Climate Change Is Already Here, Says Massive Government Report

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At least that is one titilating headline from the Internet today

Here is another

White House sets out looming climate risks for U.S., calls for 'urgent action'

Holy crap, it must be serious because even Fox news is talking about it

Administration issues dire climate change report, amid regulatory push

Here is the Huffingtonpost story so people can read it if they wish

The report is the latest update from the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and details ways that climate change -- caused predominantly by the emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases -- is already being felt across the country.

"Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present," the report says in its introduction. The full report, at more than 800 pages, is the most comprehensive look at the effects of climate change in the U.S. to date, according to its authors. (Even the "highlights" document provided to reporters the day before the release weighed in at 137 pages). The report includes regional and sectoral breakdowns of current and anticipated impacts, which have implications for infrastructure, agriculture, human health, and access to water.

Those impacts include increased severity of heat waves and heavier downpours. On the coasts, sea level rise is already contributing to increased flooding during high tides and storms, the report notes. And in the West, conditions are getting hotter and drier, and the snowpack is melting earlier in the year, extending wildfire season.

Average U.S. temperatures have increased 1.3 degrees to 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (depending on the part of the country) since people began keeping records in 1895, and much of that warming has come in recent decades. The report notes that the period from 2001 to 2012 was warmer than any previous decade on record, across all regions of the country.

The length of time between the last spring frost and the first fall frost also has increased across the U.S. The average time between frosts in the Southwest increased by 19 days in the years 1991 to 2012, compared with the average from 1901 to 1960.

Heat waves are already the top cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S., and that will only get worse. Extreme heat can cause more heart, lung and kidney problems, especially among the poor, sick and elderly. The number of days where temperatures top 100 degrees is predicted to increase in the future. If emissions continue to rise, temperatures on the very hottest days during the last 20 years of this century may be 10 degrees to 15 degrees hotter across most of the country, the report finds. Under a lower-emission scenario, those hottest days of the years 2081 to 2100 would still be 3 degrees to 4 degrees warmer than now.

Another impact that scientists are already seeing that they have linked to climate change is an increase in major precipitation events. In the Northeast, for example, there has been a 71 percent increase in storms that would classify as "very heavy" -– in the top 1 percent -- from 1958 to 2012.

While the outlook could be considered bleak, Radley Horton, a scientist at Columbia University Earth Institute’s Center for Climate Systems Research and the lead author for the assessment’s chapter on the Northeast, said the report "delves into much more detail about opportunities to address climate change."

"The climate hazards are looking as severe as ever, but I think there is a message contained in the report that our ability to respond is about getting going," Horton told The Huffington Post. "The question is, are we able to meet the challenges, given the growing understanding of how much the climate could change this century?"

The amount of climate change in the future, the report says, "will still largely be determined by choices society makes about emissions."

The report notes that American society and its infrastructure were built for the past climate -- not the future. It highlights examples of the kinds of changes that state and local governments can make to become more resilient. One of the main takeaways, said David Wolfe, a professor of plant and soil ecology at Cornell University and a coauthor of the chapter on the Northeast, is that "you don't want to look at the weather records of yesteryear to determine how to set up your infrastructure."

This report, said Wolfe, signals that the country is "beginning to move beyond the debate about whether climate change is real or not, and really getting down to rolling up our sleeves" and addressing it.

A 60-person advisory committee comprised of government, private and academic representatives oversaw the assessment, which took four years and involved more than 300 scientists, engineers, and technical experts.

In an appearance at the White House press briefing on Monday, White House senior counselor John Podesta said the updated assessment provides "practical, usable knowledge" for state and local decision-makers as they prepare for climate impacts and is the "most authoritative and comprehensive" to date.

The reports are supposed to be issued at least every four years under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, and are meant to analyze "the effects of global change on the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity." The reports are to be presented to the president and Congress.

This is the third report of its kind. The first came in 2000, during the Clinton administration. The Bush administration was accused of push for climate legislation in Congress early in its first term.

