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Thank you for supporting the case espoused by the Copenhagen cogress.
This was not a process initiated and conducted by the world’s governments, there was no systematic synthesis, assessment, and review of research findings as in the IPCC, and there was certainly no collective process for the 2,500 researchers gathered in Copenhagen to consider drafts of the six key messages nor to offer their own suggestions for what politicians may need to hear.
Then stop posting charts and data that supports its conclusions.Yawn, I don't.
Then stop posting charts and data that supports its conclusions.
Have you seen any explanation as to why they get the temperature so wrong?Everything you have posted is consistent with the notion of a warming earth, whereby models replicate the actual trends over lengthy periods..
The IPCC made no short term projections on sea level in the last report.It is impossible for sea levels to rise consistently if the earth is cooling or if massive glaciers are forming globally. In the latter regard, if recent sea level trends continue, predictions of IPCC 2007 will be rendered conservative in the years ahead.
In particular, the congress concluded that, according to recent observations and given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized.
.....We're the first generation that has had the power to destroy the planet. Ignoring that risk can only be described as reckless'
....Since publishing the Stern Review in 2006, the professor has become the global authority on climate change. Commissioned by Gordon Brown, his study of the economics of climate change shifted the debate away from polar bears and unseasonal summers, and reframed it in the cold hard language of the balance sheet. Unless we invested 1% of global GDP per annum in measures to prevent climate change, the review warned, it would cost us 20% of global GDP. Suddenly, the CBI and the Institute of Directors were paying attention. It was a defining moment for the credibility of a movement once belittled as too counter-culture to be taken seriously. Stern became the grey hero of the greens - powerful precisely because he seemed such an improbable eco warrior.
Since then Stern has returned from the Treasury to the London School of Economics, been made a life peer, and is now about to publish a book - A Blueprint For a Safer Planet. Guided by three principles of effectiveness, efficiency and fairness, it calls for an investment of closer to 2% of GDP, with rich countries leading the way in emissions reductions. Proposing green technologies, international emissions trading, and financing to halt deforestation, it lays out the terms by which he believes we can avert catastrophe - and as such is fundamentally hopeful.
But Stern navigates a delicate path between optimism and Armageddon, and at a recent climate change conference he was still exhorting world leaders to grasp the magnitude of the crisis. "Do the politicians understand just how difficult it could be?" he appealed. "Just how devastating [a rise of] four, five, six degrees centigrade would be? I think not yet." With hindsight, he says he fears that even his own review underestimated the risks we face.
"When it came out, people thought I'd over- egged the omelette. But all the things people were looking at turned out to be worse than they thought. Doing nothing looks even more reckless than it did even a few years ago." He pauses, as if uneasy with such an intemperate word, but keeps going. "Recklessness is the only word. I mean, we have to recognise the scale of the risk. If we go on at anything like business as usual, we'll be at concentration levels by the end of this century which will give us around a 50-50 chance of being above five degrees centigrade relative to, say, the 19th century. We humans are only 100,000 years old. We haven't seen that for 30 to 50 million years. We haven't seen three degrees centigrade for three million years. The idea that humans can easily adapt to conditions like these ..." He lets the proposition tail away, too foolish even for words.
"What will we do? We'll move. People will move. Why? Because much of southern Europe will be desert. Other places will become underwater. Others will be hit by such severe storms with such frequency that they become almost uninhabitable. So hundreds of millions of people will move. You're already seeing people moving in Darfur, where droughts devastated the grazing land of pastoralist people, and they moved, and come into conflict with people in the places they're moving to. We're seeing that already on just a 0.8 degree rise. We're the first generation that has the power to destroy the planet. You're re-writing the planet. So you can only describe as reckless ignoring risks like that."
