The natural balance would be the melting ice puts lots of land underwater, reducing the number of humans polluting.
But in reality we will cram more people into less space and cut down more trees and destroy more habitats.
We’ll clear the rainforest to make room for condos.
We’ll pave paradise and put up a parking lot.
You’re really pessimistic about what humans will do when the signs start to impact them. I suspect we’re <5 years from a truly massive global response to climate change. Something really bad has a habit of getting everyone on the same page quickly. This is the human historical pattern… neglect until it’s really bad followed by a likely over reaction.
Agree we are in a lot of trouble but you are mixing up weather and climate here. Predicting weather is much harder than predicting the climate. Also the climate models are all about averages so even though Greenland ice retreated very far this year in summer you can’t draw conclusions from that yet. It is also unlikely there are exponential factors because if that is the case then earth would already be a Venus or an iceball. The planet has been much warmer than this. It is more likely there are factors we don’t know that will stabilize the climate. The biggest issue is actually that the rate of change will cause mass extinctions and that even humans will have trouble adapting to the new environment.
Yep. Except some of that stabilization covers a few years. Not 50.
Eg. The ocean soaked up way more carbon than we thought, but seems to have reached its li.it.
Plenty of natural habitats would have changed with more heat and more rain, creating new carbon sinks.
That doesnt work now though when so much is farmland and cities and roads. We arent gonna be getting any new rainforests this time around.
During its history Earth has been a scorching ball of fire or completely frozen over. The planet will be fine. It’s humans that will suffer. The industrial world might be able to cope with the consequences. Look what happened when three million refugees came to Europe in recent years. Imagine the reaction when 300 million Africans start marching when Subsaharan Africa becomes uninhabitable.
This seems relevant:
No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold
periods over the preindustrial Common Era
Cliffs: We had warming periods before in the past 2000 years but never global. 98% of the earth is waming. This is absolutely unprecedented. Previous warming periods were restricted regionally.
I’m not mixing them up. I’m saying predicting climate change in future years is orders of magnitude more difficult than predicting the weather for a place in a few hours and we can’t even do that with high accuracy…no way we can predict climate change accurately.
So? The planet will survive. It’s 7B+ humans that will have a hard time dealing with the warmer planet. We haven’t done that before.
The fact that the planet has been much warmer means it’s possible for it to get much warmer, which fucks my children and my future grandchildren.
This is what I was replying to which is extremely unlikely to be the case because it would have caused Earth to be a Venus already. So far all adjustments to the models are in the other direction. It is also not needed to make claims like that as the current modelling is more than bad enough especially since we are nowhere near doing enough to reduce CO2 output.
Modelling climate is much easier than modelling weather. We are already way better in predicting climate for the next 50 years than we are predicting weather for the next 10 days.
Very weird and unverifiable claim. And the weather being unpredictable for the next day to 10 days is a cliche that’s out of date. Forecasts are usually pretty solid.
Yeah for real… I’ve been confused by these claims that we can’t predict the weather 4 hours out.
We can predict tornadoes right before they happen in 2019. The weather report is so accurate I never even mentally question whether they might be wrong. All that 'everybody hates the weatherman stuff is really out of date.
I play a lot of tennis so I follow the forecast and it’s wrong all the time in regards to rain at least.
Regardless, it’s much harder to predict climate in the future and we don’t have any way to know how much harder because we don’t have a documented history of predicting and being right/wrong over a period of time so you can’t say we are good at predicting climate over 50 years because we don’t know that yet.
To what Nicholas said, I think you guys may be underestimating the level of uncertainty that is still present in weather forecasting. It may be that by our nature as former poker players we have an appreciation for probabilistic analysis, so seeing something like “40% chance of rain” is easily understood, but the fact that we’re still looking at weather in terms of probability, even less than an hour away, kinda underscores that we don’t have very precise models of weather.
Not to imply that there isn’t uncertainty in climate predictions–there certainly is, though the media often does a poor job of presenting or explaining that uncertainty.
Snow and rain forecasts are wrong all the time here in Minnesota. There is a local radio host who calls the TV weather people weather terrorists because they’re always freaking out and predicting some catastrophic blizzard which more often then not ends up being a light 2 inch covering. I laugh when this guy rants about the latest forecast and he comes off a little unhinged but he isn’t wrong. Temp forecasts are usually fairly accurate though.
Well, rain forecasts are often like 40% or 60% and it is often raining in one spot and not raining like half a mile away. And the Rainy spot moves around as the wind blows all day.
Climate modelling is almost entirely white box modelling which means based on proven formulas most of which are well understood and very little black box modelling where you are just matching historical data to a polynome. The biggest issue in climate modelling is cloud formation as that is still not well understood. This means the current models are pretty accurate. Despite what some people here seem to think weather forecasts are still regularly massively off even for something well understood like rain. We don’t know how to forecast hurricanes, tornados or even heat waves more than 10 days out. We don’t know if an el nina will form until it is already happening. The best we have is that if the sea is warmer than x then it will probably happen but recently even that didn’t work out. This is definitely not controversial except with climate change deniers with their typical if you can’t predict if this winter is going to be cold (weather) then how can you predict the average temperature increase in 50 years (climate).
To take it back to the post that triggered this. The current hot summer in the north that is causing greenland to go green is weather and is hotter than predicted, the average global temperature is well within the climate models predictions.
