Samhain
DP Veteran
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Dialing Back the Alarm on Climate Change - WSJ.com
The new IPCC report appears to be walking back how much they expect climate change will affect the planet. The "Likely" amount of warming will be around 1C over the next hundred years, which experts believe will result in "no economic or ecological damage".
It sounds as if the majority of the climate models overstated.
The new IPCC report appears to be walking back how much they expect climate change will affect the planet. The "Likely" amount of warming will be around 1C over the next hundred years, which experts believe will result in "no economic or ecological damage".
It sounds as if the majority of the climate models overstated.
I have had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document. The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPPC thought in 2007.
Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet.
Two recent papers (one in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society, the other in the journal Earth System Dynamics) estimate that TCR is probably around 1.65 degrees Celsius. That's uncannily close to the estimate of 1.67 degrees reached in 1938 by Guy Callendar, a British engineer and pioneer student of the greenhouse effect. A Canadian mathematician and blogger named Steve McIntyre has pointed out that Callendar's model does a better job of forecasting the temperature of the world between 1938 and now than do modern models that "hindcast" the same data.