Chris Mooney reports in MoJo:
Even though more than a month remains until an official release, Reuters is now reporting on a leaked draft of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report . The report, the first in six years by the international body, is considered the definitive scientific take on climate change (although it is sometimes faulted for being too conservative, and quickly becomes out of date).
Previous IPCC reports have made news for a variety of reasons. The 2001 report, for instance, declared it “likely” (e.g., a 66 percent probability; explanation here) that most of the observed warming that the planet has seen is caused by humans. The 2007 report upped that assessment to “very likely” (a 90 percent probability); and now, according to Reuters, scientists are giving us a 95 percent confidence in this central conclusion of modern climate research. That appears to be the chief headline that will be emerging from the IPCC this time around.
Another bombshell reportedly contained in the draft: The IPCC will now label the phenomenon of sea level rise “unequivocal” and increase prior estimates of projected sea level during this century.
Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that. The report also acknowledged that the pace of global warming has slowed down recently. We can expect denialists to latch onto that. (Skeptical Science addresses that here .)
The Guardian reports:
Some items are worse than we thought. In the last report, ice loss, particularly from Greenland, was a minor issue. Now, it is clear that not only Greenland, but also Antarctica are melting and this melt is raising sea levels. Furthermore, Arctic sea ice is being lost faster than previously reported.
<snip>
How does this square with my title? One continuing question is, how much and how fast will the climate change. Are we going to be in a “slow simmer” or a “fast boil”? The answer to this question rests on how sensitive the climate is. If the climate is not very sensitive, it means the Earth’s temperature will change more slowly. A more sensitive Earth will have a more rapid temperature change.
There is some belief that the IPCC will lower the range of climate sensitivity by a tiny amount. If my crystal ball is correct, the denialosphere will latch onto this, and will, unwittingly, be agreeing that the IPCC is correct; we are changing the climate. You cannot both accept the IPCC conclusions that humans are changing the climate and simultaneously claim that climate change is either not occurring or is natural. In the end, the contrarians will be in the “slow simmer” camp. So listen carefully to the Christopher Moncktons, James Inhofes, and Rush Limbaughs of this world. Wait for them to bring up the IPCC sensitivity and realize just how much they have conceded.
So – does anybody still want to claim global warming isn’t happening, or that humans are not causing it? The gauntlet is down.
I’m happy that this is a UN report and not some internal Congressional study that the dimwits in the GOP can order sealed
XT
August 23, 2013, 9:28pm
3
If people didn’t believe it when it was a 90% confidence then they aren’t going to suddenly see the light now. A lot of people distrust the UN, and don’t believe the IPCC about this stuff, and I don’t see that changing for most of the disbelievers just because the IPCC has put out a new, updated report.
I’m not particularly interested in debating the merits of the global warming science (I, and something like 66% of the rest of the country, just don’t give a shit - cite ) I do, however, want to point out that the skeptics’ argument goes more like this:
the climate models that predict substantial future warming are failing miserably to replicate real-world temperatures. Even top scientists with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such as lead author Hans von Storch in a recent interview with der Spiegel, concede IPCC’s climate models cannot explain the 15-year pause in global warming …
Basically, the climate scientists were wrong. Why should we believe anything they claim to “know” now?
HurricaneDitka:
I’m not particularly interested in debating the merits of the global warming science (I, and something like 66% of the rest of the country, just don’t give a shit - cite ) I do, however, want to point out that the skeptics’ argument goes more like this:
Because that’s how science works?
How? You make a prediction, are wrong about it, and we’re just supposed to believe your next prediction? That doesn’t sound quite right …
The actual poll reports that the numbers are: 33% of Americans worry about global warming “a great deal,” 25% worry “a fair amount,”
To say that they (and there is still 20% more that worry “a little”) reporting that “they do not give a shit” just tells me that we should trust what you are posting.
HurricaneDitka:
I do, however, want to point out that the skeptics’ argument goes more like this:
Basically, the climate scientists were wrong. Why should we believe anything they claim to “know” now?
Because in reality the report there is misleading, the actual scientists reported several years ago that “pauses” in the surface warming were expected, (in reality most of the warming is going to the oceans, still a huge increase due to human activities and the warning is that eventually that heat will manifest in other unsavory effects, like the melting of the ice and ocean rise) your sources are indeed lying by omission and continue to mislead most of the conservative Americans.
http://climatecrocks.com/2009/10/06/birth-of-a-crock/
Check the cite, the scientists were not wrong, your sources are indeed lying by omission to you.
The trouble is, you’re misinformed about the basic facts of the issue. Your position is the result of believing this misinformation.
And then one has to notice that Models are not the only thing that is used by the scientists to give us a warning:
Skeptics argue that we should wait till climate models are completely certain before we act on reducing CO2 emissions. If we waited for 100% certainty, we would never act. Models are in a constant state of development to include more processes, rely on fewer approximations and increase their resolution as computer power develops. The complex and non-linear nature of climate means there will always be a process of refinement and improvement. The main point is we now know enough to act. Models have evolved to the point where they successfully predict long-term trends and are now developing the ability to predict more chaotic, short-term changes. Multiple lines of evidence, both modeled and empirical, tell us global temperatures will change 3°C with a doubling of CO2 (Knutti & Hegerl 2008).
