More gloomy outlook worries from this NCAR press release: Climate conditions in 2050 crucial to avoid harmful impacts in 2100
BOULDER–While governments around the world continue to explore strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a new study suggests policymakers should focus on what needs to be achieved in the next 40 years in order to keep long-term options viable for avoiding dangerous levels of warming.
The study is the first of its kind to use a detailed energy system model to analyze the relationship between mid-century targets and the likelihood of achieving long-term outcomes.
“Setting mid-century targets can help preserve long-term policy options while managing the risks and costs that come with long-term goals,” says co-lead author Brian O’Neill, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
The study, conducted with co-authors at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands, is being published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was funded by IIASA, a European Young Investigator Award to O’Neill, and the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor.
The researchers used a computer simulation known as an integrated assessment model to represent interactions between the energy sector and the climate system. They began with “business as usual” scenarios, developed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2000 report, that project future greenhouse gas emissions in the absence of climate policy. They then analyzed the implications of restricting emissions in 2050, using a range of levels.
The team focused on how emissions levels in 2050 would affect the feasibility of meeting end-of-century temperature targets of either 2 or 3 degrees Celsius (about 3.5 degrees or 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively) above the pre-industrial average.
—–Mid-century thresholds—–
The study identifies critical mid-century thresholds that, if surpassed, would make particular long-term goals unachievable with current energy technologies.
For example, the scientists examined what would need to be done by 2050 in order to preserve the possibility of better-than-even odds of meeting the end-of-century temperature target of 2 degrees Celsius of warming advocated by many governments.
One “business as usual” scenario showed that global emissions would need to be reduced by about 20 percent below 2000 levels by mid-century to preserve the option of hitting the target. In a second case, in which demand for energy and land grow more rapidly, the reductions by 2050 would need to be much steeper: 50 percent. The researchers concluded that achieving such reductions is barely feasible with known energy sources.
“Our simulations show that in some cases, even if we do everything possible to reduce emissions between now and 2050, we’d only have even odds of hitting the 2 degree target-and then only if we also did everything possible over the second half of the century too,” says co-author and IIASA scientist Keywan Riahi.
The research team made a number of assumptions about the energy sector, such as how quickly the world could switch to low- or zero-carbon sources to achieve emission targets. Only current technologies that have proven themselves at least in the demonstration stage, such as nuclear fission, biomass, wind power, and carbon capture and storage, were considered. Geoengineering, nuclear fusion, and other technologies that have not been demonstrated as viable ways to produce energy or reduce emissions were excluded from the study.
—–The 2-degree goal—–
Research shows that average global temperatures have warmed by close to 1 degree C (almost 1.8 degrees F) since the pre-industrial era. Much of the warming is due to increased emissions of greenhouse gases, predominantly carbon dioxide, due to human activities. Many governments have advocated limiting global temperature to no more than 1 additional degree Celsius in order to avoid more serious effects of climate change.
During the recent international negotiations in Copenhagen, many nations recognized the case for limiting long-term warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but they did not agree to a mid-century emissions target.
“Even if you agree on a long-term goal, without limiting emissions sufficiently over the next several decades, you may find you’re unable to achieve it. There’s a risk that potentially desirable options will no longer be technologically feasible, or will be prohibitively expensive to achieve,” O’Neill says.
On the other hand, “Our research suggests that, provided we adopt an effective long-term strategy, our emissions can be higher in 2050 than some proposals have advocated while still holding to 2 degrees Celsius in the long run,” he adds.
—–Cautions—–
The researchers caution that this is just one study looking at the technological feasibility of mid- and end-of-century emissions targets. O’Neill says that more feasibility studies should be undertaken to start “bounding the problem” of emissions mitigation.
“We need to know whether our current and planned actions for the coming decades will produce long-term climate change we can live with,” he says. “Mid-century targets are a good way to do that.”
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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cbullitt (16:51:54) :
They can’t even get a tokamak or the JET to run for more than .5 seconds.
The Register reported that the Chinese reported they had achieved fusion for three seconds in their “Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST)” reactor back on September 28 2006. EAST’s Wikipedia article merely says “…on September 28, 2006, “first plasma” was achieved.”
My, China is building a lot of coal-fired power plants. Seems they plan on building them for decades to come!
Can’t be right, as: “we have 50 days to save the planet” – G Brown, 2009.
dum dum dum dum dum dum dum Flash! Aaaaahhhaaaaaa…
Cheers
Mark
“Much of the warming is due to increased emissions of greenhouse gases, predominantly carbon dioxide, due to human activities.”
Must be galling to have written this just before Dr Latif’s paper claimed that half of this warming is due to natural cycles.
Re: fusion.
In his 2006 Google lecture, Dr. Busard said, “we’ve spent billions on tokamak research and one thing we’ve learnt is they’re no damn good.”
More optimistically he said “Fusion works – you only have to look up in the sky at night to see thousands of fusion reactors.” And then added “and not one of them is toroidal.”
