Interesting – the IPCC’s “worst-case” scenarios are being revised to less doomsday predictions. The worst-case scenario today looks 50% better than yesterday, and that’s among the governmental types sounding the global-warming sirens, not the skeptics – I wonder how this affects Al Gore’s movie?
[i]The world’s top climate scientists have cut their worst-case forecast for global warming over the next 100 years.
A draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained exclusively by The Weekend Australian, offers a more certain projection of climate change than the body’s forecasts five years ago.
For the first time, scientists are confident enough to project a 3C rise on the average global daily temperature by the end of this century if no action is taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The Draft Fourth Assessment Report says the temperature increase could be contained to 2C by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are held at current levels.
In 2001, the scientists predicted temperature rises of between 1.4C and 5.8C on current levels by 2100, but better science has led them to adjust this to a narrower band of between 2C and 4.5C.
The new projections put paid to some of the more alarmist scenarios raised by previous modelling, which have suggested that sea levels could rise by almost 1m over the same period.
The report projects a rise in sea levels by century’s end of between 14cm and 43cm, with further rises expected in following centuries caused by melting polar ice.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Interesting – the IPCC’s “worst-case” scenarios are being revised to less doomsday predictions. The worst-case scenario today looks 50% better than yesterday, and that’s among the governmental types sounding the global-warming sirens, not the skeptics – I wonder how this affects Al Gore’s movie?
[…]
The report projects a rise in sea levels by century’s end of between 14cm and 43cm, with further rises expected in following centuries caused by melting polar ice. [/quote]
I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it: we’re talking about a Chaotic System here; your guess is as good as mine, or Al Gore’s, or any scientists’ for that matter. Anyone that claims to be able to forecast with any degree of certainty what’s really going to happen is simply full of shit. We’ll only really know when it happens. Simple as that.
The thing is, telling people that we shouldn’t play with what we don’t understand is, well, hopeless. Any parent or educator knows that. I could turn blue explaining all the reasons why we really should stop screwing with our environment, and why I moved to a solar and wind-powered home and now use the train to go to Stanford every day, but most people wouldn’t get it. They can’t see past their bellybuttons, much less past their futures and their children’s. They would start clamoring about how expensive it is and how much like cattle cars public transit is, rather than understanding that the fact that we don’t know the consequences of our actions makes them all the MORE, not less, dangerous.
So we use FUD. Parents do it. Salesmen do it. Politicians do it. Everybody does it.
Complaining about Al Gore playing the FUD card is a spectacular case of intellectual dishonesty from anyone who has ever voted for the GOP – the greatest user of the FUD card of all times. If anything has put or kept the GOP in power for any amount of time, it has been FUD. So Al Gore and other ecologists are using the same technique for the greater good. Oh, the horror. Shame on them! They should resort to ineffective techniques that only work with the 1% of the population that is able to comprehend concepts that take more than 5 seconds to explain, and make their mind up on their own!