
World Bank envisions a +4°C future - iProject
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/11/world-bank-envisions-a-4c-future/
======
tjic
Unless the World Bank has climatologists on staff doing original research,
this boils down to "we found a paper that we're basing our planning on". It's
as relevant and interesting as "Boston Symphony envisions a world with quantum
cryptography". Absent researchers on staff who can add something new or
display some expertise in choosing to rebroadcast the news or not, I really
don't care what the Boston Symphony's opinion is.

~~~
scarmig
Many posters even here, however, seem to be unaware of climate cahnge.
Providing a summary of current scientific results and a discussion of how it
applies to your area of specialty is a valuable goal.

~~~
tjic
> Many posters even here, however, seem to be unaware of climate cahnge.

Based on what?

I grant you that many posters - even here - think that the science is
uncertain or that the economics of trying to prevent it as opposed to deal
with it are other than the press suggests.

...but I find it utterly wrong to say that people are not aware of the topic.

~~~
skylan_q
The logic is as follows:

1\. Believe that human-caused increases in CO2 cause catastrophic climate
change. 2\. Therefore, anyone who doesn't agree doesn't know about climate
change.

~~~
scarmig
1) No one in this thread has mentioned even anything approaching "catastrophic
climate change"--you're attributing a position to others that they, especially
me, do not hold. It's a matter of mitigation, prevention, and adaption, and
the correct balance of those.

2) Having read a bunch of blog posts does not mean knowing about climate
change. Herbal supplement and alternative medicine believers also have a
vibrant community of email newsletters and advertorial magazines.

------
Gravityloss
What is it about global warming links that bring a deluge of totally stupid
fallacious postings on Hacker News every time? There's almost not a single
good comment here that would show even rudimentary understanding of the
subject. I thought this was better than Slashdot.

\- "Climate has always changed." check. \- "I live in a cold place, I welcome
warming." check. \- "We can just adjust." check.

Maybe check if your insightful argument has actually already been debunked
here: <http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php>

~~~
jellicle
Hacker News is mostly older white men, which is a demographic associated with
Republicanism and Fox News watching in the United States. Understanding global
warming is not going to be easy for them.

The reality is that every set of global warming predictions so far has
understated the actual amount of warning observed. Models are giving too much
weight to long-term stable trends over the recent data, plus scientists don't
want to be tarred as "kooks" for having the most extreme projections. So if
their model says 5C increase, it's probably low to start off with and it will
be lowered more before publication, and it will end up underpredicting
warming.

When you read about X or Y amount of warming, it's most likely to be a
minimum, not a "most likely" and certainly not a maximum.

 _Current global warming observed has exceeded the absolute maximums predicted
in previous generations of warming predictions._

~~~
scarmig
That's false--Hacker News is a demographic mostly of younger white coastal
American men who have no particular affection for Fox News. Because they tend
to be higher income, they have libertarian tendencies, one of which is
denialism.

You're also getting a skewed view. Climate change posts on HN always drive out
the people with the strongest opinions: an actual poll of HNers would likely
have them supporting the consensus position.

------
Shivetya
Fortunately this isn't one of those "we are doomed unless you give us money"
but its probably leading to one of those types of proposals.

This is a worst case scenario. It even goes as far as stating it may not be
possible to prevent and simply lists possible outcomes; climate science is not
exact.

So what do I take away from it? Nothing much. Its nothing we haven't seen
before, most predictions are being pushed far enough out so they cannot be
invalidated.

If the temperature does change as drastically as they suggest why do they
think we would not be adjusting as well? A lot can happen in the span of two
or three generations. New technologies can minimize if not eliminate the
effects.

Look, we went through scares of overrunning the planet with people, mass
starvation and disease were to be rampant but it didn't happen, we simply grew
into our new existence and population numbers. We certainly can grow into most
changes to the planet. Until the change is drastic enough to end life on this
planet we will adjust to it. I do not think short of nuclear war we can even
engineer that.

~~~
scarmig
A couple things:

1) "overrunning the planet with people, mass starvation and disease were to be
rampant"

These were never consensus viewpoints. Anthropogenic climate change, in the
low to mid single degrees Celsius, is.

2) There's a whole lot wrapped up in the word adjusting. If it's to mean
anything more than "survive" (as a species--many individuals' lives would be
cut short), it has to include an active component.

We "adapted" to the ozone hole. Yes, that involved new technologies and habits
like better sunscreen and norms around using it. But it also involved people
getting together and banning substances that contributed to the problem. That
made individual-level adaption much less costly than it would have been
otherwise.

------
macavity23
Thus far we have done precisely zilch about global warming. Nothing, nada, not
a thing. Every significant target has been missed, every opportunity for
increased use of fossil fuels has been taken, nuclear power is now
practically-speaking off the table, and now that the Arctic ice cap is
retreating, we're taking the opportunity to drill for more oil under it!

We have evolved under natural selection pressures to maximise our exploitation
of the world around us - the winning apes were those that could make bigger &
sharper tools, bigger fires, bigger farms. The idea that mankind has somehow
veered away from the 'natural' path, that he is a 'disease' (the Matrix's
Agent Smith), could not be further from the truth. _Every_ organism competing
in Earth's biosphere is trying to maximise their resource usage, maximise
their mastery over the environment.

Our problem is that we have succeeded! We have grown to dominate the entire
planet, and (Elon Musk notwithstanding) that's a hard limit. So we have what
Iain Banks calls an 'outside context problem'. The strategies our genes have
evolved over eons are now insufficient: there is no more competition between
Man and anyone else. Even the competition of one human tribe against another
is lessening, now that the big tribes have nuclear weapons.

Solving this problem will require post-Darwinian strategies. Getting to the
point where that is a realistic prospect will be highly non-trivial.

