- Desertification of currently productive farm land
- Increased drought in already drought prone areas
- Release of unknown amounts of methane from thawing permafrost
- Rising sea levels coupled to even baseline storm levels drives property loss higher
- Ocean acidification - current projections are for ocean pH to reach 7.9 compared to 8.1 back in the 1990s. Sure it looks like a 2% change but since it’s a logarithmic scale it’s actually ~37%.
GIGObuster has already addressed your points. I’ll add some more.
The thawing will release methane from melting permafrost and from ocean biomass, as well as reducing surface albedo from melting ice, thus greatly accelerating warming both in the Arctic and globally. This is already having serious debilitating effects on the sensitive Arctic ecosystem, both animal life and the human population. Entire communities are having to be relocated as housing collapses into sinkholes and shorelines erode, and the means of subsistence of the indigenous Inuit there are disappearing.
Increased rainfall isn’t going to be uniform; many areas will experience droughts instead – remember all those recent droughts and wildfires in the southwest? Others areas will experience flooding due to excessive rainfall or due to storm surges from rising sea levels and more extreme weather.
Not true in the general case. Rising temperatures will reduce crop production in lower latitudes in the very near term. Africa is particularly at high risk. The impact on food production in poor low-latitude countries is one of the greatest present dangers of climate change. In higher latitudes, increased CO2 will be beneficial to increased growth of some crops only to a point – up to around 1 to 2 deg. C of temperature rise – and beyond that turns negative.
Sure. First a general comment. The core problem with climate change that overshadows everything else is the extraordinarily rapid rate of change, a level of forcing orders of magnitude greater than is ever normally seen in nature. This has two major implications. One is destabilization of the climate system, causing increasing incidents of extreme weather and circulation changes that induce permanent changes in regional climates. The other is that those changes are occurring much faster than the ecosystem can adapt, leading to undesirable changes in the balance of nature and ultimately to increasing extinctions of many species including our food sources.
The earth’s climate system is a huge and very complex system and a very delicately balanced one. An analogy I would offer is exerting a force powerful enough to turn an aircraft carrier around on a dime. The argument that it will now be heading in a more desirable direction, even if true, is rather moot because where it will really be heading is the bottom of the sea.
You asked for three example of “problems” caused by global warming. Here are three. They are not so much “problems” as catastrophes.
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Weather: changes in regional climates where areas become wetter, drier, hotter, or colder than the climate to which the local ecosystem is adapted. More powerful storms, more energy in hurricanes due to higher sea surface temperatures, more droughts and more flooding. Increased wildfire risk in some areas. Increased risk of coastal flooding due to sea level rise and stronger storm surges.
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Ecosystems: up to 30% of species at risk of extinction with a 2 deg. C temperature rise; significant extinctions around the globe with a 4 deg. temperature rise. Significant crop reductions in low laltitudes with a 2 deg. temperature rise. Increases in some crop production at higher latitudes but decreasing at 4 deg. and beyond. Increasing species range shifts. Unpredictable ecosystem changes due to weakening of the meridional overturning circulation
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**Health: ** Risk of mass starvations in the lower latitudes that are most vulnerable to crop failures, leading to political instabilities and the influx of refugees to northerly regions. Increased burden from malnutrition and infections diseases. Increased mortality from heat waves, floods, and droughts.
Just to add: the transition period to a new equilibrium will not be immediate. During the decades, possibly centuries, that the environment takes to reestablish equilibrium–assuming it will at some point on a human time scale–those droughts and floods will likely occur in the same places in different years.
“Hooray, great, a new grain belt! Oh shit, now it hasn’t rained in three years. Um…hooray?”
Yep, that’s likely very true because circulation changes and other direct impacts of extreme climate forcing are not one-time events but an ongoing series of perturbations of different magnitudes and effects.
Regarding equilibrium, I might add that discussions of equilibrium are only meaningful at a stabilized level of CO2; at this juncture the point of equilibrium is a rapidly moving target with no end in sight. In terms of timescales, the majority of impacts tend to play out over a few centuries, but equilibrium occurs over timescales of the order of millennia, which is why deriving climate sensitivity from models is so exceedingly compute-intensive. Furthermore, there may be a secondary equilibrium in the more distant future with still higher temperatures and further impacts, due to slow millennial-scale feedbacks like complete melting of polar ice sheets.
