Climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr, climatologist Tom Wigley, and economist Christopher Green lay out in a commentary article published in Nature why they think that the emission scenarios the IPCC produced nearly a decade ago, which are still widely used, are overly optimistic. They note that most of the IPCC’s ‘business as usual’ emission scenarios assume a certain amount of ‘spontaneous’ technological change. The size of this assumed change is unrealistic, they argue, and deceives policy-makers and the public about the crucial role policy must have in encouraging the development of technologies to prevent dangerous climate change.
Read the Nature News article, ‘Climate challenge underestimated?’ Technology will not automatically come to our aid, experts warn.
The full paper is here (subscription required).
There is also correspondence from Gwyn Prins (of Prins and Rayner):
Radical rethink is needed on climate-change policy
Excerpt:
SIR — The irreconcilable differences
between David S. Reay’s Book Review of
The Hot Topic (Nature 452, 31; 2008) and
mine, expressed in Nature Reports Climate
Change (see www.nature.com/climate/
2008/0804/full/climate.2008.23.html),
go to the heart of why there is now a crisis
in climate policy. Reay seems to believe
that agreement with a normative agenda
precludes the need for rigorous evaluation
of evidence or of proposed policy actions,
and so falls into the same traps as Gabrielle
Walker and David King, the authors
whom he praises.
These authors have no doubt that the
Kyoto Protocol is the road to follow. They
consider that anyone, particularly an
American, who doesn’t agree is wrong —
and perhaps even corrupt.
However, the Kyoto approach is broken……..
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Paul: did you miss this item today?
“No Sun link’ to climate change”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7327393.stm
“The IPCC has got it right, so we had better carry on trying to cut carbon emissions”
On the thread below this one Gavin.
Paul: I forgot to refresh the other thread however the BBC report seems poorly addressed there
I’d be interested to hear what Svensmark and Shaviv have to say.
Meanwhile, the paper is temporarily available via open access:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/3/2/024001/erl8_2_024001.pdf?request-id=8acca06d-3a63-439f-9fc6-a08e59129d15
Yawn. These bozos are merely repeating Garnaut’s serious stupidity. The results over this past decade are all in the A1 scarenario because Chinese economic growth has speeded up. But that simply brings the growth forward and shortens the time it will take for them to get to a more fully developed state when their growth rate will level off.
It is not an excuse for extrapolation into the stratosphere.
Indeed, how will these dropkicks explain all the new Chinese nuclear power plants (86 of them) that will come on stream in the 2011-2015 five year plan.
But even before then the numbers will be trending seriously down. According to the world nuclear association, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html?terms=china
“The Eleventh 5-year plan 2006-10 has firmer environmental goals than previously, including reduction of 20% in the amount of energy required per unit of GDP, ie 4% reduction per year”.
This will be achieved through the current smaller nuclear program and the current program to replace smaller inefficient regional coal fired generating capacity. In 2007 they CLOSED DOWN 553 PLANTS! That is, they closed down 11 old power stations each week and replaced them with 2 new ones each week. See
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2008-01/30/content_6430665.htm
And due to the size of the Chinese economy, these programs will produce a major, structural adjustment in the entire global energy efficiency numbers.
These guys, (Pielke Jr, Wigley, and Green) were completely out of date before they even went to print. Some study eh?
From the BBC link:
“The Svensmark hypothesis has also been attacked in recent months by Mike Lockwood from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory.
He showed that over the last 20 years, solar activity has been slowly declining, which should have led to a drop in global temperatures if the theory was correct.”
Hmmm, isn’t that what’s happening when you take volcanic impacts into account?
I’ve exchanged emails with Richard Black who wrote the BBC article ”No Sun link’ to climate change.’ Nice that he remembered me even though it’s been a long time since we last clashed on biased BBC climate reporting! The article is now updated with comments from Svensmark:
Dr Svensmark himself was unimpressed by the findings.
“Terry Sloan has simply failed to understand how cosmic rays work on clouds,” he told BBC News.
