Prominent Climate Scientists Say Boulder-Hurling Megawaves Are Decades Away

LazyLion

LazyLion

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Over the summer, pioneering climate scientist James Hansen and his colleagues penned an apocalyptic study predicting that the deadliest consequences of climate change will be felt within decades. That paper precipitated a raucous debate, but now, it’s been accepted for publication, heralding a sea shift in attitudes toward climate studies that make dire and outlandish predictions.

And we’re not kidding when we say dire. The paper forecasts collapsing ice sheets, epic superstorms, even mega-boulder-hurling mega-waves. (If you don’t believe me, check out the entire subsection devoted to said mega-boulders.) Most significantly, the study predicts that we’ll begin to feel these climate consequences within a few decades rather than a few centuries. Also, that the 2 degree Celsius climate warming benchmark bandied about by scientists and policymakers is extremely dangerous.

In a nutshell, here’s how all of this works. It starts with melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, something we’re already beginning to see. As cool, fresh meltwater pours off of the ice sheets and into the ocean, it creates a stratified layer that floats atop warmer, denser ocean water. This, in turn, disrupts the ocean’s normal “overturning circulation” pattern, which mixes the entire water column and allows heat energy accumulated at depth to be redistributed to the surface....
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http://gizmodo.com/prominent-climate-scientists-say-boulder-hurling-megawa-1766361497
 
grok

grok

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Good, the earth needs cleansing. I'm in Gauteng, come at me bro..
 
N

Ninja'd

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If disaster movies taught me anything it's that the Statue of Liberty is the first that'll be hit by these boulders.
 
LazyLion

LazyLion

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We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet’s future

An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned.

The research invokes collapsing ice sheets, violent megastorms and even the hurling of boulders by giant waves in its quest to suggest that even 2 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels would be far too much. Hansen has called it the most important work he has ever done.

The sweeping paper, 52 pages in length and with 19 authors, draws on evidence from ancient climate change or “paleo-climatology,” as well as climate experiments using computer models and some modern observations. Calling it a “paper” really isn’t quite right — it’s actually a synthesis of a wide range of old, and new, evidence....
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...cientists-are-wrong-about-the-planets-future/
 
Pitbull

Pitbull

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LazyLion said:
Read More...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...cientists-are-wrong-about-the-planets-future/
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The more I read this, the more I get this: "Load shedding unless we get our increase" running through my mind...
Carbon credits and Taxes are big money makers... More crying about nothing. We need to live greener that is a given by any stretch of the imagination. But this has been mentioned a million times and will be mentioned another million times. Earth has been way hotter before and way colder before. Live on it has survived, and will continue to do so. They can stop their fear mongering now.
 
Mortymoose

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... But can I still braai with all these boulders hurtling around? :wtf:
 
A

Alan

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Remember the dire prediction of millions of "climate refugees"....

Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones.
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http://www.spiegel.de/international...by-forecast-on-climate-refugees-a-757713.html


. In fact, Hansen’s predictions are modeled after events that geologists and paleoclimate researchers believe took place during the Eemian, a period some 80,000 to 130,000 years ago when the Earth was only slightly warmer but sea levels were 6 to 9 meters higher than they are today. It’s also—loosely speaking—the climate disaster scenario that inspired The Day After Tomorrow.
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So what fuelled the warming then?
 
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c3n0byt3

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The paper refines the forecast of the tipping point.
The earth system response and feedback to temperature change is not linear.
All fair enough, but there's a lot more work to be done before anything concrete can be said.
The model they use is sound but it can only simulate as much as we currently know.
And there's still much we don't know about the southern oceans.

I'd also argue that the ocean resolution is much too coarse.
They can run better simulations given the resources at their disposal (at least from the NASA/NOAA colleagues).
 
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