By Simon Leufstedt on March 25th, 2009
Man-made climate change will render half of the world’s inhabited areas unliveable. And we humans will not be able to adapt to a warmer climate as good as previously thought, a US climate expert warned during a climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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.”
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By Simon Leufstedt on March 12th, 2009
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.
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By Dr Gideon Polya on October 22nd, 2008
“You will be SHOCKED by the response…”
I belong to a Melbourne-based Climate Action Group called the Yarra Valley Climate Action Group (YVCAG) which is very active in public education through public meetings, participation in public demonstrations and by providing a series of very well-referenced Climate Emergency Fact Sheets on its website. Thus people confused by the vehement and dishonest denial by climate sceptics can use the YVCAG resource and discover what top climate scientists and top scientific bodies think about the accelerating global warming crisis by consulting “Climate Emergency: what top world scientific experts say“.
Our local Climate Action Group is variously linked to scores of like-minded Climate Action Groups around the Continent and Commonwealth of Australia through two umbrella organizations, namely the Climate Emergency Network and the Climate Movement. However our efforts at public education are negated by the Power of Money. Australia is the world’s biggest coal exporter with coal exports currently worth A$55 billion per annum; about 92% of Australia’s electric power comes from fossil fuel burning; and the Australian coal industry is worth in total about A$100 billion annually – with the coincident reality that Australia resolutely ignores the disproportionate impact it is having on the Earth’s environment through its world-leading annual per capita Domestic and Exported fossil fuel-derived CO2 pollution.
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