Daylife/Getty Images
|
The economic impact of global warming has been grossly underestimated and scientists must warn that inaction will spell disaster says top economist and climate change expert Nicholas Stern.
Stern told 2,000 climate scientists meeting in Copenhagen that they had failed to clearly tell humanity what it faces if global temperatures reach the upper range of forecasts made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).
“There has been lots of scientific information on 2.0 and 3.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 and 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), but you have to tell people loudly and clearly just how difficult 4.0 or 5.0 would be,” he said.
New findings show that these projections were vastly understated, scientists here said…
Stern, whose 2006 Stern Review has become the benchmark for calculating the economic cost of tackling climate change, conceded that his report had also fallen short in assessing the potential consequences of global warming…
Katherine Richardson, head of the Danish government’s Commission on Climate Change Policy and a co-organiser of the meeting, agreed that scientists had not done a perfect job in getting the message out.
“Most of us have been trained as scientists to not get our hands dirty by talking to politicians. But we now realise that what we are dealing with is so complicated and urgent that we have to help to make sure the results are understood,” she told AFP.
Of course, college basketball may demand more of your attention, eh?
#40 – MikeN,
>Nothing peer reviewed or remotely scientific.
There you have it. Fusion declares the IPCC is not peer reviewed or remotely scientific.
Do you even realize what an ass you are for deliberately taking Mr. Fusion’s statement 100% out of context and applying it to something else?
It makes you look incredibly stupid, not to mention completely inept at debating.
Somewhere in the world, there is a gnat flying around performing fourth order ordinary differential equations in his/her head and not regretting having exchanged brains with you at all.
#54 – Canuck,
The arctic ice pack thickness mid January this year was reported as the thickest it has been in the past 70 years. That doesn’t prove anything but interesting.
That would indeed be very interesting. Do you have a link for that? My information this year was that the ice extent was greater than last year by quite a bit. However, with it all being first year ice, it is not expected that much of it will last through the summer.
(google break)
Nope. I’m wrong. This year’s ice beats out all the years since 2002, but that’s it. The trend is still strongly down. This year was a La Nina year, so a bit cooler than the years around it, but not cool enough to really matter unfortunately.
And, the fact that single year ice is far thinner than multi-year ice will not help through the summer.
Sorry. Good try though.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html
Actually, I really am sorry. I would love to have any hope at all that it’s not as bad as all of the indicators make it. Oh well.
#56 – MikeN,
Certainly the author of fiction like Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and Sphere knows a lot about fear. He presumably also knows quite a bit about medicine, as a medical doctor.
But, what exactly does he know about climate change?
Al Gore, for example, is excellent at reporting science to the masses. But, when I want to go to the source, I go to the likes of James Hansen.
Predicting climate with computer programs? GIGO!
Al Gore is a lawyer who prosecuted a global warming case without rebuttal. (It was purely entertainment, though not really Oscar award level. That was Hollywood’s statement, in case we didn’t know where they stand on the issue.) Any lawyer would win that kind of case. There are two sides, but greens only want their side told.
Yes, the Earth warms and cools. Look at websites with (accurate) ice core sample graphs. Our civilizations flourish when its warm and regress when it cools.
What? Did you read the link, or just the title? Michael Crichton didn’t write it. Al Gore is not an excellent reporter. He has taught in his classes that only one side should be presented.
# 69 pdcant said, on March 15th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Our civilizations flourish when its warm and regress when it cools.
We’re talking about far greater change than that. Do you have an example of when humanity was alive at all, let alone what you would call civilized, that the temperature was 5 degrees warmer than today? We’ve survived cooler, that’s true. But, we’ve never survived warmer, at least not significantly warmer.
Remember, at 5 degrees cooler, NYC was covered by a multi-thousand foot thick glacier.
So, when exactly was it 5 degrees warmer in the last 200,000 years? (Link please!)
#70 – MikeN,
Michael Crichton didn’t write it.
True. However, his caricature of scientists was the source of the vast majority of the article. Without the Chrichton fiction, there is no article. From your article, in case you didn’t read it.
OK, so, let me get this straight, the number one completely uninformed climate change denier in the world creates a caricature of climate scientists in a work of fiction in order to discredit scientists based on nothing. The idiots who wrote this article take the fiction as gospel and claims it to be truth and use it to discredit climate scientists.
Does this sort of totally whacked out logic actually work in your brain? If so, you need to go find that gnat in a hurry.
Oh boy, is that as far as you read? These guys wrote an article for Science magazine deconstructing the hockey stick, but apparently that doesn’t interest you, and doesn’t count as real science. Perhaps if you would read these things instead of being selective you would realize the hockey stick has been debunked.
That’s right. Mann’s original hockey stick is no longer considered scientifically valid, and in fact was just bad math. You could have fed random noise into his program and it still would have produced a hockey stick.
#73 – MikeN,
This one is obviously directed at me. However, half of your posts are not so obvious. Please make sure you reference the post to which you are replying.
As for the hockey stick, you are incorrect again Lyin’ Mike.
http://tinyurl.com/c85nqw
The “debunking” of the hockey stick was done by a bunch of assholes who debunked the first version of the article after the second version had already been printed. The second version had already addressed all of the concerns they raised with respect to the first.