Models don’t need to be exact in every respect to give us an accurate overall trend and its major effects - and we have that now. If you knew there were a 90% chance you’d be in a car crash, you wouldn’t get in the car (or at the very least, you’d wear a seatbelt). The IPCC concludes, with a greater than 90% probability, that humans are causing global warming. To wait for 100% certainty before acting is recklessly irresponsible.
Did not have a chance to correct on edit, I meant to say that:
To say that the American people (and there is still 20% more that worry “a little”) report that “they do not give a shit” is just telling me that we should **not **trust what you are posting HurricaneDitka .
You’ve managed to pique my curiousity.
Did the expectation of “pauses” in the surface warming manage to find their way into the first IPCC study? If so, where?
Who’s measuring ocean temperature? How are they measuring it? Where can I review their data?
No doubt, but I daresay the UN enjoys a higher trust-level than Congress does now .
I think human-caused global warming is real, but I think it will be actually beneficial to some regions and economic sectors. The negative effects, we can deal with as they come.
As for a massive reduction in emissions, many scientists say it is too late to stop or even curb the process that way; and in any event, that is not going to happen. So we may as well set that aside and focus on other matters. Personally, I have always felt that CO2 Is the wrong kind of pollution to focus on. After all, it is not poisonous. More worrisome is the air in Beijing for instance where it is thick and smoggy and makes you cough and your eyes burn and makes you sick. Same in many parts of Texas for that matter.
Not sure right now where on the IPCC, but one of the mayor contributors of the IPCC is Latif himself, yes, the same scientist that was misrepresented by the right wing media when he mentioned the pauses and rapid increases that follow back in 2009 (so yeah, once the cycles that are masking the surface warming change, then you will see the denier media missing in action and telling you with a straight face that they were not deniers).
As we have discussed many times at Skeptical Science, although the warming of global surface air temperatures has slowed over the past decade due to a preponderance of La Niña events, the rate of heat accumulation on Earth has not slowed at all. In...
The links to the reports and science are in blue, one of the main ones is discussed here:
In science, theories discredited by data are discarded, or refined to fit the new data. That’s how science works.
From RationalWiki’s page on the film The Great Global Warming Swindle:
Hey, remember global cooling? Science was wrong back then, so obviously it’s wrong now! Some scientists did argue for “global cooling” back in the '70s, but there never was a consensus and proponents of the hypothesis called for further research, not widespread political action. The primary hyping came from “pop science” publications (i.e. Science News rather than Science). The serious scientists who did argue for it based their theory on a) the cooling effects of ever-increasing amounts of aerosols (which, as we may recall from the “1940-1970 cooling” point above, caused significant cooling during the middle of the century), or b) the natural cycles of glaciation which would lead to an ice age in the next 20,000 years. Point (a) was avoided by clean air acts reducing aerosol production (in other words, a victory for environmentalism), and point (b) obviously has nothing to do with imminent global cooling. Deniers conveniently forget to mention either of these things. In addition to that, the majority of papers published in the 1970s (when the “cooling” phenomenon was hyped) were actually predicting warming.[15][16]
And from the page Science was wrong before:
Missing the point
The logic behind this “argument” is fallacious in a number of ways. Primarily it misrepresents how science actually works by forcing it into a binary conception of “right” and “wrong”. To describe outdated or discredited theories as “wrong” misses a major subtlety in science: discarded theories aren’t really wrong, they just fail to explain new evidence, and more often than not the new theory to come along is exactly the same as the old one but with some extensions, caveats or alternatives. Often enough, these “new” theories are already in existence and just waiting in the wings ready for new evidence to come along and differentiate them. For example, the fact that quantum theory doesn’t explain gravity does not invalidate the Schrödinger equation or the quantisation of energy, it merely says that the current formulation of the theory is incomplete and there are modifications to quantum theory already being formulated, ready for when the next big leap in observational evidence occurs.
The fact that science can be “wrong” in this way is a feature, not a bug, as one of the differences between science and pseudoscience is that science is self-correcting whereas pseudoscience continues to put forth the same debunked points over and over again. These pseudoscientists present “science” as a monolithic entity with no difference between different types of science and the uncertainties associated with each field. For example, an economic study of the minimum wage that uses the scientific method cannot be replicated as easily as, say, a basic chemistry experiment that can be repeated in a lab - like finding the boiling point of a chemical. Thus, the economic study may not be “wrong,” but has a lower degree of certainty attached to it than the chemistry experiment. Inability to make this distinction is often the result of the failure to think in a Bayesian fashion, in which the subtleties of errors are more accurately appreciated. Thus the “science was wrong before” argument it conflates different types of errors within science, confusing incompleteness of theories with being outright wrong. This, as Isaac Asimov called it in his essay The Relativity of Wrong, [2], is a form of being wronger than wrong.
