climateprogress.org — The American Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its annual meeting, so you can expect a flurry of climate announcements such as this "It seems the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough, a top climate scientist warned Saturday".
Feb 15, 2009 View in Crawl 4
climatemavenFeb 15, 2009
The comment above lacks citations on why the Keeling Curve is not an accurate measure of increasing carbon dioxide and why carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas and thus it's increase isn't creating an energy imbalance. I don't find it convincing. I suggest reviewing the basics at the BBC to understand the central concepts. <a class="user" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/portal/climate_change/default.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/portal/c ...</a>The article points out that the estimates for future emissions and growth of concentrations (two different but connected measures) that the IPCC used for their models are proving to be far too low compared to how concentrations are now rising. This is not arguing the models are wrong, but that our worst case estimates of human activity and thus our inputs to the models were low. Given this underestimate in the inputs and the climate change impacts we already see worldwide, our worst case model outputs are probably also underestimates - which should worry us all as they were pretty awful to start with.It appears that our worst case scenarios for pollution are being outstripped by actual growth in emissions in the developing world and concentrations of greenhouse gasses are rising faster than expected because sinks like forests and oceans are taking up less of our pollution than we expected. We have a double whammy - we're pumping out more than we imagined we would and the systems in the environment that absorb our pollution are slowing. Thus concentrations are rising faster than even our worst case scenario and finally this means we're hurtling towards a tipping point where we can't avoid disaster faster.Think of it as a car, hurtling towards a cliff in the fog. When you might hope we'd applied a brake, it appears instead we've put our foot down harder on the accelerator. This isn't a hopeless message - just a message of urgency. We need to act while we can still control the car. We will reach a point where that won't be an option.
barondaveFeb 15, 2009
Liberals are right and conservatives are wrong. This has been true for decades, and is becoming very clear with the economic disaster we're in now and the coming environmental disaster. We will never be able to convince some of the sphincter conservatives. The best we can do is marginalize those who have been consistently wrong and move forward without them. It's a matter of values.
chipsngravyFeb 16, 2009
Naturally, this analysis is based on your scientific credentials; credentials which I am sure you will be happy to share with us. Well...go on then..