The Party’s Over
When I first watched Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” I will admit that I was a bit concerned by its structure and some of its content. Principally that Gore himself had used climate change as a naked self-promotional tool, but also that he had used Hurricane Katrina as an example of climate change; an assertion for which there is as yet no conclusive evidence.
Hence I was concerned on hearing the news that An Inconvenient Truth had been selected as educational material to be distributed in schools across the country because this would open up the documentary to further critical scrutiny of his less than watertight assertions, and low and behold it wasn’t long before the carrion started to circle.
RealClimate disassembles the critics here.
Sadly the truth is that the conclusions of the IPCC report upon which the documentary is based are in fact wrong; they are in fact far, far too conservative and climate change is accelerating at a far greater rate than it predicted.
The big melt : lessons from the Arctic summer of 2007
The rising rate of CO2 emissions is reflected in a larger annual increase in the level of atmospheric CO2. The average increase of 1.5 parts per million (ppm) for 1970–2000 has jumped to 2.2 ppm since 2001 (Adam, 2007c). James Hansen estimates that “if we go another 10 years, by 2015, at the current rate of growth of CO2 emissions, which is about 2 per cent per year, the emissions in 2015 will be 35 per cent larger than they were in 2000,” and this would take emissions scenarios to avoid dangerous climate change beyond reach (Connor, 2007a). Hansen, the Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science, and one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists, says we must “begin to move our energy systems in a fundamentally different direction within about a decade, or we will have pushed the planet past a tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to avoid far-ranging undesirable consequences”. Global warming of two to three degrees above the present emperature, he warns, would produce a planet without Arctic sea ice, a catastrophic sea level rise in the pipeline of around 25 metres, and a super-drought in the American west, southern Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa. “Such a scenario threatens even greater calamity, because it could unleash positive feedbacks such as melting of frozen methane in the Arctic, as occurred 55 million years ago, when more than ninety per cent of species on Earth went extinct” (Hansen, 2006b).
Executive Summary :
• Climate change impacts are happening at lower temperature increases and more quickly than projected.
• The Arctic’s floating sea ice is headed towards rapid summer disintegration as early as 2013, a century ahead of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections.
• The rapid loss of Arctic sea ice will speed up the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet, and a rise in sea levels by even as much as 5 metres by the turn of this century is possible.
• The Antarctic ice shelf reacts far more sensitively to warming temperatures than previously believed.
• Long-term climate sensitivity (including “slow” feedbacks such as carbon cycle feedbacks which are starting to operate) may be double the IPCC standard.
• A doubling of climate sensitivity would mean we passed the widely accepted 2°C threshold of “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate four decades ago, and would require us to find the means to engineer a rapid drawdown of current atmospheric greenhouse gas.
• Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are now growing more rapidly than “business-as-usual”, the most pessimistic of the IPCC scenarios.
• Temperatures are now within ≈1°C of the maximum temperature of the past million years.
• We must choose targets and take actions that can actually solve the problem in a timely manner.
• The object of policy-relevant advice must be to avoid unacceptable outcomes and seemingly extreme or alarming possibilities, not to determine just the apparently most likely outcome.
• The 2°C warming cap is a political compromise; with the speed of change now in the climate system and the positive feedbacks that 2°C will trigger, it looms for perhaps billions of people and millions of species as a death sentence.
• To allow the reestablishment and long-term security of the Arctic summer sea ice it is likely to be necessary to bring global warming back to a level at or below 0.5°C (a long-term precautionary warming cap) and for the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases at equilibrium to be brought down to or below a long-term precautionary cap of 320 ppm CO2e.
• The IPCC suffers from a scientific reticence and in many key areas the IPCC process has been so deficient as to be an unreliable and dangerously misleading basis for policy-making.
“We’re not going to make it are we? People I mean…”
[Edward Furlong, Terminator 2 : Judgement Day]
This is the sort of thorough analysis I’ve come to expect from you, Wolfie. May I quote some of it?
By all means, spread the word. Its a matter of life and death.
Couldnt we buy a reallllllly big fridge? I live about 1 foot above sea level. A few weeks ago I found a fish in the front garden. I put it down to global warming. True.
Not merely a suicidal fish in your garden but the calling-card of the surrealist environmental movement whom I suspect are taking an unhealthy interest in your recycling arrangements. Have you been separating properly?
I’ll go halves with you on the fridge Mutters, we can save the world and nab a Nobel in one swift manoeuvre.
Not merely a suicidal fish in your garden but the calling-card of the surrealist environmental movement whom I suspect are taking an unhealthy interest in your recycling arrangements. Have you been separating properly?
There’s a lot of it about these days -
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ioZjKsBrKOw
PS the anti spam word for this comment is ‘terror’, cool…
It may not all be down purely to CO2 though. This is perhaps what the graph tells me.
The artic has been free of ice in the middle ages and there was still an england above sea level.
I am no global warming sceptic but big chunks of hte science has holes in and alot more is just conjecture. I can’t believe any of the stuff about feedback mechanisms as some of the ones investigated in the past for extreme weather in the Caribbean for example have tunred out to be the complete opposite of what sceintists predicted.
As I said, Global Warming is something we need to urgently do something about. But it ain’t going to happen within 20 years and scaring people more is jst going to make them put their heads in the sand.
Wolfie,
This is a superb post. Sorry I did not read it earlier. I will include a link to this post in my post on climate change.
I just want to make three points:
-Scientific disputes over the accuracy of data cannot be resolved in a court of law. It is ridiculous and anti-scientific to bring this to a court of law. Scientific disputes are resolved by science itself. I have read on so many controversies, including the David Baltimore controversy, in which the FBi was sent to check if the notes in the notebook recording experiments were authentic or taken at different times, the whole thing amounted to a farce and the accused scientist, a colleague from whom Baltimore dissociated himslef in order to save his reputation was proven right but after 10 years, the 10 years it took to destroy her career. Scientifc truth is never static, it can always be tested and refuted and this is a matter that just should be left to science.
-There is nothing in the alleged ‘errors’ that can actually qualifies as an error. Actually a scientific error, as it is defined in science has more to do with intentional or non intentional misconduct in the method than within a contested result generated according to correct rules.
Ecology invented the term of the ‘precautionary principle’ (principe de précaution’ which is widely used now in Ethics. Because data on climate change concern us and the fate of our planet and our humanity, and because predictions for a complexe system can never be 100% accurate, we have to choose the worse between two suggested predictions. It is the same in syllogisms. If you have two premises in your syllogism, one correct and one false, you have to draw your conclusion on the false premise. This is no exageration, this is prediction adapted to complexe systems facing something threatening or catastrophic.
City,
I gather that you are referring to what is commonly known as the Medieval Warm Period, this period was not “free of arctic ice”, neither was it as warm as it is today and most importantly it was not a global or hemitropic event.
See the following : MYTH #2: Regional proxy evidence of warm or anomalous (wet or dry) conditions in past centuries contradicts the conclusion that late 20th century hemispheric mean warmth is anomalous in a long-term (multi-century to millennial) context
[Jones, P.D., Mann, M.E., Climate Over Past Millennia, Reviews of Geophysics, 42, RG2002, doi: 10.1029/2003RG000143, 2004]
In 20 years it will be far too late to prevent our extinction.
Sophia,
Agreed on all points. The law is quite often an Ass.
Stef,
I like to keep my spam database “topical”.