At the heart of Stern's work is a simple calculation. If the science on climate change is right, the transition costs incurred by switching to a low-carbon economy will - however daunting - be a fraction of what we will save by averting disaster. If the science is wrong, and we incur those costs unnecessarily, they would be "very far from disastrous", and we would still benefit, "because we will have a world that is more energy efficient, with new and cleaner technologies, and is more biodiverse as a result of protecting the forests". The logic of the argument is compelling, but is there any part of Stern that believes the science could be wrong?
"It's very, very remote," he says slowly. Less than one in 100? He looks surprised. "Oh, much, much less." The puzzle must therefore be why anyone would still doubt it. Nigel Lawson, for example, dismissed his review as "fraudulent", and published a book last year disputing the entire scientific premise of climate change.
"As an undergraduate, I did maths and physics. That doesn't make me a scientist," Stern responds, with exaggerated patience. "So I try to read and understand and talk to scientists. I'm staggered by how many people who are lawyers, or politicians ..." Or former chancellors? "For example," he agrees drily. "Taxi drivers. People behind bars. People cutting hair. They all seem to be knowledgeable and expert on the science.
"In public policy we have to understand a little bit about nuclear physics, and biochemistry, and genetics. So what do you do if you want to understand about genetics? You talk to a geneticist. You don't turn to taxi drivers or politicians. Both respectable professions, but you don't go to them for the science of climate change, you go to scientists. And what do you hear? That this is basically simple physics. It's not as if it's something strange or mysterious that people can't explain to you. It's not something outside the experimental. The greenhouse effect is something you can observe experimentally - and most people have observed the greenhouse effect themselves, in greenhouses. Yes?"
Does Stern feel angry with sceptics - or, as he calls them, irrational optimists? "Well, they're marginal now," he says with rather withering indifference. When he finds himself sitting next to one at a dinner party, does he even bother to argue? "I still believe in rational argument and communication. It's our duty to try. But it is an area in which people can be deliberately destructive," he says disdainfully. "There's a kind of yah boo argument: 'Don't believe it, don't believe it, don't believe it.' Or using language that's slightly more colourful, like that Paul Whitehouse character who said bollocks to everything. That's the kind of thing. It's yah boo stuff."
Stern suspects their perversity is ultimately down to political prejudice. He has no patience with those on the right who assume climate change is just a Trojan horse - an excuse for the left to interfere in the market. "This is about trying to help markets work. This isn't anti-market, this is about making markets work well. My position is pro-markets and pro-growth - not anti-growth. Indeed, it's ignoring the problem that will kill off the growth. High carbon growth kills itself. First on very high hydrocarbon prices, but second and, of course, much more fundamentally, on the very hostile physical environment it would create."
But he has even less time for those on the left who think climate change is "an elitist hobby horse"; a distraction from poverty in the developing world. "We will not overcome world poverty unless we manage climate change successfully. I've spent my life as a development economist, and it's crystal clear that we succeed or fail on winning the battle against world poverty and managing climate change together. If we fail on one, we fail on the other."
........Ultimately, he points out, the choice is quite simple: however difficult the challenge of action may be, the alternative is unthinkable. "If you say I'm not going to do that, what's left? What's left is you just reach for the suntan lotion and the big hat, and you say it's all too difficult, I'm signing off on this, and let's all fry. Why would you want to go there?" It seems more or less unimaginable to Stern that people would be stupid enough to allow a catastrophe to unfold, and his ultimate message is one of optimism.
"There are so many ideas out there, the pace of technological progress is so fast. It's a very optimistic thing about human nature; when humans focus on a problem, they're quite ingenious. And we have to recognise that this subject is young. It's only been deep in our understanding for two or three years. The scientists, of course, have been thinking about this for a long time, but in terms of politics and policy it's been big only for two or three years. I think if you look at it in that context, let's recognise what the government has done. We're ahead of the world on climate change legislation. I think the climate change bill is broadly along the right lines. If you ask yourself the question, 'How far have we got?', we've got a long way. It has to be faster, but let's not fail to recognise how far we've come."
