Global Warming Calculator
Choose a 100% reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from the United States and the IPCC’s sensitivity value of 3.0°C. Hit “Submit.” The amount of temperature savings that results is 0.052°C by the year 2050 and 0.137°C by the year 2100.
That’s the right answer. Assuming the IPCC’s value for climate sensitivity (i.e. disregarding the recent scientific literature) and completely stopping all carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. between now and the year 2050 and keeping them at zero, will only reduce the amount of global warming by just over a tenth of a degree. (Patrick Michaels at Cato)
Not much marginal gain for the price of effectively ending civilization.
The jury is still out on the validity of global warming…to me
You and all the other skeptics are delaying the progress!
There can’t be any progress without a legitimate consensus.
That’s the thing. We saw as close to a consensus as can be expected, but they are looking more and more like the Catholic Church vs. Galileo. Science is tricky, because we rely on it to make accurate decisions and judgments, but it will always be inadequate (if we are learning things in the future, then today’s knowledge is not complete) and can lead to bad decisions. Just think if we had listened to scientist in this case? We would’ve destroyed much of civilization and progress.
Isn’t one tenth of a degree pretty significant in the scale of less than a century? And aren’t other things accounted for rising temperatures? Not saying I believe in it all, it being us doing all the damage, but I also don’t dismiss our role, however slim, in changing climatic effects.
We don’t fully understand environmental science, especially in terms of human-caused effects through emissions. So, it’s not easy to assume what is or what isn’t significant in the long run.
Exactly. It’s hard to say we should make any drastic changes because we don’t know enough (and might not for a long, long time). Many people would say we should be safe and just curb emissions anyway, but that comes at a high human cost.
Right but there could be ways to reduce it without a high human cost in the future.
True, the advent of clean, efficient alternative technologies would save the day from both perspectives. We just don’t have them yet.
Pretty cool calculator to play around with.
Hasn’t the Earth been warming and cooling for hundreds of thousands of years?
Interesting calculator. I hope the assumptions are correct because the implications are far-reaching.
Basically, human prevention seems to have negligible effect on global warming. The ashes of some volcano like the Krakatoa volcano of Indonesia in the 19th century could do more to avoid global warming than all human efforts for 50 years.
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