Saturday, December 27, 2008

Conventional Wisdom Update on Climate Change

link via TalkingPointsMemo
Could the time for Happy Talk be drawing for a close? It seems like sections of the government are forgetting Shrub is still president. One of my prospective brothers-in-law was saying the other day that Bush 43 had been a disastrous president -- it always makes me anxious to hear the President being spoken of in the past tense. He's still there, doing terrible things, and to forget that renders us blind to the danger.

Anyway, the USGS, who you'd think would be out trying to find kleptocrats to turn over mining rights to (just kidding, I know that's the Bureau of Land Management,) released a study announcing climate change was happening faster than they'd previously been willing to admit.

Are you ready for what the Federal Government now believes? This is from the [PDF] executive summary:

Based on an assessment of the published scientific literature, the primary conclusions presented in this report are:

• Recent rapid changes at the edges of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show acceleration of flow and thinning, with the velocity of some glaciers increasing more than twofold.... Inclusion of these processes in models will likely lead to sea-level projections for the end of the 21st century that substantially exceed the projections presented in the IPCC AR4 report (0.28 ± 0.10 m to 0.42 ± 0.16 m rise)....

• [S]ubtropical aridity is likely to intensify and persist due to future greenhouse warming. This projected drying extends poleward into the United States Southwest, potentially increasing the likelihood of severe and persistent drought there in the future...

• The strength of the [northward flow of warm, salty water in the upper layers of the Atlantic, and the southward flow of colder water in the deep Atlantic, {which} plays an important role in the oceanic transport of heat from low to high latitudes.] will decrease over the course of the 21st century in response to increasing greenhouse gases, with a best estimate decrease of 25-30%.... [RFM: this means the lower latitudes will heat up much faster than the upper latitudes, and New York City, to choose a place at random, may even get colder for some time.]

• A... doubling of northern high latitudes CH4 emissions[RFM:, a much more intense greenhouse gas that Carbon Dioxide,] could be realized fairly easily. However, since these models do not realistically represent all the processes thought to be relevant to future northern high-latitude CH4 emissions, much larger (or smaller) increases cannot be discounted.

So, there you are. The main point here is that scientists continue to discount the impending global tsunamis predicted by this blog. They laughed at me! I should build a giant robot, or something.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"0.28 ± 0.10 m to 0.42 ± 0.16 m rise"

So is that like 0.18 to 0.58 m? Those climate scientists, always dreaming up odd ways to express uncertainty ("the balance of evidence suggests....")

But no doubt you will be vindicated once NYC is submerged by sea ice in the coming decade. In the meantime, those scientists can just continue to laugh.