'The coming climate crunch' - April 30, 2009
This week’s issue of Nature looks in detail at “the coming climate crunch”.
As my colleague Quirin Schiermeier explains on the Climate Feedback blog, “What’s it all about then? Well, Gavin Schmidt and David Archer, in their news and views piece, get to the heart of it: “Dangerous climate change, even loosely defined, is going to be hard to avoid.’”
The Real Climate blog focuses on two papers which look at the chances of staying below 2°C warming. “Both find that the most directly relevant quantity is the total amount of CO2 ultimately released, rather than a target atmospheric CO2 concentration or emission rate,” the blogging team writes. “This is an extremely useful result, giving us a clear statement of how our policy goals should be framed.”
Much of the coverage focuses on the suggestion in one of these papers that once humanity has added a trillion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere 2°C is inevitable (eg: Wired).
In the Guardian, Myles Allen, author of one of the papers, writes:
Like all scientists, most of what I do is arcane and technical and of very little interest to outsiders. For once, however, I'm involved in a couple of studies (published today in Nature), that my fellow parents might just find interesting. The headline result of both papers is that the risk of dangerous climate change is primarily determined by the total amount of carbon dioxide that we, the human race, release into the atmosphere over all time, not by emissions in any particular year.
Joseph Romm, of the Climate Progress blog, is unimpressed though. He writes that our issue “fails utterly to provide its readers with the two must-haves in any comprehensive coverage of the issue:
-A clear and specific understanding of the plausible worst-case scenario impacts facing the world post-2050 on our current emissions path.
-A clear and specific understanding of the core climate solutions, policies for their rapid deployment, and an understanding of why the total cost of action is so darn low — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.”
Make up your own mind: all the content is here.
Comments
Why doesn't Nature do the world a real service and publish a critical review of climate models by qualified statisticians and computer simulation experts who are not part of the highly inbred, self-reinforcing climate modeling community? Decision makers and the public need an unbiased consensus on just how accurate the assumptions and output of current climate models really are as well an evaluation of the ability of these models to predict future climate. I continue to be amazed at the uncritical acceptance of modeling predictions and the claimed confidence limits. In law there is a principle that greater the penalty for the crime, the greater the confidence should be in the evidence. Given the stakes for the economies and standard of living of both developed and underdeveloped countries, shouldn't we demand a similar standard of evidence for the predictions of climate modelers? The consequences of getting it wrong are not trivial. The precautionary principle that we should impose CO2 restrictions "just in case" the more outrageous predictions are correct doesn't necessarily hold.
Posted by: David44 | May 1, 2009 06:37 PM
Why does Nature proceed from the viewpoint that anthropogenic climate change is proven beyond doubt when in actual fact the scientific evidence is not there? It has forsaken science in favour of an unproven ideology. Evidence is real empirical data NOT mathematical models. Please look at this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zeGY8zbzc8 and this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BmWy6Nsm6I&feature=related for an alternative view. Bob Carter of Australia also gives a very balanced view here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI
Posted by: Richard | May 7, 2009 12:56 PM
I think that my posts are not getting posted as a matter of policy. My name appears in the post on the side-bar but my post doesn't. This has happened so many times that the odds for it being a coincidence are extremely slim. Are you complicit in the cover up of the Great Anthropogenic Global Warming Swindle?
Posted by: Richard | May 8, 2009 06:34 AM