SlackerInc:
I think human-caused global warming is real, but I think it will be actually beneficial to some regions and economic sectors. The negative effects, we can deal with as they come.
As for a massive reduction in emissions, many scientists say it is too late to stop or even curb the process that way; and in any event, that is not going to happen. So we may as well set that aside and focus on other matters. Personally, I have always felt that CO2 Is the wrong kind of pollution to focus on. After all, it is not poisonous. More worrisome is the air in Beijing for instance where it is thick and smoggy and makes you cough and your eyes burn and makes you sick. Same in many parts of Texas for that matter.
:sigh:
CO2 is a pollutant once it reaches the levels that we are seeing now, what you mention here painfully ignores the other evil twin of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere:
Ocean acidification.
<p>Past history shows that when CO2 rose sharply, this corresponded with mass extinctions of coral reefs. Currently, CO2 levels are rising faster than any other time in known history. The change in seawater pH over the 21st Century is projected to be...
BTW that talk also that “it is too late” tells me that the smarter contrarians did not gave you the memo, they assume that we will just see the low end of the heat increases by the end of the century. Of course, it does not matter that that say so contradicts the idea that “it is too late” but never mind, most experts still report that while there no way to stop some of the bad effects that are coming; doing nothing only leads to even more ugly results for our future generations. As economists would tell you, the idea that we just then tell our future generations to deal with it is reckless in the extreme.
My study is just one of many economic studies showing that economic efficiency would point to the need to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions right now, and not to wait for a half-century. Waiting is not only economically costly, but will also make the transition much more costly when it eventually takes place. Current economic studies also suggest that the most efficient policy is to raise the cost of CO2 emissions substantially, either through cap-and-trade or carbon taxes, to provide appropriate incentives for businesses and households to move to low-carbon activities.
One might argue that there are many uncertainties here, and we should wait until the uncertainties are resolved. Yes, there are many uncertainties. That does not imply that action should be delayed. Indeed, my experience in studying this subject for many years is that we have discovered more puzzles and greater uncertainties as researchers dig deeper into the field. There are continuing major questions about the future of the great ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica; the thawing of vast deposits of frozen methane; changes in the circulation patterns of the North Atlantic; the potential for runaway warming; and the impacts of ocean carbonization and acidification. Moreover, our economic models have great difficulties incorporating these major geophysical changes and their impacts in a reliable manner. Policies implemented today serve as a hedge against unsuspected future dangers that suddenly emerge to threaten our economies or environment. So, if anything, the uncertainties would point to a more rather than less forceful policy—and one starting sooner rather than later—to slow climate change.
The group of sixteen scientists argues that we should avoid alarm about climate change. I am equally concerned by those who allege that we will incur economic catastrophes if we take steps to slow climate change. The claim that cap-and-trade legislation or carbon taxes would be ruinous or disastrous to our societies does not stand up to serious economic analysis. We need to approach the issues with a cool head and a warm heart. And with respect for sound logic and good science.
The people who denied global warming in the past were wrong. But here you are believing them again.
SlackerInc:
I think human-caused global warming is real, but I think it will be actually beneficial to some regions and economic sectors. The negative effects, we can deal with as they come.
As for a massive reduction in emissions, many scientists say it is too late to stop or even curb the process that way; and in any event, that is not going to happen. So we may as well set that aside and focus on other matters. Personally, I have always felt that CO2 Is the wrong kind of pollution to focus on. After all, it is not poisonous. More worrisome is the air in Beijing for instance where it is thick and smoggy and makes you cough and your eyes burn and makes you sick. Same in many parts of Texas for that matter.
Hierarchy of Global Warming Denial:
Global warming deniers form a sliding scale of denial which is outlined below - in general these beliefs are designed to prevent action being taken.
1.Not only deny global warming, but insist the opposite is occurring[24] (taken from the Conservapedia homepage). This probably goes beyond denialism and verges on the psychotic.
2.Simply deny global warming is happening[25] - and maintain that no action is necessary - an increasingly uncommon position.
3.Global warming is happening, but it’s not caused by humanity - so we don’t have to do anything.
4.Global warming is happening, and it is in part caused by humanity, but mostly it’s caused by solar activity - so we don’t have to do anything.
**5.Global warming is happening, it is caused by humanity, but it may be a good thing [26] - so we don’t have to do anything. **
6.Global warming is happening, it is caused by humanity, it is a bad thing, but China and India aren’t doing anything - so we don’t have to do anything.
7.Global warming is happening, it is caused by humanity, it is a bad thing, but even if China and India do something it’s too late for us to do anything and it would cost us a shitload of dough - so we don’t have to do anything.
8.(There is an hypothesized eighth step, “Global warming was happening, it was caused by humanity, it is a very bad thing and previous governments should have done something, but it’s too late now!”)
See also Global Warming Denial Bingo. Another version here . The latter has links debunking each denial-claim on the bingo card.