George Monbiot, Europe’s leading green commentator, has listed his royal flush of climate change deniers. These are the people “who have done most for the denialist cause” and they include deniers (or should I say climate change creationists?) like David Bellamy, Sarah Palin, Václav Klaus and Steve Milloy.
Ace of spades, David Bellamy, TV presenter: David Bellamy has claimed that global warming is “poppycock”, that “the global warmers are telling lies – carbon dioxide is not the driver”. He maintains that “since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming I’ve not been allowed to make a TV programme.” This is odd because he stopped making TV programmes in 1994. He was making public statements in support of mainstream climate science until at least 2000. But the conspiracy extends even further. “Have you noticed there is a wind turbine on Teletubbies?”, he asked in the Daily Express. “That’s subliminal advertising, isn’t it?”
Steven Sherwood, a climate expert at Yale University, warned that parts of China, India and eastern USA will become so warm during the summers that people will not be able to lose heat by sweating, and thus making those parts unliveable.
The physiological limits of the human body will begin to render places impossible to support human life if the average global temperature rises by 7C on pre-industrial levels, he said.
“There will be some places on Earth where it would simply be impossible to lose heat,” Sherwood said. “This is quite imaginable if we continue burning fossil fuels. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t end up there.”
New research from the UK Met Office, one of the world’s leading providers of environmental and weather-related services, shows that the world’s efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions would only offer a 50-50 chance of keeping temperature rises below the two degree threshold.
Dr Vicky Pope, Head of Climate Change Advice at the Met Office states: “Even with drastic cuts in emissions in the next 10 years, our results project that there will only be around a 50% chance of keeping global temperatures rises below 2 °C.
“This idealised emissions scenario is based on emissions peaking in 2015 and quickly changing from an increase of 2–3% per year to a decrease of 3% per year. For every 10 years we delay action another 0.5 °C will be added to the most likely temperature rise.”
During a climate change summit in Copenhagen last week, with more than 2,000 researchers from 80 countries attending, scientists warned that global sea levels could rise with more than a metre, or more, by 2100. The rising sea levels, they warn, will displace 10% of the world’s population, around 600 million people who live in low-lying countries.
Just last week I told you that scientists are warning that the pace of climate change “have largely outpaced” the models and estimates from the IPCC 2007 report. And now this report shows that the rise in global sea levels is up to three times worse than previously predicted by the conservative estimates from IPCC .
“I would predict sea level rise by 2100 in the order of 1m,” Prof Konrad Steffen, of the University of Colorado, said. “It could be 1.2m or 0.9m, but it is 1m or more seeing the current change, which is up to three times more than the average predicted by the IPCC. It is a major change and it actually calls for action.”
James Randerson, currently Guardian’s environment website editor and formerly Guardian science correspondent and deputy news editor with New Scientist magazine, says that the phrase “climate change deniers” makes more harm than good as it links the climate deniers with Holocaust denial.
“[...]the denial phrase allows them to claim that the debate around global warming is a purely political argument. It isn’t and it is dangerous for that notion to gain any traction. Plus I’ve seen the phrase “eco-Nazi” repeated too many times on blogs to want to sink to that level of debate.”
Instead he argues that because climate change deniers recklessly and “sometimes” deliberately deny established scientific facts a more fitting label for these deniers would be “climate change creationists”:
During the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recently scientists warned that the pace of climate change ”have largely outpaced” the models and estimates from the IPCC 2007 report. They warned that the pace of man-made climate change is much faster than previously expected due to increased emissions from the industrial sector and that the higher temperatures have started to trigger self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms.
“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University and member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said.
If you have been following this blog for a while you know I’ve warned on numerous occasions that the climate predictions from the IPCC have been way too conservative. And now we see scientists, like Field, from the IPCC coming out and warning us that climate change is accelerating much faster than their conservative climate models have predicted.
Here is the full video of Al Gore’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about repowering America and the need for USA to resume global leadership on the climate crisis. You can read and watch his opening statement here.
It’s not just Argentina, Australia and California who faces severe droughts and heatwaves. BBC reports that China has declared a drought emergency in northern and central parts of the country. Around four million people are suffering from water shortages while almost half of China’s winter crop is under threat.
“President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao ordered all-out efforts to fight the drought, allocating 400m yuan ($58m, £40m) in relief assistance.
China’s drought relief office called it an event “rarely seen in history”.
China faces droughts and floods annually but has seen a recent increase in extreme weather conditions.
The Chinese authorities say the current drought is expected to continue as no rain has been forecast in the affected areas for at least 10 days.”
The Chinese agriculture ministry says it’s on red alert and tries to focus on stabilising the grain production and ensure agricultural production can continue.
A new study, published in the journal Nature, shows that Antarctica, like the rest of the world, is warming up. The authors of the study fear that West Antarctica may have reached a “tipping point” which will melt most of the ice. If all of West Antarctica was to melt away it would raise global sea levels of up to seven metres with devastating consequences around the world.
Eric Steig, of the University of Washington, one of the authors of the study, said:
“The thing you hear all the time is that Antarctica is cooling and that’s not the case. If anything it’s the reverse, but it’s more complex than that.
“Antarctica isn’t warming at the same rate everywhere, and while some areas have been cooling for a long time the evidence shows the continent as a whole is getting warmer.”
Professor Barry Brook, of the University of Adelaide, said after seeing the study that together with the melting of Greenlands ice sheet global sea levels would rise 14 metres:
According to the authors of the study the world’s glaciers lost 2 meters (2000 mm) of thickness on average in 2006-2007. And that “the new data continues the global trend in accelerated ice loss over the past few decades.” The authors also note that the rate of ice loss is twice as fast as a decade ago.
“One year doesn’t tell us much, it’s really these long-term trends that help us to understand what’s going on,” Michael Zemp, a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Department of Geography, said in an interview. “The main thing that we can do to stop this is reduce greenhouse gases” that are blamed for global warming.
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