Posted on 05/21/2015 1:03:42 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
The world is busy trying to achieve a global warming goal that some think we’re not on course to achieve, and that some scientists worry may not be enough to prevent some troubling scenarios — like significant sea level rise.
That goal is limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But there’s another view, embraced by many countries (which tend not to be the big emitters), suggesting that a safer target involves limiting global warming to just 1.5 degrees C.
Yet that target would be still tougher to achieve, finds a new paper in Nature Climate Change that takes a thorough look at what 1.5 degrees would actually mean. The research, based on several models used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggests that keeping global warming under 1.5 C would probably require that we overshoot the goal and then reverse course to reach it again through so-called “negative emissions” technologies, which would effectively pull carbon dioxide back out of the air again.
Indeed, the study finds that while it’s technically possible, “the window for achieving this goal is small and rapidly closing.”
The likeliest scenario is that the world will keep muddling through, examining more science and adjusting its targets, and that clean energy and even “negative emissions” technologies will improve — meaning that in the end, we still have to wait and see just which target we can actually achieve, and how the planet responds.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Maybe 2 degrees warmer makes things better. Who are they to arbitrarily decide what is optimum?
The largest pitcher of Kool Aide ever made
That goal is limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Global temperatures were always constant before industrialization?
” require that we overshoot the goal and then reverse course to reach it again through so-called “negative emissions” technologies “
Yeah, that will kill off more plants due to lacking CO2, more deserts will show up to reflect more heat into space, lose heat to space during the night and the next thing you know we are in another ice age....
Fleeping morons!@
The epochs in the past the earth were significantly warmer. That is when the entire earth was covered with plant life. Those big trees that collected in the Petrified Forrest are prime examples.
They told us when I was in the first grade that the earth just now came out of an ice age. It will get warmer and then start to cool toward the next ice age. Those blokes didn't tell me that it would perform the entire cycle in my lifetime. ;-D
How about simply nudging Earth out of its orbit to, say, around where Mars is?
On second thought, why not send these phony pseudo-scientists/leftwing political activists there. I think that might be easier, and cheaper.
The other ignored fact - it was warmer as a whole until the Himalayas disrupted the east-west air flow around 40 million years ago, leading to 10,000-15,000 year warm periods followed by 75-85,000 year cold periods. Antarctica acting as a massive freeze sink added to the cooling effect.
So we need to be warmer to get to the warm world where the dinosaurs were running around, where there was no ice at the poles.
Correct. Based on thousands of years of data it is clear that the earth has been both warmer AND cooler than it is right now. Why is the temperature as measured in 1990 the “correct” temperature?
The author is named Mooney which rhymes with.....
I thought that since it’s not warming, the issue had been renamed ‘climate change’. That way, they’re covered either way. Unless, of course, nothing happens. Then the problem will be stagnation.
Ratatouille?
Well played sir!
“, “the window for achieving this goal is small and rapidly closing.” “
Sniff......I smell doomage here.....
We ALL gonna die!
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