The Climate Change Debate Thread

[Tombo]

Sorry the image is so big. It's neater here
http://www.newscientist.com/data/ima...7/26971701.jpg

[image]pretty make believe chart][/image]

Completely unsubstantiated tosh from models that have been failing badly.

[feargach]

Hey tombo, do you have a justification for the 1995 cut-off point yet?

[imokyrok]

Completely unsubstantiated tosh from models that have been failing badly.

If by failing you mean underestimating the problem - based on the Copenhagen Diagnosis you may have a point. Not much comfort though.

The report concluded that several important aspects of climate change are already occurring at the high end, or even beyond, the expectations of just a few years ago.
The report found that global ice sheets are melting at an increased rate; Arctic sea ice is thinning and melting much faster than recently projected, and future sea-level rise is now expected to be much higher than previously forecast.

The report also noted that global warming continues to track early IPCC projections based on greenhouse gas increases. Without significant mitigation, the report concluded that global mean warming could reach as high as 7 degrees Celsius by 2100.

The report found that:

Both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass and contributing to sea-level rise at an increasing rate.

The area of summer sea ice remaining during 2007-2009 was about 40% less than the average projection from the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
Global sea-level rise may exceed 1 meter by 2100. Without significant mitigation, sea-level rise of several meters is to be expected over the next few centuries.

If long-term global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2°Celsius above preindustrial values, average annual per-capita emissions in industrialized nations will have to be reduced by around 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050.

The report concludes that global emissions must peak then decline rapidly within the next five to ten years for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding the very worst impacts of climate change.

The full report is available at download.copenhagendiagnosis.org

[ibis]

If by failing you mean underestimating the problem - based on the Copenhagen Diagnosis you may have a point. Not much comfort though.

Just what I wanted on a Sunday...I wish the climate opposition had real science up its sleeves rather than just PR gambits.

[rhonda15]

The emerging errors of the IPCC's 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker

The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.


But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/7...-the-IPCC.html

[ibis]

The emerging errors of the IPCC's 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker

The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.


But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC - Telegraph

That they "tick off the list of iconic issues" is reflective entirely of journalistic focus. In virtually every case you mention, there is no serious scientific work that forms part of the proof of climate change.

It's obvious why the climate opposition has chosen to focus on these issues - because they're PR-friendly. However, polar bear populations aren't used as an indicator of global warming, nor are Himalyan glaciers, etc etc - except in PR. The boring graphs of temperatures are the bedrock of global warming, not polar bears.

[rhonda15]

What do you think of the fact there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri , Ibis?

[imokyrok]

My personal favourite pro science and skeptism podcast is Point of Inquiry which tends to carry the very best interviews you can access on such subjects. I never miss their podcasts. (DJ Groethe is the best interviewer available anywhere I reckon).

This week Chris Mooney interviews Michael Mann who most people will know is one of the two scientists most smeared by the war on climate science since it was launched in 2002 or thereabouts. It makes for very interesting listening and those who haven't been following the ins and outs of the campaign may find some of their questions about the reality of the anti agw claims answered. (Cue the ad hominems on Mann and the nonsense "hockey stick disproven" claims).

http://www.pointofinquiry.org/

[feargach]

I notice Tombo is still declining to justify the 1995 cut-off point.

[Jethro]

From imokyrok:

The first problem would be that many of the places where people live and grow food would no longer be suitable for either. Rising sea levels - from thermal expansion of the oceans, melting glaciers and storm surges - would drown today's coastal regions in up to 2 metres of water initially, and possibly much more if the Greenland ice sheet and parts of Antarctica were to melt. "It's hard to see west Antarctica's ice sheets surviving the century, meaning a sea-level rise of at least 1 or 2 metres," says climatologist James Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "CO2 concentrations of 550 parts per million [compared with about 385 ppm now] would be disastrous," he adds, "certainly leading to an ice-free planet, with sea level about 80 metres higher... and the trip getting there would be horrendous."......

The current IPCC estimate for sea level rise is 18-59cm with a median of 29cm or the same amount of rise since 1860. This is the third time in a row that the IPCC has revised it's estimate downwards. The area receives a large amount of investigation unlike the Himalayan glaciers so all in all it is a reasonable figure for govts to go on.

However even if sea levels were to go to 2 metres it would not be the disaster described above. This is because it would make economical sense to build flood defences rather than loose your city. The IPCC estimates that the total cost to USA to protect itself against 1 metre of sea rise is $5-6bn this century. A separate 2000 estimate (Tol) puts the cost of protection for the globe for 0.5 metres at €10bn. These costs are tiny compared to the value of the land in question and the economy on it. The bottom line in all of this is that even based on current levels of technology and wealth very few inhabited lands would be left to coastal flooding because we would end up being much worse off. So the claim by Hansen et al is just another piece of short sighted alarmism.

The claims about hunger and drought suffer from the same poverty of thinking.