If you’re tired of politicians and pundits and would like to read what actual climate scientists say about climate change, you can download the IPCC report released today (.pdf)

I have only skimmed the report (have to go to that job).  The article summary is pretty strong but I won’t say any more until I’ve read the report.

UPDATE: 03 February
No huge surprises (to me) it is pretty much the “smoking gun” I expected.  The White House said the report was “valuable” but came out against either controls on CO₂ emissions, any kind of carbon tax, or any tough carbon-trading schemes.  (The European carbon-trading market was oversupplied at the beginning so it has resulted in little more than a windfall profit for some companies without any real incentive to lower carbon emissions). 

I was disappointed by the dearth of data from after 1995, but scientific reports are often that way when relating information that is still under analysis.  For example, the latest discoveries of meltwater lubrication of glaciers and ice caps (dubbed “dynamical ice loss” in Greenland and other places.  And while they did predict the extent of permafrost reduction, it was still early for quantitative factoring of billions of tons of methane release from the Siberian and other permafrosts. 

What everyone wants to know is the amount of sea level rise, and 3 feet by the end of the century doesn’t sound so bad.  But is is bad (assuming it is that little - a dangerous assumption given the radiative forcing elements that could not be factored).  The insurance industry is fully aware of what 3 feet will mean, and the economics of coastal flooding are beginning to soak into the financial community as well.  Even discounting the economic cost of damage to agriculture, the cost of carbon remediation may turn out to be the greatest bargain in history if we can “git ‘er done”.

The White House also felt that if the US unilaterally pursued carbon reductions, it would put our economy at a disadvantage against the developing world and particularly China.  But China is beginning to face up to global warming on its own, and in any case our economy has always been driven by innovation.  If we can get the jump on other countries in developing low-carbon energy and transportation modalities, that “disadvantage” will turn out to be a very smart move as other countries will have to go lo-carb eventually, and buy the technology from us.  Unfortunately given the “climate” of denial in our country, we’re not currently in a technological leadership position.

So: an important report, if only because it makes denial less tenable and provides the sheaf-waving evidence to prompt world leaders to quit stalling and move.  And in particular, to help the evangelical environmentalism movement gain traction against the Second-Coming “Suck the Earth dry” whackos. 

As Ann Druryan says; “We batter our planet as if we had someplace else to go.”

Notes:

• For an alternative framing of the problem, Mostly Cajun has this: OK, now what?
• And GUYK has a slightly less serious take 
• I’ll add more links as they come up around the news and in my blogroll.
• Read the transcript or download mp3 of LivingOnEarth interview with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center director James Hansen, responding to the report.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

1. yep we all gonna die..but I am disappointed in the report..it allows it may be a hundred years before the oceans rise three feet..I was hoping maybe next year? I wanted to build a marina on sweetthing’s half acre when it got to be waterfront property

   Posted by GUYK  on  02/02/07  at  06:35 PM

2. <a >This </a>article pretty much contradicts the report. According to Swiss and German scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, the earth is warmer because the sun is burning hotter. Sunspot activity has been steadily increasing over the last 60 years, which means that the sun is putting off more heat. Earth isn’t the only globe that warming - all of the planets in our solar system are warming, as a result.  Are they going to blame us for global warming on Mars and Venus, too?

   Posted by MorningGlory  on  02/04/07  at  08:53 AM

3. I didn’t realize the Washington Post would copy any story from a rag like the London Sunday Telegraph - scare quotes around “greenhouse gasses” are a clue.  Or maybe they are just inept (far more likely).  In any case, the article is dated 2004, the very year that solar minimum arrived earlier than expected and could be expected to account for a slight cooling.  And by “slight”, I mean “measureable but relatively insignificant”. 

   Solanki’s data are a long trend that is smaller than the cycle of solar minimum and maximum, and the Planck institute is studying it with NASA in the “Stereo” project where a pair of orbiting space probes make 3-dimensional images of the sun.  The data is factored in, but the effect is smaller than the effect of changes in the Earth’s atmosphere from burning gigatonnes of fossil fuels. 

   I should add that if we’d launch the Deep Space Climate Observatory which is languishing in a warehouse having had its launch funding revoked by an administration that doesn’t want to know, we’d know for certain.

   I firmly believe we can invent our way out of any problem, (and usually get rich in the process) if we start early enough.  What’s that Alcoholic’s Anonymous saying about the first step to solving any problem?

   Posted by george.w  on  02/04/07  at  10:38 AM

4. If you want to know what’s really going on with the Earth MorningGlory, I suggest looking to other science. 

   While the Sun does have an impact on our climate, you cannot dismiss the fact that the carbon levels we have reached in our atmosphere, are levels at which have never been measured before.  And scientists can go back a long way by looking at ice from Antarctica.  We are closing in on doubling the levels that have set off an iceage in the past.

   I could continue to go on and on, but I don’t really have the time right now to post all the links and everything.  Needless to say, the discrepancy of global warming is not within the scientists, but within the media.  A study done a year or two ago went through over 800 peer reviewed articles on global warming.  They also looked at media reports on global warming.

   Guess what they found, there was almost a 50% discrepancy in reporting on global warming in the media, in that half the reporting went to one side, and vice versa.  In the peer reviewed articles there was a 0% discrepancy.  Those conducting the study could not find one scientist that has written a peer reviewed journaled article dismissing the evidence of global warming.  Or find one scientist that had written on evidence counter to global warming.

   The study may be a couple years old, but the findings are still solid…

   Posted by webs05  on  02/05/07  at  09:40 AM

5. web05, I don’t dispute any of what you’re saying.  If you read the entire article that I cited, you would find that they don’t dispute it, either.  A quote from the article: 
   David Viner, the senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun did have an effect on global warming.
     He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20 years, the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the Earth’s temperature had continued to increase.
     This suggested that over the past 20 years, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation had begun to dominate “the natural factors involved in climate change,” he said. “
   I just wanted to be sure that everyone was getting “both sides of the story”.

   Posted by MorningGlory  on  02/05/07  at  02:17 PM

6. While I admit I didn’t read the article at first and assumed that it was another media reporting to confuse people, I did read it just now.  And I find this interesting:

   Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, welcomed Mr. Solanki’s research.
     “It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor,” he said.

   But then they end with the section you quoted.  This still makes me think that this article is just another attempt to confuse people about what is really going on with global warming. 

   And as I stated previously, I wouldn’t get information on global warming from the media.  I would get it from the scientists themselves, in their peer reviewed articles which can be found using google scholar.  Or by reading a science journal.

   Sorry if the previous post came off as an attack, that was not my intention.

   Posted by webs05  on  02/05/07  at  02:47 PM

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Decrepitude

A few selected articles from the last few years. Feel free to nominate others because really, I can't remember what all I've written.

9/11: five years on
Story from a picture
The Authority Gradient
If our lives are to have any meaning
What was lost
Cold and broken alleluia
Mary Mallon: being evil vs. being an evil
Artifacts of the long-gone man
A message to Republicans
Apple software review:
Because nature isn't waiting for us to wise up

Creative Commons stuff

I tried to figure out the Creative Commons and Wikimedia stuff but it was like doing your taxes in another language. Short version: it's OK if you copy my stuff as long as you give attribution and you're willing to share what you make of it with others. Here's the little logo:

This work by George Wiman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.