It is unclear why the assholes bothered to publish their critique of the first article after the second had already come out. But, they did. And, somehow, they got it published in a peer-reviewed journal, proving that there is no bias against anti-climate-change articles in the peer reviewed publications.
#73 – MikeN,
Oh, and if you had actually read the peer reviewed article that “debunked” the already outdated older hockey stick article, you would have seen that they merely pointed out that there was not enough overlap in the data where they switched from tree rings to ice cores. That had already been addressed in the second article.
As you seem to think that the hockey stick was “bad math”, you probably think that it was a projection into the future. Just to make sure you are aware, the hockey stick graph is a graph of past temperatures. I fail to see how you could plug in anything you want with respect to past temperatures. This was not using climate models, but real hard data from the real world.
#73 – MikeN,
One last point. If you think my reading of your non-peer-reviewed article was selective, it really did have at least 10 different paragraphs that mostly discussed a Chrichton work of fiction. I think if you found any real information in that article, it was you who were being selective. Perhaps there was a paragraph in that article that had a bit of meat to it. If so, yes, I missed it.
But, noticing 10 paragraphs about Chrichton in a one page article cannot be called selective reading.
Let me explain the bad math in the hockey stick to you. I am aware that it is not projections, but a reflection of history. This is where the bad math comes in. Basically Mann took some historical data, and then based on that data calculated temperature for those time periods. It doesn’t really matter what he was calculating, but for his calculations he had a program that took in some data and produced some output that looked like a hockey stick. The math used was a bit complicated, involving principal component analysis. Instead of using standard principal components, Mann did things a bit differently, and it turns out his program emphasized hockey stick shaped figures. The debunkers took his program and fed in random noise, that is completely random data they made up in a Monte Carlo dartboard fashion, and had nothing to do with the tree rings or ice cores or anything else. With this data, the output of the program was still a hockey stick!
You should read your link again. The hockey stick graph goes back 10000 years. This review gave high confidence that it is correct-for 400 years. So 96% of the graph they do not have high confidence, and they say maybe to another 6 percent.
DEBUNKED
#78 – MikeN,
Well, I can believe a panel of experts or an anonymous blogger.
Think I’ll go with the experts.
BTW, the 400 years is still 67% of the original 600 year hockey stick graph. Your statement of 10,000 years shows plainly and simply that you are mistaking the hockey stick for one of many other studies that all coincidentally show the same thing as the hockey stick graph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_graph
As for the Wegmen report versus the National Research Council Report. One took scientists from 12 different areas and carefully evaluated the hockey stick from many viewpoints and concluded it correct for the bulk of its time frame.
The other was a report from a bunch of statisticians. Again, statisticians vs. climate scientists from many fields, I’ll go with the scientists.
The hockey stick stands.
Hmm the link you posted gave a probably true for the past 1000 years.
OK, it appears I was wrong about 10000 years, and that 1000 is the right number. Going back 600 years, the statement is probably valid because of the medieval warm period.
However, that still debunks the hockey stick, because it’s not the conclusion alone that has to stand but the methodology and the totality of the graph. If instead of looking like a hockey stick, the graph had gone up and down, gradually going higher, it wouldn’t mean much, and it wouldn’t look like a hockey stick. And this part was debunked by the review panel, they gave little confidence in supporting it on a smaller time scale. They only accepted with high degree of confidence that this is the warmest period in 400 years. They are not willing to support the hockey stick idea.
As for the math, you can look it up yourself. There are some good explanations at Watts Up With That if you want to learn. You feed in random noise, and you end up with a hockey stick. They’ve done fix after fix and made various claims about how the critiquers got it wrong, but in the end the IPCC dropped it from their latest report.
A good layman’s review of the various critiques and counter critiques.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
Strangely this paper says the hockey stick IS in the IPCC report. I’ve never seen it, and you’ve never mentioned it either.
#82 – MikeN,
Interesting write-up. I’m surprised they mentioned neither the National Research Council nor the Wegman report.
Anyway, without a hockey stick, here’s a nice long graph, going back about 540 million years. It does not, of course, resemble a hockey stick at that scale.
http://tinyurl.com/geotemp
However, you may note that during human civilization, temperature has indeed been relatively constant. The little ice age and medieval warm periods are barely noticeable. And, today is warmer than the medieval warm period.
You will also notice that there are a few brief slightly warmer periods than today in the last 500,000 years. However, to get significantly warmer than now requires going back 20 million years, when it was about 3 degrees warmer than today.
This is important. To get 5 degrees warmer than today, a temperature well within the range of estimates for global warming, you must go back about 50 million years. As it was cooling from 55 million years ago, life began to come back from the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.
This is even more important.
Life did not begin to come back until the earth cooled quite a bit. 10 million years after the cometary impact at Chixulub, the comet could no longer be blamed for the lack of life. A warm earth can though.
Many extinctions on earth correlate with warm periods, most notably the biggest extinction of them all 250 million years ago. It was 6 degrees warmer than today at that time.
MikeN,
If you are really interested in climate change, I would strongly suggest reading The Weather Makers.
If you are interested in extinctions, I would suggest Under A Green Sky.
I don’t know if you have the level of interest required to read full length books on the subjects. They are both written for an educated general audience.