President Barack Obama plans to meet with meteorologists to discuss the report's findings, and the White House has several related events planned later this week.

Sadly I think this quote tells us exactly what will be done about this "This is the third report of its kind. The first came in 2000, during the Clinton administration. The Bush administration was accused of push for climate legislation in Congress early in its first term."

Spoiler:

Nothing.

In other news, water is wet, the sky is blue, etc.

A scientist I follow on Twitter had posted a link to the article talking about how CO2 had gone off the charts over the last decade and was magnitudes higher than it had been in over 800k years. Someone actually tried to argue with him asking just who was around 800k years ago to measure the CO2. I'm not hopeful, at least here in the US.

Nothing will get done.. the rich and powerful in general don't give a rats ass.. AND even if they did trying to get everyone to act in unison is a complete and utter waste of time. Human Nature will win out in the end and it will be to late to stop it by the time "people" realize that its now or never.

Wasn't it Bush, Jr. that said he just assumed scientists would figure out a fix by the time it became an issue?

Probably. That's what a lot of my conservative friends seem to think.

Robear wrote:

Probably. That's what a lot of my conservative friends seem to think.

Why bother with the scientists when we'll all be with Jesus by then anyway (except for the left behind heathens)?

This article pretty much sums up how we're going to react to climate change.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/pirates-gm-begins-making-frantic-haphazard-moves-a,5591/

Robear wrote:

Probably. That's what a lot of my conservative friends seem to think.

It's not happening.
It's not caused by humans.
New technology will offset it naturally.
It's not that bad.

Those seems to be the stages of denial so far. I'm predicting a final stage of denial: "We would have paid more attention if you liberals hadn't been so snotty about it. So really, it's your fault."

kazooka wrote:
Robear wrote:

Probably. That's what a lot of my conservative friends seem to think.

It's not happening.
It's not caused by humans.
New technology will offset it naturally.
It's not that bad.

Those seems to be the stages of denial so far. I'm predicting a final stage of denial: "We would have paid more attention if you liberals hadn't been so snotty about it. So really, it's your fault."

You know you have reached the final stage when they say crap like "it can't be stopped anyway".

I've got a buddy who is totally invested in this. He's a nuclear physicist. When I got him to look at a few papers for the first time in a few years, he responded by arguing that the models were invalid. (He recounted how hard it was to model phase change interfaces in a single pot of boiling water as an example of why the problem is intractable.) Then he cited various papers that showed that the variation was natural.

Of course, they used the standard models he didn't like. When I pointed that out, he stated flat out that I could pile paper as high as I like, and he'd not change his mind. We'll all be dead before the issue is resolved, is his view.

I sent him a recent paper summarizing the evidence from many studies that did *not* use models to derive their conclusions, and he never responded to it.

Meanwhile, another paper was published recently which shows that if the potential consequences of something can be represented by a convex curve - that is, they are more likely harmful than not - then uncertainty is more likely to encompass *bad* outcomes than good ones, and the more uncertainty there is, the more likely the eventual outcome is to be bad. Those arguments that we don't know enough to act? They are massively wrong.

The problem I see is that the US government is too tied up by political infighting and bickering to do anything 'big' unless it involves sending armed forces into another country. My political science prof would often talk about 'incrementalism', and how nothing happened quickly in the US government because every small step to change was examined and debated by both the population and government officials. It's true, and it's exactly the wrong approach that is needed for this problem.

Honestly, this is the one sort of situation where I think a dictatorship actually has advantages, because that's the only way I see to punch through all the chatter, achieve focus, and force people to change. Democracy (or representative republic, or oligarchy - whatever the US is) just doesn't seem conducive to combating climate change when people refuse to see what's right in front of them.

*Clicks on Fox News link*

"Don't read the comments, don't read the comments, don't read the comments..."

*Reads the comments*

In totally unrelated news, I'm building a spaceship to colonize Mars. Anyone want in?

Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans as Antarctic Ice Melts

The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.

So on the positive side, there's about to be a huge land rush in Antarctica for all of that newly ice-free land.

Kehama wrote:

So on the positive side, there's about to be a huge land rush in Antarctica for all of that newly ice-free land.

Something tells me the people losing property in Florida will not be moving to this newly available land.

No the real positive side is that I'll need to drive less to get to the beach.

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bnc_GPzCEAI-ORc.png:large)

Spoiler:

Just the tip.

Pshaw, climate change is just liberal hippie claptrap.

Seriously though, it's been sobering to watch over the last decade in particular as the long-time warnings of the scientific community have started coming to pass.

Edwin wrote:

Sea Level Rise Picture

Is there a time frame for that pic? Do they have projections for when they expect it to be that bad?

I got just a tad depressed when I was at lunch today and I heard a clip of a Republican congressman responding to this report. He argued that scientists were exaggerating how bad things were getting, denied that humans had any effect on the environment, and said all of these government initiatives that had been proposed wouldn't do anything other than wreck our economy.

It sounds like their going to stick with "well, people aren't causing it" until the bitter, bitter end. I'm now wagering it isn't long before we hear something along the lines of "Human beings polluting the atmosphere didn't cause climate change, god's wrath at [gay marriage / liberal ideas / science / atheism / minorities / abortion / gun control] is the true culprit."

Tkyl wrote:
Edwin wrote:

Sea Level Rise Picture

Is there a time frame for that pic? Do they have projections for when they expect it to be that bad?

2200 I believe.

http://ssrf.climatecentral.org/#loca...

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

It sounds like their going to stick with "well, people aren't causing it" until the bitter, bitter end. I'm now wagering it isn't long before we hear something along the lines of "Human beings polluting the atmosphere didn't cause climate change, god's wrath at [gay marriage / liberal ideas / science / atheism / minorities / abortion / gun control] is the true culprit."

Makes more sense than all of those things causing 9/11.

IMAGE(http://lgbtweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/robertsonx390.jpg)

Edwin wrote:
Tkyl wrote:
Edwin wrote:

Sea Level Rise Picture

Is there a time frame for that pic? Do they have projections for when they expect it to be that bad?

2200 I believe.

http://ssrf.climatecentral.org/#loca...

That's for a 10-foot rise, though. A 2 or 3 foot increase will still destroy almost all the highest-valued property along the immediate coastline, along with most of Coral Gables, South Beach, and the Keys.

Sadly, if that projection was for 2200 I can see many, many people brushing it off saying "Eh, we'll have figured out something by then." Forcefield domes over cities, underwater cities, interstellar travel with extraplanetary colonization, weather control, etc. The same people who think NASA is a huge waste of money are some of the first people to embrace sci-fi solutions to distant future problems.

Kehama wrote:

Sadly, if that projection was for 2200 I can see many, many people brushing it off saying "Eh, we'll have figured out something by then." Forcefield domes over cities, underwater cities, interstellar travel with extraplanetary colonization, weather control, etc. The same people who think NASA is a huge waste of money are some of the first people to embrace sci-fi solutions to distant future problems.

That's because they think the free market will create them well before hand even though there's a massive amount of RD and such that would need to occur first that would stop any for-profit company with even beginning to bother.

We likely *will* figure something out by then, if we start now. But "hope and obstruct" is not a workable plan...

Kehama wrote:

Sadly, if that projection was for 2200 I can see many, many people brushing it off saying "Eh, we'll have figured out something by then." Forcefield domes over cities, underwater cities, interstellar travel with extraplanetary colonization, weather control, etc. The same people who think NASA is a huge waste of money are some of the first people to embrace sci-fi solutions to distant future problems.

IMAGE(http://media.giphy.com/media/9oC7kqAumVi3C/giphy.gif)

Marge: Homer, that's your solution to everything - to move under the sea. It's not going to happen!
Homer: Not with that attitude!

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