« Troop Compensation | Main | Take Care of the Military »
December 10, 2006
AR 4
The leaks are starting....
Mankind has had less effect on global warming than previously supposed, a United Nations report on climate change will claim next year.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there can be little doubt that humans are responsible for warming the planet, but the organisation has reduced its overall estimate of this effect by 25 per cent.
Expect many more of these leaks in the next couple of months in the run up to the official publication. This is an interesting note:
The IPCC has been forced to halve its predictions for sea-level rise by 2100, one of the key threats from climate change. It says improved data have reduced the upper estimate from 34 in to 17 in.
December 10, 2006 in Climate Change | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c2d3e53ef00d835029f0b69e2
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference AR 4:
Comments
'cut-and-run' anyone?
Can't have any of those nasty nuclear things can we...
Posted by: Forester | Dec 10, 2006 8:08:44 AM
Better cancel my order for longer wellies. Does this mean all these Pigou taxes that Brown wants us to pay will need to be refunded?
Posted by: Kit | Dec 10, 2006 9:43:33 AM
The IPCC has been forced to halve its predictions for sea-level rise by 2100, one of the key threats from climate change. It says improved data have reduced the upper estimate from 34 in to 17 in.
Well, yes. That is the upper estimate though; as more data and better models are used the spread between the upper and lower limits naturally decreases.
I wonder what percentage those upper and lower confidence levels are, and whether they've revised their mean estimate as well.
Posted by: Mathijs van den Bergh | Dec 11, 2006 7:07:24 PM
As usually happens with this kind of articles, it is unclear which parts comes from the original report and which parts are the result of the author's own unscientific deliberations. The fact that the original IPCC AR4 report is still in its drafting stage and, as such, is still embargoed and not to be released nor distributed, makes it impossible to verify the articles claims. Thus, claiming as the article does that these are all IPCC conclusions is not only premature, it is also unscientific as there is no way to back it up! Quoting a leading UK climate scientist 'who asked not to be named' doesn't help the credibility of the article much either.
Science Correspondent Richard Gray, author of this article, seems to have forgotten about the Science issue when writing this piece of info. Reading Mr Gray's article, we're supposed to believe that the IPCC has reached the following conclusion:
"...the overall human effect on global warming since the industrial revolution is less than had been thought, due to the unexpected levels of cooling caused by aerosol sprays, which reflect heat from the sun."
With all due respect but that's absolute bullsh!t.
If one would light a match in a room and add fuel to it, the fuel would obviously burn and release heat. The more fuel one adds, the bigger the fire would be and the bigger the heat released would be. Now according to the author of the article, the IPCC's 2,000+ scientists worldwide all agree that if one would now turn on the air-conditioning in the room, its' diminishing effect on the overall room temperature would mean that the HUMAN CONTRIBUTION to the heating of the room in the first place would have decreased! Wow!
This alleged IPCC conclusion is scientifically speaking completely illogical and it points to extremely sloppy writing on behalf of it's authors. If the mentioned paragraph would have just said that the "EFFECTS of global warming are less because of aerosols" it would have hit the nail on the head but for some strange reason (more readers, add-revenues?) it had to add the 'human-effect' twist to it.
This alleged IPCC conclusion mixes up two fundamental scientific principles which no scientist would ever mix up, let alone 2,000+ of them: Cause and Effect. It takes one Effect (aerosol related cooling) and applies it to the wrong Cause (human induced global warming). That the aerosol induced cooling effect diminishes the overall global warming does NOT mean that therefor the CAUSE of the OVERAL HUMAN EFFECT on global warming itself has diminished. The Overall Human Contribution remains the same, it is the EFFECT which has diminished. Quite a difference!
This aerosol issue alone gives a pretty good indication of just how much of the original article comes from the 2,000+ IPCC scientists' report and how much from Mr Gray and a leading UK climate scientist who prefers to remain anonymous.
Posted by: ElGringo | Dec 11, 2006 11:38:33 PM
