Trying to be more precise would like asking at the outset of a very severe storm likely to break rainfall records, how many inches above the last highwater mark will a given river crest at. It might depend on all sorts of hard to gauge factors -what course will the storm take, how long will it last, how much spring snow meltoff might occur, will the levees upstream hold, etc.
What one could say is that no sane, honest reasonably well-informed person would pretend that, because of this unpredictability, weather forecasting is proven to be a great ecofreak cult hoax, or that flood control is a Stalinist tyranny because it involves a small fraction of a percent of national tax receipts, or that if politicians voting to allow clear-cut logging of all nearby forested slopes (which 97% of forestry scientists say will cause much more flooding) have received a large fraction of campaign donations from those same logging companies, that therefore non-scientists in logging company funded think tanks are "true scientists" and 97% of actual scientist are Marxist Greenie Alarmists.
I think it would be safe to assume that under a "business as usual" scenario, where most of the remaining fossil fuel reserves are consumed and the CO2 released into the atmosphere, that future generations -within a few centuries and lasting for many centuries thereafter- will be inhabiting a world much better suited to dinosaurs than to homo sapiens. Even that minority of homo "sapiens" descended from those (heavily over-represented on this site lately) who are most well-known for overusing the reptile-dinosaur portion of their "brains" and for flooding this site with cut-and-pasted anti-science lifted from fossil fuel industry duped or serving blogs, would not be likely to particularly prosper in "Triassic II."
U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2010:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record...
“Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”
“Choices made now about carbon dioxide emissions reductions will affect climate change impacts experienced not just over the next few decades but also in coming centuries and millennia…Because CO2 in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warm...
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...
Given that five major oil companies control all the oil they also control the price. Like the diamond industry the oil cartels only release oil at a rate that will keep the price up. While collusion on pricing is illegal it's what they do anyway. As demand goes up so does the price even though the world is awash in oil. Given that these oil, gas and coal mafias own so many politicians the idea that we're ever going to slow down burning fossil fuels isn't the way the smart money would bet.
In spite of the deniers the effect of adding massive amounts of CO2 to our paper thin atmosphere WILL result more retained solar energy and that means more melting ice, higher sea levels, a gradual expansion of the tropical zone and a far more unsettled world wide weather pattern. The atmosphere may only 'warm' a degree, but that's because 'heat' rapidly migrates from warm to cold....the cold being ice and seawater.
if you look at the paleo record where the concentration of CO2 was around 500ppm, that would give you an idea. Anything between 4 and 8C in the next 200-500 years, averaged over the planet. more in the arctic, less in the tropics. We've never seen this as humans, and certainly not with 7-9 billion people. Given that sea levels will be greater, Miami will either be like Venice or protected by large dams.A good part of the coastline will be different. Food and water is more of concern.
The IPCC estimates about 4-5 oC by the end of the century, assuming we do not curb CO2 emissions.
It will take longer, and higher temps to reach equilibrium. And higher yet if we burn all our fossil fuel. That is enough to change the ecology of the places we grow food. Our kids will be around to see it.
So put a note in a bottle with your predictions. Your kids will get a kick out it.
I don't think anybody really knows. In fact I have not heard or read of anybody giving any estimate for any warming more than 100 years in the future. We just can't predict it so far out, so nobody (or hardly anybody) is even trying.
The global warming alarmists want us to believe we'll have a runaway greenhouse effect and the world be a ball of pure burning hell just like venus unless we stop having babies and we pay higher taxes and create a new totalitarian socialist world order which will destroy capitalism, destroy personal freedoms, destroy wealth creation, redistribute what little people will have left.
In reality history has given us knowledge and experience of what life would be like in a warmer world. Life prospered everywhere. Humanity prospered in a warmer world.
They are saying We have 10 years left for action ,More taxes
redistribution of wealth . They said that in the 1980s and nothing happened. Everything is the same
We are at peak warming NOW because of solar influences, the world will start cooling for at least the next 40yrs.
No one knows.
If we continue as we are, (the likely scenario) and agw continues, eventually we would run out of cheap fossil fuels and have to find alternatives anyway. But the CO2 would still be there and would still be heating the earth. As the oceans warm, the atmosphere would warm too, until the planet emitted as much heat as it received from the sun and was once again in equilibrium.
So at some point down the line, (I would guess in hundreds of years), there will be a peak in the warming. What would the peak be and what would that mean in human terms?
