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IEA Sees Dire Future For Climate, Energy Without New Technology
Dow Jones Newswires via Fox business news
The world is headed for a “dire future” where high energy prices drag on economic growth and global average temperatures rise by more than 3.5 Celsius unless significant innovations to lower the cost of clean energy and carbon capture technology, said the International Energy Agency Wednesday.
Speaking at the conclusion of a two-day meeting with international energy ministers and business leaders in Paris, senior officials from the agency painted a gloomy picture of the world’s current trajectory.
The meeting concluded that growth in energy demand will be powered largely by coal and the only hope of restraining the rise in global temperatures to safe levels is to hope that the creation of cheaper technologies to capture carbon dioxide “might eventually allow it to be used in a more environmentally benign manner.”
(19 October 2011)
Global Warming Study Finds No Grounds for Climate Skeptics’ Concerns
Ian Sample, Guardian
Independent investigation of the key issues skeptics claim can skew global warming figures reports that they have no real effect
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Climate sceptics’ criticisms of the evidence for global warming make no difference to the emerging picture of a warming world, according to the most comprehensive, independent review of historical temperature records to date. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, investigated several key issues that sceptics claim can skew global warming figures and found they had no meaningful effect on world temperature trends.
Researchers at the Berkeley Earth project compiled more than a billion temperature records dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world and found that the average global land temperature has risen by around 1C since the mid-1950s.
This figure agrees with the estimate of global warming arrived at by major groups that maintain official records on the world’s climate, including Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, with the University of East Anglia, in the UK.
“My hope is that this will win over those people who are properly sceptical,” Richard Muller, a physicist and head of the Berkeley Earth project, told the Guardian.
“Some people lump the properly sceptical in with the deniers and that makes it easy to dismiss them, because the deniers pay no attention to science. But there have been people out there who have raised legitimate issues,” he said.
(20 October 2011)
Related from The Economist:
A new analysis of the temperature record leaves little room for the doubters. The world is warming.
-BA
When politicians distort science
Robert Socolow, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Republican presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently questioned the science of climate change in ways so unsupported by evidence that Glenn Kessler, the “Fact Checker” columnist at The Washington Post, gave him a rating of “four Pinocchios.” Perry’s is but one scientific misstatement among many that regularly roil the US political scene. What is the proper scientific response to the political distortion — or even outright rejection — of science? In coming weeks, three Bulletin experts will offer authoritative and at times provocative analysis.
– Bulletin of Atomic Scientists editor
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Yes, science is being distorted. But, much more dangerous, it is being rejected.
This roundtable explores “the proper scientific response to the political distortions of science.” Indeed, distortions abound regarding both what science understands and how science is conducted. Of even greater concern, however, is the rejection of the scientific way of knowing — or rather its relegation to the status of just one of many equally valid ways of knowing. If the scientific method loses its place as a privileged way of knowing, the consequences will be devastating. Developing effective responses to the rejection of science, however, will take scientists into unfamiliar territory.
… Rejection. More threatening than the distortion of science, however, is its rejection. At issue is whether the scientific way of knowing is privileged relative to other ways of knowing that are rooted in myth. As scientists, we are poorly prepared to respond when science is called “just a theory,” on a par with other theories. We are distressed when intelligent design and evolution are placed on the same footing. We consider it self-evident that better climate science will help in sorting out threats to human well-being from climate change. Then we learn that the answer is already known: Our vulnerability is minimal because God wouldn’t let climate change injure us.
Think hard about Republican presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s mental model, which leads him to reject climate science and cast himself as Galileo and the current science establishment as the 17th century Catholic Church. Rather than writing him off, perhaps scientists should consider this stagecraft to be a warning. Perhaps an experienced politician knows something about the state of the electorate that scientists should not dismiss. What are the similarities between the current scientific enterprise and the 17th century papacy? We scientists are remote, we believe we deserve deference, and we extract considerable financial resources from the general population to run our affairs. Such parallels make us vulnerable.
We must not underestimate the threat now looming. Another age of darkness could lie ahead. In what may someday be called the Science Wars, our opponents present science as dogma and construct a symmetric conflict: their dogma vs. our dogma. We are carried back to the contest set up by Elijah to determine the stronger god, described in the Book of Kings. Firewood is piled on two altars on the peak of Mount Carmel, and each group pleads with its god to create a fire. “Baal, we cry to thee” is a poignant moment in Mendelssohn’s rendition.
There is no such symmetry. Science is not just another point of view. Science is a process of searching, always incomplete. Its norms include strict evidentiary standards and transparency. Anyone working anywhere can overturn a prior consensus. Safeguards against human frailty take the form of countless processes that protect decision-making from being compromised by friendship, rivalry, and financial interest.
Robert Socolow is the codirector of Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, under which he has helped launch new, coordinated research in environmental science, energy technology, geological engineering, and public policy. His research interests include global carbon management, the fossil-carbon sequestration, and energy efficiency. He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Socolow is a member of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board.
(20 October 2011)
Dr. Socolow is co-author of the “Wedges Theory.” -BA