~~~
meaty
Yes us evil Eukaryotes are responsible for the demise of this planet. Why
don't we all do the honourable thing and kill ourselves rather than solving
the climate problems with taxation and working out how to trade carbon and
leverage trade sanctions to gain more tangible but useless bits of metal and
plastic...

I mean those sulphur breathing bacteria which we oxygenated out of existence
are utterly pissed at us now.

For those who don't get my comment: we don't know how the planet works. Don't
know what our impact is. Oh and the climate changes anyway without our
intervention which may cause our demise or not - just go with the flow.

~~~
Gravityloss
I'm not exactly sure if I understood your comment.

But we know quite a lot about how the planet works and what our impact is. We
don't know everything, but we know a lot more than nothing.

It's like sending a blind person over a busy road. If you do it when the
pedestrian light is red, you might not know which car might hit her at what
velocity, but you know that the outcome is quite likely much much worse than
if you wait for the green light.

~~~
meaty
Actually no we don't. The physical models are scrapped yearly, our predictions
are incredibly inaccurate and we can't shake a stick at the to tiny amount of
broken data we hold and extrapolate it. Every corporation and politician
clamps onto hypothesis' if there is gain to be made, yet theories that result
are impossible to challenge. That'snot science. Thatis religion.

It's more like we're arrogant blind fundamentalist religious zealots with not
much data playing whack-a-mole in the dark and simultaneously fucking everyone
in the process.

~~~
scarmig
The fact that models are constantly refined doesn't mean they're "scrapped."
The core model, of CO2 being a greenhouse gas that drives feedbacks--
particularly water vapor feedbacks, but others as well--is very well attested
to.

It's true that climate is complicated and there are significant uncertainties
in how they might interact. Most of those uncertainties, however, lie in the
positive direction. That's part of the reason why the expected mean warming is
much closer to the lower bound than the upper one.

------
patrickgzill
Not two weeks ago I posted this: === We were told back in the late 1980s and
early 1990s that huge computer models were written, that ran on
supercomputers, to model and predict climate change.

The fastest Cray in 1990 could do (I think) 60 GFlops when loaded with 32
processors, which is roughly the sustained GFlops as a high end i7.

So clearly it is not a case of "just need a faster supercomputer and we will
have an accurate prediction".

Reality is, from what I can tell, is that _we don't have an accurate
mathematical model of all the pieces that go into global climate_ to run on a
supercomputer, no matter how powerful. ===

No one challenged me and I got several upvotes and follow-on posts in
agreement. link: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761364>

Did something change in the meantime?

~~~
lclarkmichalek
I don't really think that the idea that something must be perfect to be useful
is correct. Trying to find a perfectly accurate model is impossible, so you
must qualify your meaning of the phrase. Mathematics has a whole subject named
statistics which spends quite a lot of its time dealing with the proportional
incorrectness of models. If you look at the graphs or figures in the report
(not just the headline of +4 degrees celcius), you will notice that almost all
of them have a degree of uncertainty; figures without uncertainty values are
as good as useless.

Also, if you are going to use "No one challenged me and I got several upvotes
and follow-on posts in agreement" as a pseudo appeal to authority, I don't
think that the readership of a Hacker News comments section really qualifies
as authority on this particular issue.

Edit: Oh, apparently models have already predicted temperatures since 1900
correctly via hindcasting, along with changes in climates after significant
events such as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. And so far, they seem to be on-
track with empirical data:
<http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/SLR_models_obs.gif>, though I fully
understand if you want to discard that graph due to it's source; the risk of
selection bias is very high when taking a shallow look at a large and deep
subject.

~~~
patrickgzill
I am not using an "appeal to authority" argument, but I figure the HN
readership would have pointed out my errors. (It's certainly happened before
:-) )

We do not understand even the basics. For instance, we do not fully understand
how the Gulf Stream works.

The problem is that we can't just sum or multiply the uncertainty values and
try to arrive at a consensus.

Perhaps an analogy can be made to trying to model the US or Europe's financial
system - clearly even the largest banks, spending large amounts of money on IT
systems and modeling over the past number of years, have grossly mis-
calculated things. And the financial world is arguably less dynamic than
Earth's climate system.

------
fauigerzigerk
_"winter months that are warmer than our current summers—sound pretty ugly"_

I know that the 4 degrees are supposed to be an average, but that statement
sounds pretty unbelievable nonetheless.