Re: Higher levels of carbon dioxide, higher temperatures and increased rainfall all combine to promote plant growth, thus improving agricultural output.
This is the only area that I’m really equipped to comment on, but…not really.
First of all, higher temperatures don’t ‘promote plant growth’. Every plant variety has a particular optimal range, and above or below the temperature range, their ability to thrive drops off sharply. Typically, temperature response curves are left skewed, i.e. growth drops off much more sharply above the optimum than below. (Which is the same with humans- you can survive temporary moderate hypothermia much better than you can survive temporary moderate hyperthermia, e.g. during a high fever. Heat will kill you quicker than cold). The most you could say that in some situations, in some environments (i.e. where they’re at the low limit of their temperature range), plants will benefit from a shift to higher temperature regimes. That isn’t the case for most plants, and it isn’t the case for most of our major agricultural crops, which are expected to suffer from rising temperatures.
Higher CO2, other things being equal, is generally good for plants. (With some exceptions- if increased sugar content in leaves attracts herbivores, shortens life cycles, changes plant defence chemistry, etc. than that could be bad). Other things are never equal though, and often plants are limited by nitrogen, phosphorus or other nutrients rather than by carbon. Just like you can’t survive on a diet of sugar alone, neither can plants improve their growth in the presence of high CO2, unless they have adequate supplies of nitrogen, phosphorus and micronutrients.
This is a very big topic, and one that it would take a long time to do more than scratch the surface of, but the reality is much more complicated than what you suggest. Also, rainfall is supposed to increase in some areas, decrease in others, as a result of climate change.
Considering that a tiny, tiny percentage of humans inhabit those regions, it’s hard to imagine the payoff of this being significant.
California is in the midst of the worst drought in decades. My little region in the far northwest corner of the state is known for the amount of precipitation it receives, yet for a couple of years it has seen far less of it.
@ Hector_St_Clare – excellent summary, thank you. It provides a good explanation of what I had only mentioned superficially.
Are you serious, 67ºF today where you live !!! AND SUNNY !!! That’s insane, you’re getting Los Angeles weather. Man, days like today are rare even in high summer !!!. But, yes, I was tramping around the woods around where you live a couple weeks ago and the ground was alarmingly dry. Unfortunately, a few dry years is not climatically significant. You’ll get your beloved rain all day long, day after day, for months on end soon enough. Don’t backfill your catchments yet [grin].
I guess I asked for everyone’s indisputable personal beliefs, far be it for me to dispute any of them. I think some of the scientific backing for these personal beliefs is somewhat lacking, and here I’m tying things back to the OP. The vast majority of research papers are concerned with man-made carbon dioxide because so much research needs to be done. Just read your local seven-day weather forecast (hahahahahahahahaha) and you’ll get a sense of the difficulties of forecasting out 20 years or 100 years.
My coup de grâce:
4] Human-kind have survived, indeed have thrived, over the past 8ºC temperature increase … there’s nothing in the new generations that leads me to believe that we can’t thrive over the next 4ºC increase.
This would give output forcing at seven times input forcing, a physical impossiblity.
The Mayan civilization and the end of the early civilizations in the Hindu valleys would like a word with you.
The thriving today requires to be really prepared, the “solution” from many contrarians and lukewarmers is to do nothing, nor to get the revenue that will be needed to deal with the nice changes you expect, it is that lack of commitment and the typical xenophobia still seen that will not lead to effective ways to deal with the load of climate refugees.
Again, if you are so sure of that, point to the researchers that agree with you, it is very likely that your say so here misses important variables that you are ignoring or you are just plain wrong.
This study provides the numbers I’m working with. As you can see, none of them can be increased 100 times without violating the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. Fig 7 is giving a total output flux of 235 W/m^2. With input flux at 342 W/m^2 and subtracting 107 W/m^2 due to reflection we have 235 W/m^2 input flux. These values must be equal (at least to the precision I’m offering here).
Temperature is defined as energy content per unit mass. If the subject is average global temperature, then energy is the only variable.