Not even the world recession has dampened his optimism. "This recession is seen as something that would prevent action on climate change only if we confuse ourselves. If we think clearly, this is an opportunity to bring forward some of those investments, because resources are a bit cheaper at the moment. I've been struck that this climate change story has stayed very much on the agenda, the way that the green stimulus has been seen as part of the expansion package. In the next two or three decades, I think low-carbon technologies are going to be like the railways or IT - big drivers of growth."
Strong interview with Nicholas Stern (Stern Review 2006 on Global Warming). I believe he brings together all the elements of the discussion in a very convincing way.
.....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/30/climate-change-nicholas-stern-interview
Being irrationally optimistic as Stern says might make us feel better but it won't change what is happening on the ground.
We fight or we lose.... everything..
Mistreatment of the economic impacts of extreme events in the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change
Abstract
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change has focused debate on the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action on climate change. This refocusing has helped to move debate away from science of the climate system and on to issues of policy. However, a careful examination of the Stern Review's treatment of the economics of extreme events in developed countries, such as floods and tropical cyclones, shows that the report is selective in its presentation of relevant impact studies and repeats a common error in impacts studies by confusing sensitivity analyses with projections of future impacts. The Stern Review's treatment of extreme events is misleading because it overestimates the future costs of extreme weather events in developed countries by an order of magnitude. Because the Stern Report extends these findings globally, the overestimate propagates through the report's estimate of future global losses. When extreme events are viewed more comprehensively the resulting perspective can be used to expand the scope of choice available to decision makers seeking to grapple with future disasters in the context of climate change. In particular, a more comprehensive analysis underscores the importance of adaptation in any comprehensive portfolio of responses to climate change.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...=5031951&md5=e3d8605435bb19b53152cb6b81a8973e
Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told
.....
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/...sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html
More from mainstream.
Not sure about his quote 'the sea is not rising'
Wayne trotted out this very same tripe earlier in this very same thread. It's just a case of the skeptics continuously repeating proven falsehoods on the chance that some of the less intelligent will be sucked in.The article says he was chairman of INQUA.
He must have been a lone dissenting voice as they are strongly saying sea levels are rising.
http://www.inqua.tcd.ie/documents/iscc.pdf
Wayne trotted out this very same tripe earlier in this very same thread. It's just a case of the skeptics continuously repeating proven falsehoods on the chance that some of the less intelligent will be sucked in.
againspool said:Not sure about his quote 'the sea is not rising'
Scientists must rein in misleading climate change claims
Overplaying natural variations in the weather diverts attention from the real issues
Dr Vicky Pope
News headlines vie for attention and it is easy for scientists to grab this attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic prediction.
“Since the current transition now exceeds 568 spotless days, it is becoming clear that sun has undergone a state change. It is now evident that the Grand Maxima state that has persisted during most of the 20th century has come to an abrupt end.
“If the sun becomes quieter than the old solar cycles, producing more than 1028 spotless days, then we might slip into a Dalton Minimum or maybe even a Grand Minima such as the Maunder Minimum. This solar state will last for decades. Several solar scientist have predicted this will begin in Solar Cycle 25, about a decade from now. But a few have predicted this will occur now in Solar Cycle 24.
“Temperatures are already falling. Satellites provide generally the most accurate atmospheric temperature measurements covering the entire globe. From the peak year 1998, the lower Troposphere temperatures globally have fallen around 1/2 degree Celsius due to the quiet sun.
Oh dear, there really was one!What scientists speculate that we're entering a Maunder Minimum, and have they put out a press release with climate warnings? The previous Maunder Minimum was bitterly cold leading to deaths, disease and famine.
US Navy Physicist warns of possibly 'several decades of crushing cold temperatures and global famine'.
By Retired U.S. Navy Physicist and Engineer James A. Marusek
2 Apr 09 – Excerpts: “The sun has gone very quiet as it transitions to Solar Cycle 24.
Oh dear, there really was one!
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