If fusion can suceed, it won’t be via tokamak’s, whose research is dogged by the same problems as AGW – big government science fosters research dependent on continued funding for its own sake, with no conclusion ever.
Inertial Electric Confinement however, sounds promising, but is funded on a shoestring and suffers from a lack of traditional vacuum physicists – they are all dead or retired.
So, if we’re half-way to the 2C limit we should be observing catastrophe- right? So we don’t need modeling. We just need to trend human prosperity versus temperature.
If it turns out that human prosperity has not declined since the pre-industrial age, what then?
This goes w/my pet theory (similar to Stephen Wilde’s) — earth’s avg temps are relatively insensitive to the sun, CO2, aerosols, etc, but some tipping point can cause a change in ocean currents that can then change the temps rather drastically. Positive feedback from ice-albedo changes then increase those changes even more. Presto — ice ages.
And for alarmists, when looking at the ice-core temp records, there’s really no tipping point to (much) higher temps now, the only major change from here in the interglacial is downward.
Be afraid of the cold. Be very, very afraid.
On fusion:
http://www.iter.org/Pages/FactsFigures.aspx
The machine will cost 10 billion euros over 30 years , so I doubt the quote above is correct for the money spent on other tokamaks: In his 2006 Google lecture, Dr. Busard said, “we’ve spent billions on tokamak research . except if he means billions in Zimbabwe dollars.
The problem with fusion is that too little money has been spent, rather than too much.
Have a look at JET’s q&a
http://www.jet.efda.org/faq/iter-and-the-future/
Is there any way some of these pictorial representations can be redrawn using a more appropriate mapping method than the 1569 Mercator projection, which grossly over-represents polar land areas relative to temperate and particularly equatorial zones? I appreciate that a sinusoidal projection inconveniently breaks up the polar areas, but it does at least show the land areas in proportion.
After all Mann and Jones’s mischief, a certain degree of paranoia has crept in, and one starts to wonder whether the selection of this 441-year-old method by so many climate scientists is entirely innocent.
Re: John Blake (16:13:09)
Excellent polysyllabic diatribe, and right on the money, too!
Just to reiterate:
(I think you mean “centuries if not decades,” but that’s a small nit.)
I’m printing the whole thing out.
/Mr Lynn
vboring (14:21:11) :
“I wonder why they ignored fusion? The first commercial scale plant is planned to be in service within a decade or so. It is virtually guaranteed to be a technology option by 2050.”
—
Reply: Actually, by then cold fusion will be going strong, IMHO. Don’t laugh–look up LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) and see how the research is going. The US Navy demonstrated it last year, and there’s a medical device already on the market that’s based on the principle.
Hot fusion is like trying to harness electrical current from lightning bolts. There’s an amazing amount of energy there; however, capturing it to make it useful is another story altogether.
anna v,
“The problem with fusion is that too little money has been spent, rather than too much.”
do you really believe that more money equals better results, after everything that has happened with climate research? If you want to throw some money around, I would suggest trying a different approach, such as Inertial Electric Confinement.
Let’s face it folks:
a. Unless a study says there’s a problem, a BIG problem, and recommends several trillion dollars to fix it, the people who did the study will be laughed off the planet.
b. Unless governments, government departments, government employees, and politicians do studies and find BIG problems that need trillions of tax dollars to fix, they’ll be thrown out of office. And you can bet the people who replace them WILL find BIG BIG problems that need trillions and trillions of tax dollars to fix them.
c. The root cause of all our modern insanity is the explosion in drugs and vitamins that people take today for every little nit-picky thing.
Solutions needed ASAP:
1.) Pass a constitutional amendment against government studies.
2.) Pass a constitutional amendment requiring a ballanced budget.
3.) Pass a constitutional amendment against drugs; except good ol’ fashion alkehol (White Lightning, Moonshine), Caster Oil, Kerosene, Serutan (‘Natures’ spelled backword), Geratol, Asperin, Vicks VapoRub, Chicken Soup, Ginger Ale, and Saltine Crackers. Oh! Yeah! And penicellin (the shot in the kiester kind, none of them pills)- we ain’t gonna get far without that.
That’id solve just about all our problems! Don’t ya agree? We’ve kind’a gotten way beyond our physical limitations in the past 50 years.
John Blake,
A round of applause here also. Well said sir and something I’ve heard from one of my finest friends and chemist extraordinaire Murray Clarke ever since the Climate Grifters themselves, given a face by David Suzuki, crossed his path.
************
mikelorrey (15:10:40) :
The drawbacks from coal are actually worse than nuclear fission power, given one coal plant emits more radioactive heavy metal isotopes into the environment in one year than the entire nuclear industry does. And they can sell the radioactive fly ash as filler to cement plants, which winds up in home foundations… Personally I could give a fig about their CO2 emissions.