I don’t think you’re using the word “xenophobia” correctly … just saying …
No, we won’t. This is a common misconception and a frequent denialist meme. When forecasting weather a few days in advance, one has to predict the behavior of chaotic systems. It’s actually easier to predict long-term climate because predictable forcings dominate and chaotic effects cancel out. Without knowing anything about weather forecasting and its prognosis for next week, I can confidently predict, from first principles, that it will be much warmer in July.
If you are referring to the termination of the last glaciation, I would remind you that the temperature increase occurred over a period of thousands of years, driven by a CO2 increase of 100 ppm that also occurred over thousands of years. We have increased CO2 by 120 ppm in just a few hundred, and most of that in less than 100 years. Moreover, present warming is occurring from a baseline of existing interglacial warmth and a baseline of existing historical CO2 maxima. The two scenarios are so completely different that to suggest any kind of analog is completely ludicrous. I’m afraid that this point doesn’t fare any better than your first three.
I have no idea what inputs and outputs you’re talking about or where you dredged up the mystery figure of “seven times”. Perhaps you could clarify what you’re trying to say.
Only that you are going for a strawman, **wolfpup ** never referred to a 100 times increase. He only referred to magnitudes over what is natural, you are going for extremes that he did not talk about.
Seeing that it is Keving Trenberth who are you using to prop up levels that were not mentioned, it is then important to see what does Trenberth concludes all that means: (as your citations were from 1997 there is the “tiny” issue of the march of science making researchers like Trenberth report now were the missing heat was going.)
As for the magnitude of change being observed that **wolfpup **was likely referring to, I will let him point first at what he was referring to rather than reaching for reductions to ridiculous level fallacies.
Nope, I’m referring to the typical refusing of accepting refugees for the rise of the oceans, IIRC there have been cases from Australia or New Zealand were the governments are refusing immigrants that point at their loss of potable water and land due to the rising ocean, once the issue gets worse that may change, but I’m not very optimistic. Unless you can show me that Russia and many other countries that typically have a beef with immigrants will change their views (and the very conservatives in countries like the USA) it is very likely that unrest in the countries more affected will not give us the nice world you expect as there are many interconnections present today.
Is from 1997. A bit long in the tooth, don’t you think?
Re: Just read your local seven-day weather forecast (hahahahahahahahaha) and you’ll get a sense of the difficulties of forecasting out 20 years or 100 years.
Huh?
Lots of things are easier to predict over the long term, or on a large scale, than in the short term or in the small scale. The point of looking at long-term trends is to cancel out all the short-term noise that makes seven-day forecasts so difficult.
I can make a confident statement that over the course of a year, Illinois is going to be warmer than Michigan, but I can’t make any such confident statement about what the temperatures in Chicago and Traverse City are going to be a week from now.
Re: Human-kind have survived, indeed have thrived, over the past 8ºC temperature increase … there’s nothing in the new generations that leads me to believe that we can’t thrive over the next 4ºC increase
Humankind survived the Black Death too, but not without a lot of mass deaths and suffering.
Wednesday it got into the mid 70’s.
We’re lucky to get that in the summer.
Yesterday it was just a few degrees less.
Gotta love those mid January heat waves.
Wolfpup, thanks. I’m a plant biology researcher at a U.S. university (just got my graduate degree last summer). Plant responses to climate change is not my area of research, at all, but it’s such an ubiquitous area of interest that it’s hard not to exposed to at least a little bit of the ongoing research and literature.
We get warmist climate scientistslisten to our ideas and finally pay attention so warmists can’t complain.
This is a better way to state your case, but get your numbers right, they’re actually a lot worse. You can always show me 400 ppm to get me to agree and work to change “business as usual”.
In context, I assume “magnitude” means “a power of ten”, such that “magnitudes” is at least 10^2 = 100.
Grey summed up things quite nicely in his post #61. I’d say U-Haul would be a good investment right now. If being optimistic about the future makes me a denialist, so be it. It’s a choice …
Nasty inversion here, packs the fog down. It’s cause and effect, look at the cold in the East, we always have pleasant weather at their expense. I’ve also noticed that when hurricanes slam home. There’s something you can feel guilty about today.