Yes, global warming will be bad. But these scientists say it won’t reach the worst-case scenario

Washington Post ^ | January 17, 2018 | By Chris Mooney

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Climate scientists on Wednesday suggested that they may be able to rule out some of the most dire scenarios of what would happen if greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere were to double.

Unfortunately, the same scientists say the best-case scenarios are also probably unrealistic.

How a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gases would affect the climate is of tremendous importance, as humans are running out of time to avoid that outcome. With current atmospheric concentrations at 405 parts per million, as opposed to about 280 parts per million before the dawn of the industrial era, the planet is already about halfway there.

Recently, however, different teams of scientists have hit upon an approach to try to narrow the results — trying to find an “emerging constraint” on what the possible future outcome could be by comparing high-powered climate change models, which predict the future, with currently observed elements of present climate.

“You find something in the models which is well correlated to future response and can potentially be observed in the real world,” Ben Sanderson, a climate expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said of the approach. Sanderson was not involved in the current study.

It all suggests that scientists have plenty more work to do in figuring out a better estimate of the climate sensitivity. Their best answer will be watched closely when it arrives in the form of the next report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, expected in 2021.

“If this study is proved correct, it wouldn’t change our best guess of what the future would look like under climate change — but it would make the worst-case scenario slightly less catastrophic,” Sanderson said.

[cymbeline]

“CO2 is plant food.
The result of higher CO2 is more plants.
The earth is greening up.”

You left out something important. Plants take in CO2 and put out oxygen. More plants means more CO2 is replaced with oxygen. Good for animal life and good for earth cooling if you think CO2 is causing warming in the first place.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Remember THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT from the 1960s and 1970s before THE COMING ICE AGE scare?

[samtheman]

How did the world survive at those CO2 levels? Impossible.

---

As the Holy Profit algore told us in his Golden Tablets Movie Masterpiece:

“It’s complicated.”

[kallisti]

That is an excellent question. It is also one of the many reasons I appreciated the trilogy by Matt Bracken,

[butlerweave]

I thought we already passed the worst and were all dead

[cgbg]

The “worst case scenario” would be if all these “scientists” lost their cushy jobs.

Hope it happens!