~~~
noiv
Well, 4°C temperature change do not sound scaring, you have that between night
and day. Usually the majority estimates consequences of climate change from
their past experience. The thing is nobody ever experienced a +4°C anomaly
driven by CO2 in 200 years (probably even not this planet).

So, forget about what you've learned about weather and expect the worst and
multiply this by two. In other words our uncontrolled experiments with the
atmosphere do not lead to a weather upgrade, it is more of a system change -
introducing bugs and BSODs.

------
Zenst
Not exactly the best title, induces initial feeling of `hey havn't the banks
messed up enough, keep them away from the climate`.

But on a serious note, this is a worst case analysis and one area when people
say rising oceans is that recently in many area's they have gone down. Oceans
are like stock it seems! Now alot of these studies also do not factor in land
rising and sinking and the effect that has along with even measureing the
global water tables on land.

But weather is alot like finance as it is chaotic (ok less predictable over
time) and with that maybe th World bank are suited to analyse such things with
some authority. But also as with finance, the level of prediction you can make
does not mean you can change.

So with that weather can effect finance, but finance can not effect weather.
People do in part effect the weather and finance effects people. Its just a
vicious circle of people, weather, finance.

------
guard-of-terra
I am living in a pretty cold place and away from the shore so I don't see why
I should be scared.

~~~
jsmcgd
Here's a reason. I, like most humans, live near the coast. When my home is
submerged I'm going to come and live in your neighborhood. And when I run out
of food, I'm going to go to your house and steal yours.

~~~
aes256
Population density is not a problem.

Even at a relatively low population density equivalent to that of Los Angeles,
you could fit the entire population of the world 3.4 times over in the
contiguous United States.

Agriculture is a potential problem, but technological advances are improving
the situation. If everyone switched to vastly more efficient plant-based
diets, it wouldn't be a problem at all.

------
tokenadult
The Ars Technica article kindly submitted here is based on a World Bank press
release that has prompted many news articles today. Several of the articles
mention the underlying World Bank report .PDF file "Turn Down the Heat: Why a
4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided,"

[http://climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/Turn_...](http://climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/Turn_Down_the_heat_Why_a_4_degree_centrigrade_warmer_world_must_be_avoided.pdf)

which was a dead link for me the first few times I tried to follow the link,
but is working fine as I type this.

The World Bank report was "written by a team from the Potsdam Institute for
Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics, including Hans Joachim
Schellnhuber, William Hare, Olivia Serdeczny, Sophie Adams" and other co-
authors. Other scientists and commentators reviewed the report, with
acknowledgment from the World Bank, and the bank expressed gratitude to the
organization Connect4Climate for contributions to the production of the
report.

The Ars Technica article summarizes the report as estimating that even if all
countries are able to meet their current emissions pledges there's still a 20
percent chance global average temperatures will rise by 4°C by the end of the
century. Predicted sea level rise would be a half-meter or more.

Just last week here on HN another participant shared a speculative essay by
science fiction author Charlie Stross on the world 500 years from now. Stross
predicted sea-level rise of at least a meter, so I looked up sources about the
effect of sea level rise. An interesting series of online maps shows
projections of flooded land based on various degrees of sea level rise for
places of interest such as New York City,

<http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/new-york.shtml>

San Francisco,

<http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/san-francisco.shtml>

the Netherlands and England,

<http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/netherlands.shtml>

and Chesapeake Bay.

<http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/washington.shtml>

In all cases, the maps default to showing seven meters of sea level rise and
do not project any civil engineering projects to protect existing
infrastructure. Having read Matt Ridley's blog post "Go Dutch"

<http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/go-dutch.aspx>

back when it was published, I wonder if the most dire predictions about the
Netherlands are true, or if the Netherlands, the land of polders,

<http://static.nai.nl/polders/e/index.html>

can continue to be "living proof to climate pessimists that dwelling below sea
level is no problem if you are prosperous."

The report continues with dire predictions of hot summers and changes in
rainfall. "It is my hope that this report shocks us into action," is World
Bank President Jim Yong Kim's statement about the report. "Even for those of
us already committed to fighting climate change, I hope it causes us to work
with much more urgency."

