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£3.68 trillion: The price of failing to act on climate change
The Observer (U.K.) ^
| 10/29/06
| Gaby Hinsliff
Posted on 10/28/2006 6:01:23 PM PDT by Pokey78
Landmark report reveals apocalyptic cost of global warming
Britons face the prospect of a welter of new green taxes to tackle climate change, as the most authoritative report on global warming warns it will cost the world up to £3.68 trillion unless it is tackled within a decade.
The review by Sir Nicholas Stern, commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and published tomorrow, marks a crucial point in the debate by underlining how failure to act would trigger a catastrophic global recession. Unchecked climate change would turn 200 million people into refugees, the largest migration in modern history, as their homes succumbed to drought or flood.
Stern also warns that a successor to the Kyoto agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions should be signed next year, not by 2010/11 as planned. He forecasts that the world needs to spend 1 per cent of global GDP - equivalent to about £184bn - dealing with climate change now, or face a bill between five and 20 times higher for damage caused by letting it continue. Unchecked climate change could thus cost as much as £566 for every man, woman and child now on the planet - roughly 6.5 billion people.
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.guardian.co.uk ...
TOPICS: Culture/Society; Front Page News; Government; United Kingdom
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To: Still Thinking
Just one question here...this 3.68 trillion pounds...does that include VAT? I'm sure we could have that taken off...provided we were acting as tourist when we spent the money.
To: Pokey78
Total unadulterated GARBAGE! Global Warming is purely a fraudulent scheme cooked up by the elite, to install Socialism via the back-door. Fight it with everything you've got. It's evil to the core.
To: Pokey78
These egomaniacs think man is more powerful than "MOTHER NATURE".
To: DaveLoneRanger
ping (this is an article about the report, so I don't have to post one)
To: ConservativeMind
Charge it to the Sun's bank account. ... It's responsible for the warming.Well, true, we have to have solar radiation for the warming to take place, but changes in solar variability are very likely not responsible for the current warming trend.
To: omega4179
One is dumping iron in the ocean so it absorbs co2Research on this process has indicated that it would not be an effective way to remove sufficient amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere to affect climate.
To: Exton1
Why is it that so called global warming is only reported as a bad thing? One good side effect would be shorter warmer winters that would save people money. Less diseases, and longer growing seasons are also good things. You can tell they are lying because they only predict doom and gloom.That would happen for a small global temperature increase. The more drastic and deleterious effects happen with larger global temperature increases.
From this: British Government Report Calls for Broad Effort on Climate Issues
"If emissions are not cut and temperatures rise as many scientists project, the Reuters agency quoted the report as saying that, among various impacts, melting glaciers would threaten one sixth of the world population by raising sea levels and drying up river sources." [there are a lot of other impacts, of course]
and ...
"The study, according to the news reports, said that progress would best be accomplished by doubling global investment in research on climate-friendly energy technologies and placing a rising cost on further emissions of the greenhouse gases, led by carbon dioxide, to propel the shift toward non-polluting options."
The first part of this has already been advocated by the Bush administration, and it's an important idea for the economy and national security, not just the environment.
To: cogitator
To: cogitator
49
posted on
10/30/2006 9:43:46 AM PST
by
ancient_geezer
(Don't reform it, Replace it.)
To: ConservativeMind
Yeah, it can't be solar variability.Correct!
The Role of the Sun in 20th Century Climate Change (Solanki is quoted here)
From your article: "He [Solanki] says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself."
Also from the article:
"Dr David Viner the senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun did have an effect on global warming. ... He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20 years the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the Earth's temperature had continued to increase."
More information: The trouble with sunspots
The lure of solar forcing
Regarding Mars: Global warming on Mars? "Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing."
Let's see what else we can find.
Regarding Jupiter: "The latest images could provide evidence that Jupiter is in the midst of a global change that can modify temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit on different parts of the globe. ... The global change cycle began when the last of the white oval-shaped storms formed south of the Great Red Spot in 1939. As the storms started to merge between 1998 and 2000, the mixing of heat began to slow down at that latitude and has continued slowing ever since." [No linkage to solar variability suggested]
Regarding Pluto: "The change is likely a seasonal event, much as seasons on Earth change as the hemispheres alter their inclination to the Sun during the planet's annual orbit. ... Though Pluto was closest to the Sun in 1989, a warming trend 13 years later does not surprise David Tholen, a University of Hawaii astronomer involved in the discovery. "It takes time for materials to warm up and cool off, which is why the hottest part of the day on Earth is usually around 2 or 3 p.m. rather than local noon," Tholen said. "This warming trend on Pluto could easily last for another 13 years." [No link to solar variability suggested, though there is a link to solar insolation, similar to Milankovitch forcing of Earth's climate]
Regarding Triton: " There are two possible explanations for the moon's warmer weather. One is that the frost pattern on Triton's surface may have changed over the years, absorbing more and more of the sun's warmth. The other is that changes in reflectivity of Triton's ice may have caused it to absorb more heat." [No link to solar variability suggested]
Regarding Enceladus, warming is not even suggested. The question is about how Enceladus has an internal heat source allowing the generation of water-ice jets.