*****************
Actually, the radioactivity from natural sources can be much higher than the flyash mixed with cement or wall board. If the government had half a brain, it would allow private industry to capture the fly ash, extract the thorium and uranium, and burn those in the new breeder/molten salt reactors the government pushed through in a Moon-shot-like program. But no, the government is building useless windmills instead. The government is worse than useless.
The caption under the image makes this sound like a study based on observation of past events, but it’s actually a scenario based upon models.
Who verified the models?
Haven’t other scenarios from other models claimed to show freshwater from melting ice caps decreases the flow of warm water from the tropics and thereby makes the climate more severe?
Now i understand. These people have perfected the art of scaremongering. They examine all kinds of doom scenarios. So if it gets colder, no problem, AGW might be out but we already know how much we need to tax you to prevent AGC. Perpetual funding guaranteed. That’s MUCH smarter than working.
I have a solution for any of these governments to follow, and it is orders of magnitude cheaper than anything they are proposing; even if you include all those science advisors.
Simply take some of Obama’s stimulus slush fund, and use it to fully fund the retirement gravy trains of every one of those scoundrels on Capitol Hill, and then retire every last one of them; and throw in the administration for good measure.
Everything will run much smoother, and all climate catasprophies will be avoided; all the economic ones too.
“”” Galen Haugh (08:02:59) :
vboring (14:21:11) :
“I wonder why they ignored fusion? The first commercial scale plant is planned to be in service within a decade or so. It is virtually guaranteed to be a technology option by 2050.”
—
Reply: Actually, by then cold fusion will be going strong, IMHO. Don’t laugh–look up LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) and see how the research is going. The US Navy demonstrated it last year, and there’s a medical device already on the market that’s based on the principle.
Hot fusion is like trying to harness electrical current from lightning bolts. There’s an amazing amount of energy there; however, capturing it to make it useful is another story altogether. “””
Heaven help the human race and this planet, should we ever knock over the fusion genii, and get all the energy the world will ever need from the top 1/16th of an inch of San Francisco Bay.
Humanity deserves better than a cheap source of near infinite energy; we are big enough screw ups even with today’s cheap energy prices. Yeah ! having junior playing with nukes in the basement, sounds like a good idea.
“”” beng (06:29:57) :
This goes w/my pet theory (similar to Stephen Wilde’s) — earth’s avg temps are relatively insensitive to the sun, CO2, aerosols, etc, but some tipping point can cause a change in ocean currents that can then change the temps rather drastically. Positive feedback from ice-albedo changes then increase those changes even more. Presto — ice ages.
And for alarmists, when looking at the ice-core temp records, there’s really no tipping point to (much) higher temps now, the only major change from here in the interglacial is downward.
Be afraid of the cold. Be very, very afraid. “””
Well actually, if you look closely at the “earthrise” photo from the moon, you will see that earth albedo, has much more to do with clouds, than any ice.
There’s actually a reason why the earth has all that ice at each end. there simply isn’t enough solar energy reaches there to warm things up, so you could put silver mirrors up there, and they wouldn’t do much better than the ice, in reflecting sunlight; there’s isn’t that much sunlight up there.
*******
George E. Smith (15:11:54) :
*******
I made the mistake of not reading the original thread enough & responding too quickly. I didn’t notice, but not surprised that the “model” results are twisted around to support AWG, but in fact don’t see that at all. Their results show a mechanism for cooling, but not one for warming beyond the current “warm” ocean-current configuration.
*******
Well actually, if you look closely at the “earthrise” photo from the moon, you will see that earth albedo, has much more to do with clouds, than any ice.
There’s actually a reason why the earth has all that ice at each end. there simply isn’t enough solar energy reaches there to warm things up, so you could put silver mirrors up there, and they wouldn’t do much better than the ice, in reflecting sunlight; there’s isn’t that much sunlight up there.
*******
It’s difficult to determine cause and effect. IMHO, the ice-albedo effect does little at high latitudes (as you point out), but increasingly so at lower latitudes. Constant snowcover here in western MD for the last 3 weeks have prevented temps from exceeding the freezing point even on sunny days.
The glacial periods were generally much drier than now (some exceptions like the western US). If so, I’d think cloudiness was actually less during glacial periods than now. Again, IMHO.
Ok i need a little help i have been taking a real interest in the climate change subject and have been reading and trying to learn as much as i can, i post on another message board and posted this artical and got this response:
[QUOTE]Temperatures would never change significantly under an ice shelf, these meassurements are utterly stupid. If water temperatures went up under an ice shelf the increase in ice melting would lower the temperature back down to an equilibrium where the energy flow is neutral.
Why do they think we use baths of ice to keep equipment at a stable temperature?[/QUOTE]
My question is is there any validity to this statement and whats the best way for me to respond to it?
I bet that next they will tell us that the water is a stable 4 degrees at the bottom of the ocean and large fresh water lakes.
opps! the last sentence goes in the quote.