Expert Warns World Warming Faster Than Expected

Expert Warns World Warming Faster Than Expected
Mon May 13,11:29 AM ET
By Eva Sohlman

LONDON (Reuters) - Planet earth is warming up faster than previously expected, the head of a leading climate research institute said on Monday.

Dying forests, expanding deserts and rising sea levels would wreak havoc to human and animal lives sooner than anticipated as global warming was accelerating, said Geoff Jenkins, head of the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research.

"It looks like it will be warmer by the end of the century than what we have predicted," he told Reuters in an interview.

Jenkins said recent revisions showed much greater output of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide than earlier estimated. These gases are blamed for global warming.

Warmer weather will generate more droughts, floods and rising sea levels which many fear will create millions of refugees from drowning island-nations and possible wars over increasingly scarce fresh water.

Economies are also likely to take a blow as farming, fishing and business will be affected by the change in climate.

A 2001 United Nations (news - web sites)' report on climate change forecast that global temperatures will rise two to five degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

But recent data suggest temperatures could rise even higher as a worst case scenario shows four times as much emitted CO2 in the atmosphere from today's levels which Jenkins said is significantly higher than previously expected.

Carbon dioxide is blamed for two thirds of all global warming and is largely produced when burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal.

Despite efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 percent of 1990's levels during 2008-12 under a global Kyoto pact, the amount in the atmosphere is set to rise as warmer temperatures will curb nature's capacity to absorb the gases, Jenkins said.

Half of all CO2 emissions last in the atmosphere for about 100 years, while the rest is soaked up by seas, land and vegetation.

But the opposite effect may kick in as warmer weather and less rainfall in some places will dry out and kill trees which emit CO2 as they decompose, Jenkins said.

CO2-absorbing microbes in the soil are also set to boost emissions as higher temperatures will fuel their activities which produce the greenhouse gas.

He echoed a warning from the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, that present measures to cut greenhouse gases were not sufficient to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

He said temperatures in the UK could rise by seven to eight degrees by 2080 compared with an expected four degree increase.

"We would have to cut emissions by 60-70 percent by the end of the century to stabilize CO2 levels," Jenkins said.

The European Union (news - web sites) has said it will ratify the Kyoto treaty this summer and if Russia and Japan also do so the treaty can come into force without the world's largest producer of man-made CO2 emissions -- the United States.

The U.S., which has the world's biggest economy, rejected the pact in 2001 over worries it would harm its industry.

There was something posted on FR within the past couple of days which described how this new prediction was obtained. I'm sorry to be so non-specific, but I read it in passing. The former head of the IPCC was replaced by an Indian scientist. The previous guy had basically used his position to promote an agenda, not science, with respect to global warming. Here's what he did. I just found this at www.sepp.org:

3. Climate Change is Political 'Science':

By Prof. Ross McKitrick in the National Post (of Canada) (4/4/02)

The public's concerns about global warming heated up last year after the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that temperatures could increase by "up to" 5.8C over the next century. In 1995, the projected range was only one degree to 3.5C. The stunning rise in the upper-end forecast prompted headlines worldwide to the effect that the world was warming "faster than expected."

Reporters at the time did not ask why the warming projections rose so much. The estimated sensitivity of the climate to changes in the CO2 concentration did not change between the IPCC Report in 1995 and the Third Assessment Report last year. Nor, for that matter, did satellite-borne instruments pick up any distinct warming of the troposphere; the region climate models say will bear the first fingerprints of any CO2-induced warming. So why did the warming forecast jump?

The answer lies with the new scenarios used for the recent report. These are based on fictional "storylines" (the official term) drawn up by an IPCC sub-group in 1996 for the Special Report on Emission Scenarios. The SRES group wrote the scenarios which scientists were asked to analyze. They were specifically instructed not to comment on the likelihood of the scenarios but to treat them all as equally probable.

To fix the range of reasonable emission scenarios, examine the graph. Since 1970, global CO2 emissions per capita have been remarkably constant at about 1.14 (metric tons of carbon equivalent) per person per year. Emissions per capita are higher in industrialized countries than in poor countries. Income growth generates two offsetting effects. As poor countries grow rich they produce more CO2 per person, but they also get more efficient in their energy use. These effects seem to cancel, leaving the global average remarkably constant over the past three decades.

