Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Global warming accelerates; Climategate rumbles on
A report by a group of leading scientists that global warming is accelerating and that world sea levels could rise at worst by 2 metres by 2100* is grim reading.
But sceptics are using a flood of leaked e-mails from a British University — dubbed “Climategate” – to question the findings.
You can read the Copenhagen Diagnosis here, by 26 researchers worldwide. It says a thaw of summer sea ice around the North Pole, for instance, has far outpaced projections in a report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) two years ago. They say world emissions must peak by 2020 to avoid the worst of climate change.
They say that sea levels could rise by perhaps a metre, at worst 2 – a figure also mentioned recently by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon — and far above scenarios in 2007 by the IPCC. More than 190 nations will meet in Copenhagen from Dec. 7-18 to try to agree a new pact to combat global warming.
But the leak of thousands of hacked documents from the University of East Anglia has added fuel to the debate because they include snide comments about climate sceptics and exchanges about how to present the data to make the global warming look convincing.
Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the university, is quoted today as saying that he “absolutely” stands by his findings and says the suggestion that there was a conspiracy to alter evidence was “complete rubbish”.
I’ve had a several e-mails from people who doubt humans are to blame for global warming saying that “Climategate” indicates that the Copenhagen Diagnosis is a new example of alarmism. Will this be a new pattern before Copenhagen?
2008 to be 10th hottest year: warming trend up, or stalling?
This year is set to be about the 10th warmest since records began in the 19th century, according to Phil Jones, a leading British climate scientist — see story here.
But does that confirm a long-term trend of global warming, stoked by human emissions of greenhouse gases, or show that it has stalled? The warmest year on record is now a while ago, in 1998.
Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, has no doubt that the underlying trend is still up — 1998 was an unusual year when global temperatures were boosted by an El Nino weather event in the Pacific Ocean. And this year, the opposite La Nina effect is cooling the planet.
(Among signs of a cooler 2008, some high Alpine ski resorts in Switzerland have opened early…)
And Jones says that the world’s thermometers may also be underestimating temperature rises because the Arctic — visibly warming since summer ice shrank in 2007 to the smallest since satellite measurements began in the 1970s – is pretty much excluded. That’s because there’s a lack of records from 1961-90, the benchmark years for judging current global warming, because ships didn’t go there.
But Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist who leads ICECAP (International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project), wrote in a comment that ”flawed science and bad siting” of thermometers often mean a bias towards warmer readings. He says that 2008 might only be in the top 20 or 30 years.
ICECAP says it is that it is worried that “the sole focus on greenhouse gases and the unwise reliance on imperfect climate models while ignoring real data may leave civilisation unprepared for a sudden climate shift that history tells us will occur again, very possibly soon”.
Hello – just look at the weather this week – global warming is a fear fed by false prophets. Humans are just not powerful enough to affect the worlds weather. Making political and financial decisions based on this nonsense will cost each of us dearly. The same set of scientists who raise the fear of “Global Cooling” in the 1970′s are now trying to sell us “Global Warming”. Wake-up people – look outside – it is COLD with more snow and ice than we have seen in decades!!
Here’s what I don’t understand: what is the point of the alleged global warming hoax? What do advocates have to gain from it? What is their motive? Why would thousands of researchers around the world devote decades to inventing data to support this claim if it’s patently untrue from the get-go? Quite simply, these accusations don’t make a shred of sense.