmospheres do evolve according to their chemistry. I really, really, really think that people should think about Venus.

We now are finding out that global climate change is actually worse than we expected. We may in the future find out that it's worse than worse.

[Dead_Parrot]

51. Did you mean that?

I'll give a chance for an edit before I start waxing lyrical about the stellar nucleosynthesis of carbon, Wheeler's work on abiogenesis in a reducing atmosphere, and the current conditions on Titan... :D

But as mentioned before, I avoid drawing any comparisons before life (and Earth) had settled down to a fairly familiar pattern

[NNadir]

52. Wax away. I await your wax is if I were about to surf.

[Dead_Parrot]

53. Oops. Or not.

Sorry, I mis-read your point :blush:. It turns out I agree with you...
I'll shut up :)

(ahem. One of those weeks, it seems.)

[Pooka Fey]

33. K&R No. 5 for the Greatest Page

[rfkrfk]

37. IPCC admits climate models are rubbish

everybody knew that,,,, except them, I guess.

[Strelnikov_]

38. There's Rubbish Showing Up Around Here At Regular Intervals

and it sure isn't the IPCC climate models.

[Odin2005]

41. Rubbish, like Chrichton?

:dunce:

[jpak]

46. LOL!!!

Gotta link for that horseshit?????

[rfkrfk]

54. try this link

http://www.ecoearth.info/articles/reader.asp?linkid=53210

read the fifth paragraph

1.5 4.5 11
yeah,right
...............
I'll call, and raise another 11

meaningless drivel

[XemaSab]

55. Kick for Jessica and Britney!

:patriot: