New IPCC report is out

[_Some Schmo]

Riding this hard, aren't ya?

LOL

The guy is obviously busted for misquoting (fraud), and pretends everyone else is crazy. A person with integrity would be embarrassed, so it's not surprising to see him double down.

This is the age of Drumpf and his sheep.

[_Some Schmo]

Let's think.

Which would be the more rational reaction to the IPCC report?

1. Spend pages discussing the contrarian views of Water Dog and his favorite outlier scientist on this question?

2. Assume that this extremely mainstream and hugely consensus based report is more or less along the right lines, which it almost certainly is, and discuss the politics of getting government to move in a direction that might actually start doing something other than ignoring the urgent issues raised.

Gosh, that's a really difficult one to answer ...

There are some people on this board who are useless to engage, which is why I never do. I mean, it's so obvious this guy is uninterested in honest discussion. He gets drunk off "liberal tears." He's an aggrieved victim (whiny little bitch); at least; that's how he appears to justify his BS.

Sometimes I admire the efforts of others to show how disingenuous these guys are, but generally I think what they're doing is useless. Honest people can, over time, see who the liars are.

Although I admit, it was entertaining to read RI take him down. Sometimes watching fish die in a barrel is gripping.

[_Res Ipsa]

So, here's the kind of thing that causes me to lose a little sleep from time to time:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/ ... a1af8a8cf9

I think we tend to think of our planet and its ecosystem as being in a long term, stable kind of equilibrium. If the system sustains some kind of perturbation, the ecosystem will right itself by returning to the state it was before the damage.

But that's not necessarily the case. There are equilibria that can withstand some perturbation, but at some point become unstable and run rapidly toward a new, completely different equilibrium. And, in the case of the environment, that new equilibrium may not necessarily be sufficient to support modern human civilization. Or perhaps human life at all.

I'm thinking of figure c at this link: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ball-c.png

So when we have evidence that entire food chains are unraveling from the bottom up, with good reason to believe that warmer temperatures are a significant cause, it occurs to me that the conditions we rely on to stay alive may be much more fragile than we imagine. We wouldn't be the first major life forms to experience disappearance of conditions needed for survival, but we would be the first to realize it is happening and take steps to prevent it.

[_Morley]

It's the security implications that worry me the most. The Middle East is already descending into chaos, in part because of years of drought. I have family there, and I see little hope. Even if we in the West move toward a solution, the pressure this puts on Europe and the US can't be overstated. We're seeing the tip of the spear in the refugee problem already. But it's just the beginning.

Fake news

May of this year in The Economist.

Apathy towards climate change is common across the Middle East and north Africa, even as the problems associated with it get worse. Longer droughts, hotter heatwaves and more frequent dust storms will occur from Rabat to Tehran, according to Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. Already-long dry seasons are growing longer and drier, withering crops. Heat spikes are a growing problem too, with countries regularly notching lethal summer temperatures. Stretch such trends out a few years and they seem frightening—a few decades and they seem apocalyptic.

The institute forecasts that summer temperatures in the Middle East and north Africa will rise over twice as fast as the global average. Extreme temperatures of 46°C (115°F) or more will be about five times more likely by 2050 than they were at the beginning of the century, when similar peaks were reached, on average, 16 days per year. By 2100 “wet-bulb temperatures”—a measure of humidity and heat—could rise so high in the Gulf as to make it all but uninhabitable, according to a study in Nature (though its most catastrophic predictions are based on the assumption that emissions are not abated). Last year Iran came close to breaking the highest reliably recorded temperature of 54°C, which Kuwait reached the year before.

Water presents another problem. The Middle East and north Africa have little of it to begin with, and rainfall is expected to decline because of climate change. In some areas, such as the Moroccan highlands, it could drop by up to 40%. (Climate change might bring extra rain to coastal countries, such as Yemen, but that will probably be offset by higher evaporation.) Farmers struggling to nourish thirsty crops are digging more wells, draining centuries-old aquifers. A study using NASA satellites found that the Tigris and Euphrates basins lost 144 cubic kilometres (about the volume of the Dead Sea) of fresh water from 2003 to 2010. Most of this reduction was caused by the pumping of groundwater to make up for reduced rainfall.

Climate change is making the region even more volatile politically. When eastern Syria was ravaged by drought from 2007 to 2010, 1.5m people fled to cities, where many struggled. In Iran, a cycle of extreme droughts since the 1990s caused thousands of frustrated farmers to abandon the countryside. Exactly how much these events fuelled the war that broke out in Syria in 2011 and recent unrest in Iran is a topic of considerable debate. They have certainly added to the grievances that many in both countries feel.

from: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/05/31/climate-change-is-making-the-arab-world-more-miserable

[_Chap]

... discuss the politics of getting government to move in a direction that might actually start doing something other than ignoring the urgent issues raised.

Chap, with Water Dog’s chaff now out of the way, I’d be interested in your opinion on practical policy ideas that can address the potential changes and damages, while avoiding being pegged by a large enough segment of the population as too costly, alarmist or ‘economically damaging’.

Frankly, I wish I knew. Of course different countries demand different solutions, though there are some common factors.

It is, unfortunately, quite possible that the information structure of the public sphere is now so corrupted that there is no practical way of ensuring that most people understand the actual state of things clearly and accurately enough to understand the necessity for urgent action.

But despair is not an option. Me, I'm for a policy of calm and straightforward explanations of core issues, and avoiding wasting time on public controversy with people whose motives are either the pursuit of personal notoriety or getting more funding from fossil fuel industry advocates. Such debates end up giving the viewer the false idea that there are two more or less equally balanced sides in this debate. But if there ever were, there certainly aren't any more.

Just to cheer you up: a study in Puerto Rico shows massive deaths of insect populations as the climate changes.

"Who cares if bugs die?"

"No bugs, no pollination. No pollination, no crops. No crops, no food, no people."

Two degrees decimated Puerto Rico's insect populations

While temperatures in the tropical forests of northeastern Puerto Rico have climbed two degrees Celsius since the mid-1970s, the biomass of arthropods—invertebrate animals such as insects, millipedes, and sowbugs—has declined by as much as 60-fold, according to new findings published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The finding supports the recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warnings of severe environmental threats given a 2.0 degree Celsius elevation in global temperature. Like some other tropical locations, the study area in the Luquillo rainforest has already reached or exceeded a 2.0 degree Celsius rise in average temperature, and the study finds that the consequences are potentially catastrophic.

"Our results suggest that the effects of climate warming in tropical forests may be even greater than anticipated" said Brad Lister lead author of the study and a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "The insect populations in the Luquillo forest are crashing, and once that begins the animals that eat the insects have insufficient food, which results in decreased reproduction and survivorship and consequent declines in abundance."

"Climate Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web" is based on data collected between 1976 and 2013 by the authors and the Luquillo Long Term Ecological Research program at three mid-elevation habitats in Puerto Rico's protected Luquillo rainforest. During this time, mean maximum temperatures have risen by 2.0 degrees Celsius.

Major findings include:

Sticky traps used to sample arthropods on the ground and in the forest canopy were indicative of a collapse in forest arthropods, with biomass catch rates falling up to 60-fold between 1976 and 2013.

The biomass of arthropods collected by ground-level sweep netting also declined as much as eight-fold from 1976 to 2013.

As arthropods declined, simultaneous decreases occurred in Luquillo's insectivorous lizards, frogs, and birds.

The authors also compared estimates of arthropod abundance they made in the 1980s in the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve in western Mexico with estimates from 2014. Over this time period mean temperature increased 2.4 Celsius and arthropod biomass declined eightfold.

Cold blooded animals living in tropical climates are particularly vulnerable to climate warming since that they are adapted to relatively stable year-round temperatures. Given their analyses of the data, which included new techniques to assess causality, the authors conclude that climate warming is the major driver of reductions in arthropod abundance in the Luquillo forest. These reductions have precipitated a major bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.

Given that tropical forests harbor two thirds of the Earth's species, these results have profound implications for the future stability and biodiversity of rainforest ecosystems, as well as conservation efforts aimed at mitigating the effects of climate forcing.

Andres Garcia, of the Universidad Nacional Autònoma de Mèxico, was co-author on the study which was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Research into the effects of climate change is an exciting aspect of The New Polytechnic, an emerging paradigm for teaching, learning, and research at Rensselaer. The foundation for this vision is the recognition that global challenges and opportunities are so great they cannot be adequately addressed by even the most talented person working alone. The New Polytechnic is transformative in the global impact of research, in its innovative pedagogy, and in the lives of students at Rensselaer.


More information: Bradford C. Lister el al., "Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web," PNAS (2018). http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1722477115
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-10-degrees-d ... t.html#jCp

[_subgenius]

While temperatures in the tropical forests of northeastern Puerto Rico have climbed two degrees Celsius since the mid-1970s, the biomass of arthropods—invertebrate animals such as insects, millipedes, and sowbugs—has declined by as much as 60-fold, according to new findings published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The finding supports the recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warnings of severe environmental threats given a 2.0 degree Celsius elevation in global temperature. ...

I think something else increased since the mid-1970s that had a more significant impact on the biomass levels of insects...
(and note that all these, and more, are brought to you by the friendly faces of 'science')

[_Res Ipsa]

Hey Sub, you got any, like, data on that? You could start with the number of Roach Motels deployed in the Puerto Rico rainforest.

[_canpakes]

Lol, of course. Roach Motels are the reason why the overall insect population is fluctuating.

These guys. And they want to be taken seriously. : D

[_Res Ipsa]

Lol, of course. Roach Motels are the reason why the overall insect population is fluctuating.

These guys. And they want to be taken seriously. : D

I know, right? Sub things spraying crops destroys insect populations in the rainforest. But if an environmentalist suggested such a thing, Sub would accuse him of hair on fire.