The recent IPCC summery (today's SPM release)
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/WG...ryApproved.pdf has been promoted as just more sensationalist hooey from the science illiterate press, giving a forum to global warming idealogues confusing their scientific training with a talent to devine and pontificate on the human conditiion.
The interested reader (if not numbed the continual fear mongering) are fed a dubious set of claims from the press - unscientific and unverifiable. Left out of the fawning press reports is the real story - POSTMODERN SCIENCE. In prior years science was crippled by the need to first evaluate and settle on the data THEN write the conclusions and recommendations in a summery. Today the UN has done us a favor, reversing the process - the SUMMARY conclusions have been written with government representatives dictating the process AND the report that supports the claims will be further cooked and 'fixed' till May 7th, when it is hoped that it will comply with a priori findings.
So, what should we make of a 21 page summery of a report not yet completed and massaged? Well, let's pretend there will be a manipulated backup to its claims:
This report is more emphatic about mostly human caused warming, although the balance of the research since the 2001 TAR (Third Annual Report) is still divided on the ratio of solar and human caused forcing. Although solar physists continue to generate solar studies indicating it is a major (but not exclusive factor) it looks like the climate boys decided its time to stop arguing and just ignore them.
What has been lost in the propoganda though has been the REDUCTION of claims from the third report.
Chris Monkington has a nice summary:
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070201_monckton.pdfQuote:
FIGURES in the final draft of the UN’s fourth five-year report on climate change show that the previous report, in 2001, had overestimated the human influence on the climate since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.
Also, the UN, in its 2007 report, has more than halved its high-end best estimate of the rise in sea level by 2100 from 3 feet to just 17 inches. It suggests that the rate of sea-level rise is up from
2mm/yr to 3mm/year – no more than one foot in a century.
UN scientists faced several problems their computer models had not predicted. Globally, temperature is not rising at all, and sea level is not rising anything like as fast as had been forecast. Concentrations of methane in the air are actually falling. ...
The draft of the science chapters, now being circulated to governments for last-minute comments, reveals that the tendency of computers to over-predict rises in temperature and sea level has forced a major rethink.
The report’s generally more cautiously-expressed projections confirm scientists’ warnings that the UN’s heavy reliance on computer models had exaggerated the temperature effect of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Previous reports in 1990, 1995 and 2001 had been progressively more alarmist.
In the final draft of the new report there is a change in tone. Though carbon dioxide in the air is increasing, global temperature is not.
Figures from the US National Climate Data Center show 2006 as about 0.03 degrees Celsius warmer worldwide than 2001. Since that is within the range of measurement error, global temperature has not risen in a statistically significant sense since the UN’s last report in 2001.
Sources at the center of the drafting say that, though the now-traditional efforts are being made to sound alarmist and scientific at the same time, key projections are being quietly cut.
One says: “Stern is dead. The figures in the final draft of the UN’s Fourth Assessment Report makes the recent report of your Treasury’s chief economist on the cost of climate change look like childish panic.
It seems that a cadre of climate hyterics is the group are getting stressed by the better news, and sounding far more alarmist than ever:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/clim...techange_x.htmQuote:
"We can adapt our way through this," said Jonathan Overpeck, a University of Arizona climate scientist who helped draft the summary and coordinated a chapter in the report. "What the IPCC is endeavoring to do is show everybody what's going to happen if we just let it go unabated, if we pull back some, or if we really try to cut emissions. It's just like turning the dial up. We control this climate system, that's clear. We can turn the dial down or keep it up." (PANT... PANT...)
Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and lead author of the report's chapter on projections of future climate change, added: "The longer you wait, the worse the problem gets. The longer you wait, the longer it takes (to fix)."
The panel's bleak summary, released Friday in Paris, lays out the how, what and why of global warming, but not remedies to the problem.
(And leave it to the french): "We are on the historic threshold of the irreversible," warned French President Jacques Chirac, who called for an economic and political "revolution" to save the planet.
Two realities - one is the report, the other is the cadre of alarmists and the press...
