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The economic impact of global warming has been grossly underestimated and scientists must warn that inaction will spell disaster says top economist and climate change expert Nicholas Stern.
Stern told 2,000 climate scientists meeting in Copenhagen that they had failed to clearly tell humanity what it faces if global temperatures reach the upper range of forecasts made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).
“There has been lots of scientific information on 2.0 and 3.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 and 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), but you have to tell people loudly and clearly just how difficult 4.0 or 5.0 would be,” he said.
New findings show that these projections were vastly understated, scientists here said…
Stern, whose 2006 Stern Review has become the benchmark for calculating the economic cost of tackling climate change, conceded that his report had also fallen short in assessing the potential consequences of global warming…
Katherine Richardson, head of the Danish government’s Commission on Climate Change Policy and a co-organiser of the meeting, agreed that scientists had not done a perfect job in getting the message out.
“Most of us have been trained as scientists to not get our hands dirty by talking to politicians. But we now realise that what we are dealing with is so complicated and urgent that we have to help to make sure the results are understood,” she told AFP.
Of course, college basketball may demand more of your attention, eh?
OK, it appears I was wrong about 10000 years, and that 1000 is the right number. Going back 600 years, the statement is probably valid because of the medieval warm period.
However, that still debunks the hockey stick, because it’s not the conclusion alone that has to stand but the methodology and the totality of the graph. If instead of looking like a hockey stick, the graph had gone up and down, gradually going higher, it wouldn’t mean much, and it wouldn’t look like a hockey stick. And this part was debunked by the review panel, they gave little confidence in supporting it on a smaller time scale. They only accepted with high degree of confidence that this is the warmest period in 400 years. They are not willing to support the hockey stick idea.
As for the math, you can look it up yourself. There are some good explanations at Watts Up With That if you want to learn. You feed in random noise, and you end up with a hockey stick. They’ve done fix after fix and made various claims about how the critiquers got it wrong, but in the end the IPCC dropped it from their latest report.
A good layman’s review of the various critiques and counter critiques.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
Strangely this paper says the hockey stick IS in the IPCC report. I’ve never seen it, and you’ve never mentioned it either.
#82 – MikeN,
Interesting write-up. I’m surprised they mentioned neither the National Research Council nor the Wegman report.
Anyway, without a hockey stick, here’s a nice long graph, going back about 540 million years. It does not, of course, resemble a hockey stick at that scale.
http://tinyurl.com/geotemp
However, you may note that during human civilization, temperature has indeed been relatively constant. The little ice age and medieval warm periods are barely noticeable. And, today is warmer than the medieval warm period.
You will also notice that there are a few brief slightly warmer periods than today in the last 500,000 years. However, to get significantly warmer than now requires going back 20 million years, when it was about 3 degrees warmer than today.
This is important. To get 5 degrees warmer than today, a temperature well within the range of estimates for global warming, you must go back about 50 million years. As it was cooling from 55 million years ago, life began to come back from the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.
This is even more important.
Life did not begin to come back until the earth cooled quite a bit. 10 million years after the cometary impact at Chixulub, the comet could no longer be blamed for the lack of life. A warm earth can though.
Many extinctions on earth correlate with warm periods, most notably the biggest extinction of them all 250 million years ago. It was 6 degrees warmer than today at that time.
MikeN,
If you are really interested in climate change, I would strongly suggest reading The Weather Makers.
If you are interested in extinctions, I would suggest Under A Green Sky.
I don’t know if you have the level of interest required to read full length books on the subjects. They are both written for an educated general audience.