I fully agree with the premise that there will continued widespread use of
fossil hydrocarbon fuels for electricity generation, transportation, and
building heating. There are no effective incentives in place today, nor any
likely in the next few decades, to prevent further consumption of fossil
hydrocarbons, and that will surely result in a substantial increase in
atmospheric concentration in CO2.

Predicting climate change is a safe prediction any time, because over 100 year
and especially 500 year time scales, we have often observed climate change in
historic times. Over longer time scales, but since Homo sapiens populated much
of the earth, rock art in the Sahara Desert shows that the Sahara was once
much less arid than it is now, and cave art in Europe shows that the climate
of Europe was once much more frigid than it is now.

I live in the United States Midwest, and my mother grew up in a hotter part of
the United States Midwest during the Dust Bowl era. Most of her family is
still near the family farm on the windswept Great Plains. I don't expect any
part of the earth to become uninhabitably hot. We have, according to the best
developed models of influences on world climate, a sure prospect of a
generally warmer Earth, warming currently lethally cold areas into areas that
will be habitable. My experience living in subtropical east Asia in two long
stays about two decades apart suggests that we will have more warming of cold
areas than turning hot areas into unbearably hot areas from global warming.

Despite the dire predictions in the World Bank report, it is not necessarily
the case that port cities will be inundated even by more substantial sea level
rise than is anticipated by the report. New York City is sufficiently
prosperous to attract some of the world's brightest minds to live there (I
know some young people who have moved there recently) and the current city
administration actively encourages making New York City a technology hub. New
York will thrive, whatever the climate.

[http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/11/new-york-
can-...](http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/11/new-york-can-be-a-
vibrant-venice-as-sea-level-now-rises-say-engineers/)

Venice and New Orleans have been in long-term decline for quite a while, from
bad governance, and will surely suffer further relative decline, regardless of
sea levels. There will still be a great port at the mouth of the Mississippi-
Missouri river system, and it will be a thriving and cosmopolitan city, but it
may well be in a different place along the river delta from the current
location of New Orleans. Venice may basically vanish, but current ports that
matter for the world economy will gain the infrastructure investment to build
up protection against the sea faster than the sea will rise.

There is much more interesting content in the long World Bank report
referenced in the submitted article, but allow me to explain why I think the
high end of global warming predictions (and thus the high end of sea level
rise and climate pattern change predictions) is unlikely. We already have a
known model for induced global cooling from the "natural experiment" of
volcanos erupting and ejecting much dust high into the atmosphere. If the
climate change we now experience produces more pain than gain (where I live,
at 800 feet above sea level in a continental dry, cold winter climate zone,
global warming has so far mostly produced gain), then there will be political
and economic incentives to sequester greenhouse gases, or directly shade the
Earth with high-altitude dust, or to do whatever else science discovers to
slow and perhaps eventually reverse global warming. The end of the century is
about eighty-eight years from now, and surely our understanding of climate
models and geoengineering possibilities will be stronger then than it is now.
Over the time span of the report, I would expect enough of an increase in
understanding of climate models to bring about workable means to moderate
global warming and shape climate change in the direction of making most
inhabited regions better off.

~~~
seiji
Nice try, Jonah: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4799082>

~~~
nitrogen
I'm assuming that you are referring to Jonah Lehrer recycling his own
material. Part of tokenadult's self-assigned role here on HN is collecting
relevant commentary and references for various subjects, then revising and
posting it whenever those subjects come up. You'll find such tokenadult tomes
posted on articles related to intelligence, for example. I think they are a
useful contribution to the discussion, as they summarize previous discussions
and bring newcomers up to speed on a subject.

~~~
seiji
The problem is when I think I'm reading something new then realize half way
through "Wait, didn't I read this two days ago?" It's a huge waste of time
because it's the comment from two days ago with a tiny new header added making
it relevant to this topic instead.

Comment reposts should (must?) designate such at the top with a link back to
the original comment.

------
cryptoz
So, who is working on a startup to help with climate change? There are many
avenues: adaptation, mitigation, research.

------
rjzzleep
is that the same world bank that wants infinite growth to sustain itself?

------
aes256
I don't see what's so bad about this? Temperatures will rise, sea levels will
rise, what's the big deal?

Certain parts of the world that are low-lying or subject to extremely high
temperatures will become uninhabitable. Too bad for those who thought it would
be a good idea to settle there, they'll have to migrate.

Once all the ice has melted, sea levels will plateau. By the 22nd Century
(notwithstanding a global nuclear war between now and then) we will have
mastered nuclear fusion and will no longer be dependent on fossil fuels.

So what's the big deal?

~~~
Gravityloss
The sea level will go up something like 25 meters (100 feet) if all the ice
melts.

~~~
scarmig
Luckily enough, no one is predicting that all the ice will even come close to
entirely melting.

Unfortunately enough, levels of melting that range from likely to possible
will by themselves be very expensive and difficult to deal with.

