Hundreds of leading scientists warned Thursday that global warming is accelerating beyond the worst predictions and threatening to trigger "irreversible" climate shifts on the planet. Saying there's no excuse for inaction, the nearly 2,000 climate researchers meeting in Copenhagen urged policy-makers to "vigorously" implement the economic and technological tools available to cut emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
Their stark message came at the end of a three-day conference aimed at updating the findings of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change before U.N. talks in December on a new global climate treaty. "The worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized," the scientists said in a statement. "There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts."
The climate change panel predicted a sea level rise of 7 to 23 inches by the end of the century, which could flood low-lying areas and force millions to flee. But more recent research presented at the conference suggested that melting glaciers and ice sheets could help push the sea level up at least 20 inches, and possibly as much as 39 inches, or about 1 meter.
"Recent observations show that societies are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change with poor nations and communities particularly at risk," the statement said. It noted that policy-makers already have a range of tools to mitigate global warming. "But they must be vigorously and widely implemented to achieve the societal transformation required to de-carbonize economies," it said. The conclusions of the congress will be presented to politicians when they meet in Copenhagen in December to discuss a new global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
"We know from scientific evidence that climate change is a reality and that climate change will have damaging effects on the economy all over the world," said Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, one of the politicians attending the scientific conference. "Therefore we need an agreement and we need an agreement this year. Earlier Thursday, British economist Nicholas Stern, the author of a major British government report detailing the cost of climate change, told the conference that the global recession presents an opportunity to build a more energy-efficient economy.
"Coming out of this we have got to lay the foundations for a low-carbon growth, which is going to be like the railways, like the electricity, like the motorcars, this is going to be over the next two, three decades the big driver in investment," Stern said. Stern said green investments make sense because energy-efficient economies will be more sustainable in the future. "We know from this crisis that if we postpone looking risk in the face, it will bite us much more deeply," he said."
Joe's Commentary
Nothing but total fabrication. See here how both the CO2 acceleration and temperature changes are far below the lowest of the scenarios from the IPCC. Sea levels have slowed or stopped in their rising that has been ongoing since the last ice age. The antarctic ice reached a new record in 2008 and is above normal this year. The summer 2008 arctic ice was 9% greater than in 2007 and was among the high end of the winter years this decade this winter. This is clearly scientific fraud. The "2500 of the worlds leading scientiists early presented has become hundreds of leading scientists trying to outdo each other for the biggest newsbreaking lie. Even the new 2000 number is a fabrication, probably including wives, drooling reporters and maybe wait staff at the hotel." The AP and the science have fallen so low it is unimaginable.
SPPI's Monthly CO2 Report shows that throughout the eight years of George Bush's presidency there has been a downtrend in global temperature at a rate equivalent to 2 F (1.1 C) per century. See how it is far below even the lowest IPCC projection.
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Since Al Gore's climate movie An Inconvenient Truth was launched in January 2005, global cooling has occurred at the equivalent of 11 F (6 C) per century. If this very rapid cooling were to continue, the Earth would be in an Ice Age by 2100.
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The UN's climate panel, the IPCC, had projected temperature increases at 4.5 to 9.5 F (2.4 to 5.3 C) per century, with a central estimate of 7 F (3.9 C) per century. None of the IPCC's computer models had predicted a prolonged cooling.
The IPCC's estimates of growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration are excessive. They assume CO2 concentration will rise exponentially from today's 385 parts per million to reach 730 to 1020 ppm, central estimate 836 ppm, by 2100. However, during President Bush's eight-year term, CO2 concentration rose in a straight line towards just 575 ppmv by 2100. This alone halves the IPCC's temperature projections.
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And finally the fingerprint of the greenhouse effect is warm air in the middle to high atmosphere. The NIPCC report shows that is not there and thus the models these 'scientists' are basing their projections on are falsified.
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Figure 6: Model-calculated zonal mean atmospheric temperature change from 1890 to 1999 (degrees C per century) as simulated by climate models from [A] well-mixed greenhouse gases, [B] sulfate aerosols (direct effects only), [C] stratospheric and tropospheric ozone, [D] volcanic aerosols, [E] solar irradiance, and [F] all forcings [U.S. Climate Change Science Program 2006, p. 25]. Note the pronounced increase in warming trend with altitude in figures A and F as a 'fingerprint' of greenhouse forcing.
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