“He predicts much bigger effects than we would do, as between the equator and the poles, and after solar eruptions; then, because he doesn’t see those big effects, he says our story is wrong, when in fact we have plenty of evidence to support it.”
But another researcher who has worked on the issue, Giles Harrison from Reading University, said the work was important “as it provides an upper limit on the cosmic ray-cloud effect in global satellite cloud data”.
No one said that solar wind/cosmic rays/clouds are the only important climate variable. Only that the cosmic ray/cloud connection could be important. That is still true. The sun has several ways it can influence climate.
If the IPCC is as corrupt as it appears to be, even if current temperature downturns continue, the IPCC will continue to claim that everything is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Now that is what one calls a “one-trick pony.”
Indeed. This is really funny:
“From the distribution of the depth of the dip in solar cycle 22 with geomagnetic latitude (the VRCO) we find that, averaged over the whole Earth, less than 23% of the dip comes from the solar modulation of the cosmic ray intensity, at the 95% confidence level. This implies that, if the dip represents a real correlation, more than 77% of it is caused by a source other than ionization and this source must be correlated with solar activity.”
Someone remind me, how well do GMSTs over the last 30 years correlate to increasing GHG emissions?
I haven’t read through the above paper so if anyone has can you let me know if they’ve removed the likely effects of aerosols in cloud-formation.
Not quite on topic but ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing is airing ‘The Climate Engineers’ Sunday 6th at 9.00 am. Podcasts usually follow a few days later.
Funny, I thought this thread was about the validity of IPCC projections but Gavin turned it into another solar wank from the first post. What do you guys do for an encore?
We blame the farmers for everything.
This is John A. of Climate Audit response to the Richard Black article:
Saturday, April 05, 2008
“Letter to Richard Black by John A. below:
Richard,
I note your latest attempt in your continuing campaign to ignore and demean the considerable and growing evidence of natural influences on climate change, and especially on the cosmic ray/solar cycle hypothesis of Svensmark et al.
Last time you raced out of the blocks with an article entitled “No Sun link’ to climate change” about a paper then yet to be published, and couldn’t be bothered beyond leaving a few voicemail messages to contact Dr Svensmark for a response. The paper of course was by Lockwood and Froelich.
Then of course, you didn’t bother reporting the reply from Svensmark because we don’t want the license payers unnecessarily confused with a solid rebuttal, would we Richard? Especially since that paper by Lockwood that you trumpeted was rife with errors.
Here’s the reply from Svensmark. Here’s another from Ken Gregory. And here’s another from Anthony Watts.
Obviously you won’t spend any time reporting on them, because life’s too short isn’t it Richard? After all, what with burning up all of those carbon credits to visit glaciers calving perfectly naturally, and polar bear populations stridently not declining but growing strongly, there’s no time for nuanced scientific reporting is there?
This time its a letter to a little known and little read environmental science journal – so we’re a long way from any expertise in statistics or solar science, aren’t we? This time the two scientists are Sloan and Wolfendale, and would you believe it! They come to the same conclusion as the one you want to hear! I’m not a betting man but if I was, I’d bet they contacted you about their forthcoming letter and you got some nice juicy “colour quotes” to pad it out to justify your BBC salary and the rest is history!
Nobody cares, because nobody checks anything! Except that even Sloan and Wolfendale don’t show that there is “‘No Sun link’ to climate change”, they say that even with their limited analysis of 20 some years, the Svensmark process on its own contributed perhaps 25% of the warming. That’s not insignificant. That’s not “no link”, that’s “some link” Richard. Even this limited analysis showed some connection between the Svensmark process and global climate.
You could have asked them to run the identical analysis looking at the correlation between carbon dioxide rise and temperature over the same time period, but you don’t want to rock the boat by showing that the carbon dioxide link is even more tenuous than the Svensmark process you’re trying to bury! Carbon dioxide has continued to rise, while global temperatures appear to have stopped rising in 1998 having stabilized below the 1998 level and might even now be starting to fall. Even the Met Office admits this – but you don’t report that of course.”
Go to this link at Greenie Watch for the embedded links to John’s letter.
http://antigreen.blogspot.com/