The former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says global average temperatures could reach 5°C above their pre-industrial level.
LONDON, 14 February – The world has missed the chance to keep greenhouse gas emissions below the level needed to prevent the temperature climbing above 2°C, according to the British scientist who used to chair the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The scientist, Professor Sir Robert Watson, chaired the Panel from 1997 until 2002, when he was ousted after US pressure for his removal.
Professor Watson says there is a 50-50 chance of preventing global average temperatures rising more than 3°C above their level at the start of the industrial age, but a 5°C rise is possible. That would mean the Earth warming more than it has since the end of the last Ice Age.
He was speaking at a symposium, Preventing global non-communicable diseases through low-carbon development, held at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
He said: “All the promises in the world, which we’re not likely to realise anyway, will not give us a world with only a 2°C rise. All the evidence, in my opinion, suggests we’re on our way to a 3°C to 5°C world.
The other day I noticed Peter Gleick was "name calling" (climate deniers) on Twitter, so I approched him on the topic of how much "man made" co2 there is...after his reply I was going to use words like "arrogant" and a few others, instead I thought I would just use a calculator (see below)
ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano has been called "the Matt Drudge of climate denial," the "king of the skeptics," and "a central cell of the climate-denial machine," and he revels in these descriptions. Although he has no scientific expertise, he is adamant that manmade global warming is a "con job" based on "subprime science." Morano gained prominence working for two of the most vocal climate deniers in the U.S.: Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who notoriously called climate change "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," and Rush Limbaugh, who we named Climate Change Misinformer of the Year in 2011 for his steadfast denial of climate science and wild conspiracy theories about the climate change "hoax."
These days Morano is paid by an industry-funded group to run the climate denial website ClimateDepot.com. At Climate Depot, Morano serves as the de facto research department for the right-wing media's attacks on climate science, and mobilizes his readers to target individual scientists and reporters for telling the public about climate change threats. The site was instrumental in manufacturing the 2009 "Climategate" controversy, which Morano incorrectly claimed exposed "deliberate manipulation of facts and data" by climate scientists. Morano is a darling of the organization most committed to climate denial, the Heartland Institute. He regularly speaks at their conferences and defended their controversial billboard comparing those who accept climate science to "murderers, tyrants, and madmen" including the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
Following the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy, Chris Matthews laid into individuals—including politicians and major funders—who deny climate change theories.
Matthews spoke to Professor Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University and Rep. Ed Markey about Republican politicians who do not take environmental reform issues seriously. Markey said that Hurricane Sandy "frames the election next Tuesday," which comes down to "Mother Nature vs. the Koch brothers."
When the economy is suffering, no one wants to hear about an impending environmental catastrophe.
Was it really just six years ago when a documentary about climate change -- Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth -- could draw $24 million at the U.S. box office? That was back when the words "housing bubble" were just entering the average American's lexicon, back before the liquidation of Lehman Brothers, back when we would voluntarily fork over cash to sit in a dark room while a former vice president told us that we're all boiling ourselves to death.
There was, for a brief period then, a sort of optimism about what the United States could accomplish on climate change. President George W. Bush, already on his way out the door in April 2008, affirmed that human activity was causing global warming and vowed that the "ingenuity and enterprise of the American people" would help us overcome it. Barack Obama won the White House later that year with the promise that the next four years would be remembered as the time "when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal" (a pledge that became a punch line for his Republican challenger this time around).
Since then, the United States has failed to do anything significant about climate change. The issue has disappeared from the national radar, even as the scientific evidence has piled up. Political leaders no longer care about it, outside the occasional obligatory mention, in large part because voters don't either. Internationally, the situation isn't much better. Despite all the hype about the 2009 United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, there's still no binding international accord that sets emission limits for both the United States and China. And this past June, a conference held on the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit -- billed as a "once-in-a-generation chance" to set out a vision for a sustainable future -- was similarly disappointing, concluding with a flimsy political statement.
There have been several of these "How to argue with a climate sceptic" articles, but this one takes the view that only "climate scientists" have the answer and therefore they know best. James could not have understood or read the emails regarding "climategate" to think "climate scientists" have all the answers and indeed there is no mention of "climategate" in this essay. Here is an extract as to what he wants business leaders to say to us, thats assuming ALL business leaders share HIS views, and yes James also reverts to name calling, this time we are "climate reckless".
James Murray argues business leaders must step up to the mark and start pushing back against "climate reckless" arguments.
