At the current rate of global warming when can a major climate change that causes catastrophy be expected?
Answer:
It depends on the part of the world. Different parts will be affected differently, and at different rates. But even when the parts that are affected are not part of the developed world, it will impact the developed world when they need our help.
The "INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE" study from April, 2007, has pretty clear descriptions of each area, and approximately when. The earliest "major" catastrophe caused by warming seems to be:
By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to an increase of water stress due to climate change. If coupled with increased demand, this will adversely affect livelihoods and exacerbate water-related problems.
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Today (June 29th, 2007) there is a fire raging in the mountains of California. Florida has had fires. Both of these are caused by warming, drying weather patterns. (see sources, below)
The biggest "problem" with Global Climate Change / Global Warming, is that while the changes move stunningly fast compared to historical climate change, things move very slowly compared to human life cycles. The chance that there will be One Big Obvious Catastrophe that will get everyone to realize we are really in for it, is small. Sort of like why the gas company adds a noticeable smell to natural gas that comes into our homes. If they didn't, you could have a leak, and not notice until you passed out. And if nothing changed, you'd die.
If one accepts the hype and misinformation, purported by the anti-capitalist, global warming crowd, 2 degrees per 100 years will never lead to anything catastrophic. People will move inland, and adjust.
Humans are incredibly adaptive.
Again, assuming they are correct, it is still such a slow change, it will hardly be noticible.
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Rita
Its been raining in Texas for 2 months non stop.
Well it was really hot yesterday did that count. If you ask the so called experts, it is already happening.
and Hurricane Katrina and Rita were no more stronger and unsolicited than any other Hurricane, they were part of the natural weather pattern for the year.
Please stop the madness
Scientist don't know because the data on "feedback effects" is limited.
Positive feedbacks are things like, ice melts, exposes darker soil, causes more warming.
Negative feedbacks are things like, more clouds blocking the sun.
The majority of scientists think that positive feedbacks will dominate and global warming will happen faster than current estimates. For one thing, there are more positive feedbacks than negative ones. But they can't prove it, so they don't say it much.
10-50 years is a good guess.
depends on your definition of catastrophe
if you mean worldwide extinction of the human race you'll probably be waiting a loooong time.
But if you mean a change in weather patterns that causes wintertime thaws and disrupts the winter tourism revenues in northern regions it's already occuring. There're tons of examples of negative effects of global warming that are on a smaller scale like this and within your lifetime you'll see a lot of other similar things.
The worst of it will prob be the effects of polluting the ocean. The oceans will have more water which will change it's composition, kill off many species, and flood several low level regions, raised water temps will result in stronger hurricane seasons and a host of other problems...
unfortunatly..anytime and any moment....
Hmmm...not 1 huuricane hit the U.S last year. I believe they said more than in 2005 and so far 2007 has been quiet.
i just watched an interesting show yesterday on the science channel that attempted to asnwer that question. their answer is bound to be better than mine, since i'm not a scientist and don't have the benefit of their training and research.
they asked internet users to download and run programs that attempt to simulate and predict the effects GW will have in the future, each model a little different from all the others, to attempt to see what would be most likely to happen. not what will definitely happen, but what would be most likely. they received hundreds of thousands of results of these simulations. the pattern, the most likely results were between 3 and 4 degrees increase in temperature by the end of the century. that doesn't sound like much, but let me add that 2 degrees is the point at which irreversible change happens. so, according to the study, within the next 50 years we'll see some irreversible changes.
(i know this is not what you asked but...) another interesting thing was a graph they showed, relating volcanoes and sun cycles to temperature. as of the 1850s the difference between actual temperature variation and temperature variation that can be explained by those natural causes is huge and growing fast. however, when they factor in greenhouse gases, miraculously, the lines match. go figure!
The short answer is: Never.
The reason you believe that there will be is because of all the scare mongering that the Global Warming Alarmists spout, the vast majority of which is simply nonsense.
In fact you’ve got a large number of them in this question, so let’s go through a few of them, shall we?
“Sunday P” quotes one of the best: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. This, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with global warming. Briefly: Katrina was not a particularly big storm – it was not the biggest storm ever, and was not even the biggest storm of 2005 (it was the 3rd biggest). The reason New Orleans was such a disaster was because it is built below sea level and the flood defences were only designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane. Katrina was category 4 when it hit. It was bad luck and bad planning, not global warming. New Orleans was devastated by hurricanes 3 times in the 1700s, long before global warming.
Oh, and the rain in Texas is a weather phenomenon, not global warming.
“Bob” mentions “feedbacks”, including clouds as a negative feedback, but clouds can also be a positive feedback, and every climate model used by the IPCC assumed that clouds would cause a net positive feedback effect. That’s hardly unbiased, it is?
“icpooreman” mentions species extinction, but warmer is generally better than colder as far as life is concerned (just ask yourself where there’s more life: the Amazon, or Antarctica?) He then mentions floods, but sea levels have been rising at a pretty steady 1 inch every 15 years for the last 100 years (so that’s about 6 inches in a century) and that rate shows little sign of accelerating. Finally he mentions stronger hurricanes, something that is not supported by any scientific research.
“ac_achen” says “unfortunately [sic]..anytime and any moment....” Well, how’s that for scare mongering?
“nojunk_9” mentions “water stress”. This seems to contradict what Sunday P, above says, so the Global Warming Alarmists don’t seem to be able to agree amongst themselves. Anyway, water shortages are easily solved with the use of desalination plants as used by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He also mentions forest fires in California and Florida. So that’s never happened before then? Of course it has. It is absurd to attempt to attribute events that have happened continuously throughout history, to global warming. He then comes up with a corker - that “the changes move stunningly fast compared to historical climate change”. Except, of course, he’s wrong. The climate has changed just as fast, if not faster, in the past than it is today. Medieval Warm Period to Little Ice Age – a change of up to 5°C – in only a few centuries.
“gwenwifar” mentions the GCMs (basically computer climate models) that have been used to recreate the climate of the past. It’s worth pointing out that they have only recently managed to get these GCMs to accurately mimic *past* climate – where they can see where the GCM goes wrong and correct it. If they’ve only just managed to model the past, do you really think they’ll be able to model the future with reliability any time soon? I doubt it. They’ve certainly failed to accurately model the future climate so far.
At the end of the day, the climate of planet Earth has been much warmer than it is today in the past (and the relatively recent past, too) without any major, cataclysmic disaster wiping out all life. So why do we think it’s going to happen this time?
No.
The planet has been through far more extreme climate changes in the past.. and we've come through just fine.
it's not going to happen go get a glass of kool-aid and relax
No catastrophe is expected. The IPCC believes that there will be an increasingly variable climate which will lead to unpredictable results. That is not the same as predicting a catastrophe. But it does open the door for every eco-terrorist to speculate about a catastrophe. How else are they going to get their message across? Through reason?
Don't hold your breath...
global warming doesn't exist
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