Regarding Saturn: The observation is that Saturn's south pole is "warm", with a polar vortex due to atmospheric circulation. No global warming is suggested and no linkage to solar activity or variability is suggested.
Thank you for allowing me to update my knowledge of these phenomena; I hope the information I have provided above will also be useful to you as guidance for critical inquiry into the science of climate change.
To: ancient_geezer
Thanks for the information.
To: cogitator
You accept that all the other changes CAN'T be from the sun, yet you insist the changes on Earth MUST be from humans.
My only insistence is that humans are not responsible for it, just as they are not responsible for it on all the other planets and moons experiencing heating trends.
To: Pokey78
£10.68 trillion - the price of acting on it!
To: Pokey78
So what's the cost of "acting"? I bet at least three time
54
posted on
10/31/2006 7:40:20 AM PST
by
mad_as_he$$
(Never corner anything meaner than you. NSDQ)
To: Pokey78
Hmm. 1% of Global GDP. Now who would pay this? Perhaps those countries with the highest GDP? Kiss off.
To: ConservativeMind
My only insistence is that humans are not responsible for it, just as they are not responsible for it on all the other planets and moons experiencing heating trends.Why is that your only insistence? Why are you not open to what analysis of the data actually indicates? "Global warming" commingles science, policy, and politics. The starting point is science. The science is indicating that increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to increasing global temperatures (basic physics indicates that this absolutely must happen).
While there are other contributing factors to Earth's complex climate system, greenhouse gas forcing is proven by the temperature of the Earth, maintained by the water vapor content of the atmosphere (without which the Earth's temperature would be about -40 C). The average water vapor content (relative humidity) of the atmosphere is dependent on Earth's radiative balance, and this in turn is determined by other "radiation-active" atmospheric gases, most important among them being CO2. If the atmospheric concentration of CO2 changes, Earth's radiative balance will change. Humans are causing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to increase. That's the basic scientific picture; simple and inescapabe. The question of human "responsibility" is a matter of quantification and attribution to other potential causes, such as solar variability. The current best attribution analysis does not find solar variability to be a major contributing factor to the currently observed warming.
To: cogitator; ConservativeMind
57
posted on
10/31/2006 9:03:35 AM PST
by
ancient_geezer
(Don't reform it, Replace it.)
To: Pokey78
Unchecked climate change Sitting there in the bureaucrat's office it might be easy to imagine that power to do anything resides in the bureaucrat's purchase order signing pen.
58
posted on
10/31/2006 9:06:53 AM PST
by
RightWhale
(Repeal the law of the excluded middle)
To: ancient_geezer; ConservativeMind
Interesting when you consider that the UN/IPCC modelers hold cloud cover constant in their calculations.That comment surprised me. I can't imagine current climate models not including cloud cover or cloud feedback effects, even though due to uncertainty there must be quite a bit of assumptions guiding cloud behavior in the models.
As you might expect, searching first provided a RealClimate link:
IPCC in action, Part I
Very relevant first off: "To be exact, IPCC does not do the research. It only collects peer-reviewed publications, evaluates them through an expanded appraisal process and publishes it."
So there are literally no "UN/IPCC modelers". There are only independent scientists and groups doing climate modeling, and the IPCC evaluates the research results published by these scientists.
Quoting the article: "So, what is CMEP [Climate Model Evaluation Project] exactly? Well, it is a very ambitions and painstaking project which has managed to bring together all the aforementioned modeling groups which run specified model experiments with very similar forcings and then performed coordinated diagnostic analyses to evaluate these model simulations and determine the uncertainty in the future climate projections in their models. The output from all the atmosphere-ice-ocean-land coupled general circulation models (GCMs) is hosted in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory database. The model variables that are evaluated against all sorts of observations and measurements range from solar radiation and precipitation rates, air and sea surface temperatures, cloud properties and distributions, winds, river runoff, ocean currents, ice cover, albedos, even the maximum soil depth reached by plant roots (seriously!)."
So the models do (and they should) consider cloud effects. This is underscored by comment #3 in the thread. Excerpting liberally:
From the Q: "I have seen estimates that one percent change in cloud cover is equivalent to a doubling of carbon dioxide from pre-industrial levels." From the A: "Cloud cover in these models does change as a function of the forcings (including solar variability), though it remains to be seen whether those changes are consistent with that observed."
So I think that the statement that the models/modelers "hold cloud cover constant in their calculations" is an over-generalization.
To: Pokey78
$7 trillion: The Ultimate Tax on Economic Growth
a.k.a. The Liberals' No-Jobs Return-To-Poverty Initiative
60
posted on
10/31/2006 9:58:23 AM PST
by
OESY
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