....."Climate recklessness"
The next step is to properly name the problem. As numerous commentators have pointed out climate scepticism is a completely inadequate term. All proper climate scientists are climate sceptics, taking a sceptical, dispassionate, and questioning approach to the evidence in front of them and then drawing conclusions from that evidence. "Climate sceptics" are not proper sceptics. Moreover, the term has been made doubly problematic by the shift in climate sceptic arguments from questioning climate science to questioning the efficacy and cost effectiveness of green technologies and policies.
Another day, another name! This time were so bad we are "worse" then "deniers" were......"saboteurs"..Doug if you read this you may want to let us know why the so called "science" of AGW is supported by Politics and NOT by real time observations.
Some of us are awake. Some of us are asleep. It is that simple. Those of us trying to educate our fellow citizens about global climate change are no one special. We are just people who see and cannot look away. We understand. We know the truth. And we love our children or feel a moral obligation to others beyond ourselves. We've studied the science and have grasped the obvious. We cannot rest even though deep down we fear it might not matter in the end. We have to do this. We must. We have no choice.
Calling the deniers by the name deniers is too kind. A better name would be saboteurs. A saboteur is someone who engages in sabotage. "Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening another entity through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction."
The saboteurs have one aim. Delay. They pretend to participate in this process in good faith but they cannot be trusted. Nothing they say can be believed. They offer us nothing. They come in the name of science but they deliberately deceive. They are the enemies of the Earth, our children, their own children, future generations, the poor and non-human life.
You may have noticed that I have started to take note of the so called "scientific" Journals and Newspapers who have reverted to what is best described as "name calling" when they descibe people who dont agree with "man made" climate change.
This issue has become so rife that even the President of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, resorts to "name calling" by using the word "denialists" as if it's an OK thing to do. How can you debate with, or have any respect for people who do that, what thay are doing in effect, is making sure they are taking a moral high ground.
The "D" word to throw back at them is "Disempower".
Whenever people are faced with "name calling", as if what you have to say is unworthy.......you should make it clear that they are trying to disempower you, they are trying to take a moral high ground by depriving you of power or influence in order to make their point. In this respect their argument of the science being settled and therefore not open to debate is a "straw man". Science has to stand up to debate and skepticism, and "man made" climate change is no differant, what we ALL need is DEBATE.
The President of the Royal Society can be seen to try and Disempower people with their views on "man made" climate change with the following article in the New York Times with name calling.
With an El Niño on the way, 2013 could be the warmest year on record. But the climate-denial machine will keep on churning
IT HAS been another "normal" global-warming summer in the northern hemisphere. The US sweltered in the hottest July on record, following the hottest spring on record. More than 60 per cent of the contiguous US is suffering from drought, as are parts of eastern Europe and India. In the Arctic, sea ice cover is at a record low and the Greenland ice sheet shows what the US National Snow and Ice Data Center calls "extraordinary high melting". Global land temperatures for May and June were the hottest since records began in the 19th century.
Meanwhile, El Niño conditions are forecast to develop in the tropical Pacific Ocean, warming up ocean surface temperatures. Some observers have predicted that this will lead to record-breaking global temperatures next year.
If El Niño does arrive and temperature records are broken, there will inevitably be much discussion of the causes of the warming. So now is a good time to sort signal from noise in the global temperature records.
Climate change heretics rarely have a science background, but editors are still happy to air their views.
No one would want a novelist to perform brain surgery with her biro. No one would want a man with a PhD in political science to then write textbooks claiming that those misadventures are best medical practice.
Society understands the architecture of academia and knows there are relevant qualifications in different fields, and the media accepts the idea of specialisations and accords greater respect to those with greater expertise. With one exception: climate science.
When it comes to this academic discipline, it seems that if you are a specialist in public sector food-poisoning surveillance or possess a zoology doctorate on sexual selection in pheasants, editors will seek your contrarian views more avidly than if you have qualifications in climate science and a lifetime's professional expertise. The press is further littered with climate "heretics" almost all of whom have academic backgrounds in history, literature, and the classics with a diploma in media studies. (All these examples are true.) One botanist trying to argue that glaciers were advancing took his data (described as simply false by the World Glacier Monitoring Service) from a former architect.
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ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano has been called "the Matt Drudge of climate denial," the "king of the skeptics," and "a central cell of the climate-denial machine," and he revels in these descriptions. Although he has no scientific expertise, he is adamant that manmade global warming is a "con job" based on "subprime science." Morano gained prominence working for two of the most vocal climate deniers in the U.S.: Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who notoriously called climate change "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," and Rush Limbaugh, who we named Climate Change Misinformer of the Year in 2011 for his steadfast denial of climate science and wild conspiracy theories about the climate change "hoax."
(Image: Andrzej Krauze)
Climate change heretics rarely have a science background, but editors are still happy to air their views.
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