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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: RetiredNow who wrote (751993)11/10/2013 5:38:59 PM
From: Bilow  Read Replies (1) of 1576385
 
Hi mindmeld; Re: "can humans survive much higher temperatures, especially if they decimate our ability to produce enough food or harvest it from oceans?"

The evidence in favor of CO2 caused global warming consists of climate simulations that "match the long term trend" in recent global temperatures.

During the recent temperature rise, human production of food has increased.

That indicates that either humans are better at adapting to global warming than you think they are, or that warmer climate is better for growing food (or some combination).

And one of the features of CO2 forcing is that it is logarithmic. [That is, doubling the amount of CO2 causes a certain amount of warming. Doubling it again and again only increases temperatures by that same amount each doubling.] Consequently, we've already seen the fastest rates of increase in temperature. From here things keep getting hotter (according to the global warming theory) but at a lower rate. And that suggests we can adapt to it more easily in the future than we have in the past. And since we've absolutely slaughtered the food crisis demon in the past, all indications that it will be easily managed in the future.

-- Carl

P.S. Since half of my audience is quite stupid, I'll do a numeric example of why the increase in temperatures slows down when the forcing is logarithmic.

Let's suppose 3 degrees C per doubling and set our anomaly to be zero when the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is 300 ppm. That is, we assume a relationship between CO2 and temperature of

T = 3 log_2( C/300)

where T is the temperature anomaly (degrees hotter) in centigrade, and C is the amount of CO2 in ppm. Then a table of steadily increasing CO2 concentrations leads to a temperature increase as follows:

C(ppm) T(degrees C)
300 0.00
325 0.35
350 0.67
375 0.97
400 1.24
425 1.51
...
575 2.81
600 3.00
625 3.18
...
875 4.63
900 4.75
925 4.87
...
1175 5.91
1200 6.00
1225 6.09

From the above, you can see that at 300 ppm, increasing the CO2 by 25ppm increases temperatures by 0.35 degrees C, but by the time you reach 1200ppm, the effect is only 0.09 degrees C.
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