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CSIRO’s horror climate forecast
Lincoln Wright and Meryl Naidoo, Sunday Tasmanian
HEAT waves that kill thousands, gigantic bushfires and regular 100-year storms are part of a frightening new climate change forecast for Australia.
A leaked CSIRO report into the impact of global warming predicts a century of climatic horrors for Tasmania and the rest of Australia. The doomsday scenario will form the basis of the Australian chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the Federal Government’s key stocktake on global warming due for release in April.
The United Nations’ IPCC reports into climate change represent the world’s most up-to-date assessment of how rising global temperatures will change our planet.
The CSIRO report found that extreme fire days will be more common across Australia.
The report predicts Tasmania and Victoria’s east coast will be battered with massive 100-year storms, adding to beach erosion and the destruction of coastal properties.
Eucalypt forests will start to disappear, along with the delicate habitat necessary to sustain Australia’s native animals.
Human lives in bigger cities will come under increasing threat, with the annual death toll from heat waves expected to reach 1300.
And refugees from Pacific Islands submerged by water will flock into the country.
(11 Feb 2007)
Reports on global warming lag behind the science
Peter N. Spotts, The Christian Science Monitor
The newest UN-sponsored assessment left out research that suggests more dire climate change.
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When Rep. Bart Gordon gavels the House Science and Technology Committee to order Thursday morning, it will mark Congress’s first hearings on the latest United Nations-sponsored report on global warming.
But even before several authors of the prestigious report discuss its findings, other authors say the process is too slow.
The problem: Climate science is moving too quickly for the ponderous reporting system to keep up, they argue. Besides receiving a written consensus once every six years, policymakers need some form of interim report to keep abreast of the science of global warming and make important decisions, they add.
“Some of us believe that going to some updates, especially as the science is changing very rapidly, might be a very good tack to take,” says Linda Mearns, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and one of 15 lead authors on the chapter dealing with projections of global warming’s regional effects.
(7 Feb 2007)
You’re Getting Warmer …The new statistical rhetoric of climate change
Daniel Engber, Slate
… A report from the United Nations’ blue-ribbon international panel of climatologists declared global warming an “unequivocal” fact, “very likely” caused by human activity.
This upgrades the panel’s previous assessment from 2001, which tagged our poor behavior as the “likely” culprit. The words are selected to correspond to precise numerical assessments of our guilt. Six years ago, the authors calculated a 66 percent chance that we were behind the recent warming trend; today they peg it at more than 90 percent. (At one point, they proposed going as high as 99 percent.)
This quantification of doubt is relatively new. For years, climate-change scientists relied on verbal expressions of chance instead of statistical ranges: Effects were “probable” or “possible”; they “could” or “might” be true. As a result, their language of uncertainty was easy to misinterpret, politicians threw up their hands, and skeptics seized on ambiguous phrases to argue that the science of climate change was based more on estimation than fact. But 10 years’ worth of new data have emboldened the researchers, and now they’ve replaced their hazy equivocations with percentage values. This shift in rhetoric-at base, from words to numbers-has made their conclusions more comprehensible and compelling. It’s also made them less honest.
(6 Feb 2007)
The discussion is interesting, but the framing used by Engber is disingenuous. Calling the IPCC’s change in terminology “less honest” just takes my breath away. -BA
Rising to the Climate Challenge
Kim Teplitzky, wiretap via Znet
Nearly 600 coordinated campus actions — from photo petitions to winter “beach parties” — marked the largest week of climate action yet.
Last week, students across the United States and Canada put on polar bear costumes, jumped on their bikes, chalked their campuses, threw beach parties, staged cross campus “energy wars” and packed university auditoriums with students, administrators and community members as part of the largest coordinated climate week of action in North America yet.
The Campus Climate Challenge Week of Action (Jan. 29 to Feb. 2) included over 580 student groups on campuses all over the nation. The week, which was titled “Rising to the Climate Challenge: Visions of Our Future,” was the seventh and largest coordinated collective action hosted by the North American Youth Climate Coalition over the past three years.
“For the first time, people are realizing climate change is a human issue, not just an environmental issue,” said University of Washington sophomore Christina Billingsley, who also helped organize the Northwest Climate Justice Summit last weekend in Seattle. “People are finally realizing the direct impact it has on their lives,” she added.
(10 Feb 2007)
Related from Znet: Activists ‘Step Up’ Challenge to Climate Change
