Aside from the incredibly misleading graphs presented by your computer scientist blog author, this is the basic fact: CO2 emissions hang around in the atmosphere for perhaps thousands of years. So all the natural variation of the Holecene, which we still, by the way, experience, is overwhelmed by our CO2 emissions.

The Halocene has indeed been a beautiful window for humans, and we, with the science that can determine minute quantities of particles in our atmosphere, now know that we are closing that window by our own actions.

getstaffed,

There is nothing alarmist about millenial timeframes. We humans will adapt in the short term without too many problems but, if we don’t take drastic action, like just banning the burning of coal, then future generations face huge battles the WE have directly caused.

Do you really not care that that will be our legacy?

However, what is becoming increasing clear is that not taking drastic action will very likely cause irreversible change that will do enormous damage to the ability of humans and others to simply survive. But something will, and one school of thought is that human extinction it is not necessarily a bad thing for the planet, anyway.

And Luc and his fellow travelers wonder why they’re labeled Alarmists! Go figure.

He doesn’t specify the scientific community – is probably more thinking of some of the NGOs.

So I do that here and here.

Then there is this by DPF: I have tended to take the formal IPCC reports as the most likely scenario. The stolen e-mails have damaged some of the credibility of IPCC processes – especially the boasting about making sure certain dissenting opinions are kept out. That really has rung some warning bells.

I’m not going to litigate that particular email, aside from stating for the record that it is misrepresented as suppressing dissent when it was actually opposed to the publication of bad science, but I will say that even the US government, infamous for protecting its perceived national interest even if to the detriment of every other nation understands the science is “incredibly robust.”

I also have reservations about this statement by DPF: I have little time for those who claim that the world is doomed if by Xmas Eve there is not a decision to reduce emissions to a certain level by 2020.

I’m not aware of any in the scientific community asserting such a thing. Even in the worst case scenario, with many, many metres of sea level rise, which would include mass extinctions of the magnitude the earth has previously endured, the planet will survive. Humans and the remaining animals may well be reduced to masses huddled in the few clement spots, but as DPF says, that will be millenial process.

However, what is becoming increasing clear is that not taking drastic action will very likely cause irreversible change that will do enormous damage to the ability of humans and others to simply survive. But something will, and one school of thought is that human extinction it is not necessarily a bad thing for the planet, anyway.

The best summation of the scientific case for AGW is the article Global Temperature Change” published by the National Academies of Science, the premier scientific body of the United States.

The main fault of the climate models is that they appear to have severely underestimated the rapidity of the effects of climate change. We are now looking at a sea level rise of 1-2m this century. Here is an extract from a report commissioned by the insurance giant Allianz:

Combined sea level rise – global sea level rise (SLR) of up to 2 m by the end of the century
combined with localized sea level rise anomaly for the eastern seaboard of North America

Exposed assets in Port Megacities – A global sea level rise of 0.5 m by 2050 is estimated to
increase the value of assets exposed in all 136 port megacities worldwide by a total of $US
25,158 billion to $US28,213 billion in 2050. This increase is a result of changes in socio-
economic factors such as urbanization and also increased exposure of this (greater)
population to 1-in-100-year surge events through sea level rise.

Those cities have a combined population of 600m souls.

And adaptation for tens, even hundreds of millions in newly uninhabitable areas of the planet is not just a matter of dollars and cents. Look at the reluctance to accept refugees even today. Wait until the boats off our coast number in the thousands. What will we do: shoot them all? Some countries will, I’m sure.

The simple fact is that we do have an opportunity to minimise the damage we have already caused to the hopes of future generations.

Just as some call government borrowing inter-generational theft, allowing global warming to continue is akin to inter-generational genodice.

But places like the Maldives, and Tuvalu – it is a big call for them to do nothing and hope they backed the right experts.

Yes agree. But successive ruling governments who have their hands out for large dobs of cash, for a problem that stubbornly refuses to manifest, just strike me as not working in the best interests of their people.

Perhaps their leaders would be better focusing attention on obvious domestic issues of housing, health and economic growth… and quit dreaming about winning the UN lotto.

Pete, you certainly are getting tiresome

I can’t see Copenhagen succeeding in anything practical. I have my doubts anything worthwhile can be achieved, and we will end up crossing our fingers and trying to deal with anything if it happens.

But places like the Maldives, and Tuvalu – it is a big call for them to do nothing and hope they backed the right experts.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5596516/less-than-qualified-punditry.thtml

Would you risk your country on one of a number of differing opinions?

If they did get swamped should we offer our apologies and let them come here?

Pete – if the sea level rises are a result of natural fluctuations then how can anyone fix that? I’d happily endorse a refugee programme for anyone displaced by natural, permanent sea level rises. However I’m not happy to hand the UN billions for them to ‘manage’ this contingency on our behalf. Neither should you be.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world”.

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC’s favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a “corrective factor” of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they “needed to show a trend”.

When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an “expert reviewer” on the IPCC’s last two reports, he was “astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one”. Yet the results of all this “deliberate ignorance” and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.

He also has a short film on youtube explaining his whole reasoning.