According to the calculations of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, over the next century the climate will change more quickly than it ever has in the recent history of the earth. These results come from the latest climate model calculations from the German High Performance Computing Centre for Climate and Earth System Research.
The global temperature could rise by up to four degrees by the end of the century. Because of this warming, the sea level could rise on average by as many as 30 centimeters. The scientists expect that under certain conditions, the sea ice in the arctic will completely melt. In Europe, summers will be drier and warmer, and this will affect agriculture. The winters will become warmer and wetter. Another consequence of the heated atmosphere will be extreme events like heavy precipitation with floods.
“The significant result of these future scenarios is the progressive raising of mean global temperatures and the movement of climate zones in connection with that,” says Dr. Erich Roeckner, the project leader of the model calculations in Hamburg. “Almost everywhere on earth, the forestry industry will have to husband different types of trees than it has until now.”
In addition to the findings about the complex interplay between atmosphere and ocean, the current climate models from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology also include new findings about the effects of aerosols and the influence of the earth’s carbon cycle. The results confirm speculations over recent years that humans are having a large and unprecedented influence on the climate and are fuelling global warming.
I’ve been waiting for this report to come out. Properly speaking, it doesn’t involve paleoclimatology; but, then, it needn’t especially. Just as the history of medicine may have prehistoric roots, changes in the industrial era can be qualitative rather than quantitative.
The results by the climate researchers from Hamburg will be presented in the report from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is developed every five years, on the commission of the WMO, World Meteorological Organisation, and the UNEP, United Nations Environmental Programme. The IPCC report is provided to governments as an independent source of information. In total, 1000 scientists worldwide are working on the fourth edition of the progress report, due for release in 2007. The scientists are commissioned by their governments to participate in the comprehensive, independent climate status report.
“The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology is participating in the calculation of the IPCC scenarios with a coupled atmosphere-ocean model that is considered one of the best climate models worldwide,” says Dr Guy Brasseur, the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, and one of the 15 coordinating main authors of the IPCC Report. “As scientists, we want to provide politicians with a decision paper that is as understandable as possible, and from which they can decide which measures ought to be politically implemented as urgently as possible.”
The report starts here:
Additional simulations start here:
Oh, wow! 4 WHOLE degrees. Jeez, I better stop driving altogether…(sarcasm). BTW, “I GET SPAM!” I Love TWiT!!
That would be 4 degrees centigrade since the report is from Germany. I think that comes to 15.5 degrees F. Scared yet?
The oceans will rise one foot over the next 100 years? Damn, I guess I’ll just slit my wrists to spare my eyes the horror of it all!
Help, help, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Sounds like so much nonsense. And why are these Euro idiots always blaming this country. (Its not mentioned in this piece, but we know who they are talking about) They should look toward China and such as these countries could care less about any enviornmental impact of their blooming industry.
Now Duhbya asked his science advisor, the Rev. Idon’tknow Shitaboutscience, and he prayed and said the there was no “good science” on the subject.
The Duhbya – what a mench!
Speaking globally, 4 degrees is a lot of change in 100 years…
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
…
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
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Just one thing, this was in Newsweek in 1975, talking about global cooling.
By the time anything substancial happens from this we’ll all be dead from the bird flu…
Yeah, I live in the Midwest, where sheets of ice a half mile to 2 miles thick have covered the ground during many ice ages over the past couple million years. I wonder which humans and their SUVs were responsible for melting these ice wonders each time? It must be our fault SOMEHOW…
#2 ZenDude MInor point: a change of 4 degrees C would only be a change of 7.2 degrees F.
ZenDude, 4 degrees C is 7.2 degrees F. And no, I’m not even a little bit scared. I haven’t seen any data that supports ANY of the predictions being made about global warming. I certainly don’t believe the results from any computer model.
They keep using these “forcings” for all of the varibles in the model. But in my younger years when I did research and computer modeling (nothing as complicated as global climate, btw) we referred to this sort of tweaking as applying “fudge factors.”
Of course, no one would take any computer prediction serious if you had to use 8 or 10 “fudge factors” to get results anywhere near reality. So, they do a “newspeak” and call them “forcings”.
Not surprised at all. It’s that snowball effect kicking in. Some related comments are as follows: