Gorebal Warming?
Posted on 12/07/2006 8:26:28 AM PST by cogitator
Frisson means "a moment of intense excitement". (I had to look it up.) I guess they're predicting several of those next year on this topic.
Here's the text:
Nothing beats a whiff of Apocalypse for focussing minds and, next year, climate change will be the big issue that will send an icy shiver down spines followed by a clamour for action.
On February 1, the world's top scientists will issue their first instalment of a massive three-part update on global warming.
It will be the first knowledge review by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2001 -- and the phone-book-sized report will convey an unvarnished message that will be bleak and quite possibly terrifying.
Those close to the IPCC say it will not only confirm the grim warnings of the past but also amplify them.
It will declare that climate change is already on the march -- and newly-discovered mechanisms in the complex climate system could worsen the threat.
"The [temperature] trends that were expected will be unchanged," says Herve Le Treut, director of research at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
"But one can add positive feedbacks that weren't measured a few years ago. The range of possible risks and awareness of them has widened."
In its 2001 report, the IPCC projected that global mean temperatures would rise by between 1.4 and 5.8 C (2.5-10.4 F) by 2100 compared with their 1990 level, depending on the atmospheric levels of carbon pollution, which traps heat from the Sun.
That estimated temperature range will not change, if Le Treut's rough forecast of the IPCC findings is correct.
However, the report will also warn of newly-found "positive feedbacks" -- in ordinary language, vicious circles -- that could accelerate and possibly worsen the effects of climate change.
These include the loss of polar ice and alpine snow cover, which drives up temperatures because of the loss of whiteness which reflects sunlight, and the gradual melting of Siberian permafrost, releasing gigatonnes of carbon that had been stored for millennia in the frozen soil.
The IPCC's 4th Assessment Report "is going to shock a lot of people," says Hans Verolme of the green group WWF.
The long-awaited document comes on the heels of a string of studies in the world's science journals in 2006 that pointed to Greenland's shrivelling icesheet, loss of Antarctic glaciers, acidification of the ocean by absorption of CO2 and hammer blows to biodiversity as species habitat shifts or is destroyed.
Added to that was the report by British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, which highlighted the cost of failing to tackle greenhouse gas pollution.
If no action is taken on emissions, there is a more than a 75-percent chance that global temperatures will rise by between two and three degrees Celsius (3.6-5.4 F) over the next half century, an increase that would slash global economic output by three percent, the Stern Report said.
Overall, public awareness about climate change is rising all the time -- but this contrasts starkly with the action being taken by politicians.
The annual conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which took place in Nairobi in November, was a dreary circus of showy rhetoric.
The meeting, as expected, stood by the Kyoto Protocol for curbing greenhouse gases.
But it did almost nothing concrete for determining how this treaty -- burdened by its own complexities, weakened by a US walkout -- could deliver much faster, far deeper pollution cuts for the future.
That goes to the core of the problem.
Scrapping or modifying dirty carbon-spewing power stations and vehicles costs money, and people are loath to make sacrifices if they suspect competitors are getting a free ride.
Despite this, 2006 also saw the undercurrent of coming political change, most notably in the United States, the world's No. 1 polluter.
California vowed to cap its carbon emissions by 2020 in line with Kyoto's 1990 benchmark and sued automakers for damage to the state's climate system.
And, after their crushing victory in the US Congressional elections in November, the Democrats vowed to initiate climate-change legislation early next year.
Vicki Arroyo, director of policy analysis at a US think tank, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, cautions that the incoming two-year Congress is relatively moderate.
It is likelier to go for a gradualist approach, implementing "climate-friendly" laws that nibble at President George W. Bush's voluntary approach on carbon emissions rather than bulldoze it away completely, she predicts.
"It may not be as sweeping as, for example, the EU [carbon] trading system -- yet," she said. "But it could lay the groundwork for a trading system, for example by requiring mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions."
Other action could be new laws covering emissions by utilities or road transport, both of which would be sellable to the US public on the grounds that they save energy and thus reduce US dependence on imported oil, says Arroyo.
And yes, the article is written in a quite biased fashion, that's obvious.
** ping **
I have seen the climate change in South Florida during my lifetime. It used to (back in the 60s) get chilly in winter, now it really doesn't.
Here's a an observation: I am seeing different types of birds. When I was little you could cardinals, robins, orioles, and even, a horned owl! (I was terrified). You don't see them anymore.
Recently I saw a flock of green parrots!
Bill Gray, the most noted hurricane prognosticator, has given several reasons why the 2006 season didn't match the initial predictions (the shorter-range predictions got better as they saw the conditions changing). One of the main reasons for the lower frequency in the Atlantic was the formation of El Nino. The western Pacific has not seen any diminishment of hurricane activity -- ask the residents of the Phillipines about that.
Any smart person can make up reasons after the fact. Don't you think GW proponents should be held to the ordinary scientific standard of making successful predictions before we pay attention?
It's not really a circus until the UN Clown Car pulls up...
Hmm. A known variable they didn't account for. And here I thought climate forecasting was so simple even a caveman could do it!
I love all the "could cause..." and "can be..." qualifiers. In other words, "we added a bunch of scary what-ifs to our last prediction, because you ignorant peasants aren't taking us seriously enough. This latest hype, which will be trumpeted by your media loudly (scary always brings the viewers), should force you to beg us to lead you out of the wilderness (and if it doesn't, next time we'll add in even more movie-plot hypotheticals)."
Climate doesn't always obey the rules intuition indicates it should.
Dr. Gray is not a global warming proponent. But I agree with your statement.
If the precursors for El Nino could be reliably identified a year from onset, this would help. Currently the lead time for identifying a developing El Nino is 6-8 months. But most climate models have difficult with intradecadal variability and not as much with interdecadal variability. Intradecadal variability is affected by ocean circulation changes, and other phenomena like the North Atlantic Oscillation and Atlantic Meridional Oscillation, and that makes it more difficult.
WE'RE DOOOOOOMED!!!
Have any of these so called scientists ever produced temp. recordings for the last 50 years from various locations around the world?
I think that would settle the matter very quickly.
Yes.
Some station records go back to 1850.
An Overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network Temperature Database
Actually I guess that's only half the question. The other is, why aren't GW Theory proponents being held to a strict scientific standard?
Isn't Antarctica cooling overall?:
While it is clear the there has been warming in the localized region around where the Antarctic Peninsula glaciers are located, it is also clear that the majority of the rest of the continent has been cooling. Just how much has been cooling was also calculated by Doran ... about 2/3rds of the continent outside of the Peninsula has been cooling over the past 35 years or so.
Does the article lie by omission? It leads one to think of Antarctica as warming up, when it appears rather that, in total, Antarctica has cooled over the last 35 years.
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