A few weeks ago, the UN released its latest population growth forecasts. The world population over the coming century is now expected to reach just over nine billion souls by the middle of this century. Depending on fertility trends, it could peak out at or around this level. So we can construct a simple CO2 emissions scenario for the next century. If global emissions per capita remain at 1.14 tons, and population peaks at 10 billion in 2050, total emissions will rise from the current level of about 6.7 billion tons to about 11.4 billion tons, and then decline through the latter half of the century. If emissions per capita were to increase to, say, 1.2 or 1.3 tons per person, the peak could be 12 or 13 billion tons. Or if energy efficiency improvements accelerate, the peak may be lower: maybe 8 to 10 billion tons. But we could reasonably expect a peak emissions rate of about 9 billion to 12 billion tons sometime in the middle of the coming century.

By comparison, the SRES report instructed modelers to assume peak 21st century global emission levels from a low of 11.7 billion tons to a high of (get this) 29 billion tons. The "up to 6 degrees" warming forecast follows directly from feeding this range of emissions into climate models.

This range is based on a family of emission projections. The "B1" scenario projects emissions growing to 11.7 billion tons mid-century, and then slowly declining thereafter. The "A1FI" scenario projects emissions rising to an astonishing 24 billion tons by 2050, and rising further to almost 29 billion tons through the rest of the century. That would imply global per capita emissions somehow triple in the next few decades! The fantastic increase in wealth and consumption around the world needed to accomplish this would, in any other context, be considered a dream come true.

The biggest source of CO2 emissions is coal use. The scenarios were dated to begin at 1990, and consumption levels were guesstimated at 10-year intervals. Over the 1990s coal consumption was projected to grow by a minimum of 4% (in the B1 scenario) to a maximum of 31% (in A1FI). The final model simulations for the Third Assessment Report were done in 2000, so it would have been easy to verify these assumptions against data available from the International Energy Agency. Those data show that actual global coal consumption fell by over 10% during the 1990s. Yet none of the scenarios were revised downwards to reflect this fact. The projected increase in coal use for the three decades from 2000 to 2030 ranges from a low of 50% (B1) to a high of 160% (A1FI). By comparison, actual world coal consumption grew only 40% in the three decades from 1970 to 1999. Again, none of the scenarios were revised to bring projections into line with past trends.

So the world could warm up to six degrees this century. It is equally true that pigs can fly up to six miles a day.

The A1FI scenario was not included in the draft report released in November 1999 for expert review. The projected warming range at that point was 1.5C to 4C, virtually the same as five years previous. But the final draft released in October 2000 included the new A1FI scenario run on a set of models with a wider range of (assumed) climate sensitivities, yielding a new warming range of 1.4C to 5.8C. The upper end of the warming forecasts rose almost two degrees in 11 months, not by any change in the science but by inclusion of an extreme emissions scenario.

One of the experts invited to review the IPCC Report was Vincent Gray, a Climatologists in New Zealand. When he saw the final report with its astonishing new upper end, he wrote a letter of protest to fellow New Zealander Martin Manning, vice-chairman of one of the IPCC working groups. Mr. Manning replied to Gray in an e-mail subsequently cc'd throughout the climate research community. He confirmed that: "The higher warming projections that arose towards the end of the TAR process are due to a high fossil fuel emissions scenario rather than changes to climate models." He emphasized that the A1FI scenario was not produced by climate modelers or any of the scientists working on the report but "came from the SRES community and in particular was a response to final government review comments for the SRES." He also emphasized that he and many of his colleagues think the A1FI emissions are "unrealistically high."

It is a curious feature of the IPCC process that the final review stage is not done by scientists but by government bureaucrats. The fact that they could cause the warming range to be bumped up two degrees gives you an idea of how political the report-writing process has become.

If only scenarios in the range of, say, 10 billion tons to 15 billion tons peak annual 21st century emissions were used, the projected warming range would have been 1.5C to 3.5C over the next century. In other words, after five years and US$10-billion worth of research we have the same warming projections as we had in 1995. Why didn't they just say so?

Perhaps because this would have shown that the fundamental uncertainties surrounding climate modeling are not going to get resolved any time soon. And perhaps announcing the same old news wouldn't get the kind of attention the IPCC likes. As political theatre, the announcement of the 5.8-degree warming limit succeeded brilliantly. But as an exercise in science? It's only when people have a wobbly argument that they have to resort to theatrical stunts.

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