Misled re Climate Change

We and our leaders have been consistently misled by the OPCC and the IPCC.

By Katie Weeman, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, and Patrick Lynch, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center 

The rate of global sea level rise has been accelerating in recent decades, rather than increasing steadily, according to a new study based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data.

This acceleration, driven mainly by increased melting in Greenland and Antarctica, has the potential to double the total sea level rise projected by 2100 when compared to projections that assume a constant rate of sea level rise, according to lead author Steve Nerem. Nerem is a professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, a fellow at Colorado's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and a member of NASA's Sea Level Change team.

Extracts from ‘What Lies Beneath’ – The Understatement of Existential Climate Risk – David Spratt, Ian Dunlop & Hams Schellnhuber:

‘This report seeks to alert the wider community and business and political leaders to these limitations and urges changes in the IPCC approach. To the wider UNFCCC negotiations, and to national policymaking. It is clear that existing processes will not deliver the transformation to a carbon-negative world in the limited time now available.

A 2013 study by Prof Naomi Oreskes ands fellow researchers examined a number of past predictions made by climate scientists. They found that scientists have been “conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change” and that “at least some of the key attributes of global warming from increased atmospheric greenhouse gases have been under-predicted, particularly in IPCC assessments of the physical science.”

Often blind eyes were turned, either because of a lack of will to believe the signs, or an active preference to deny and then not to engage.

These deficiencies are clearly evident a the upper levels of climate policymaking, nationally and globally. They must be corrected as a matter of extreme urgency.

We have reached a point where we have a crisis, an emergency, but people don’t know that… There’s a big gap between what’s understood about global warmingby the scientific community and what known by the public and policymakers”. – Prof James Hansen 2008.

We are now at a tipping point that threatens to flip the world into a full blown climate emergency. – Tony de Brum, Mary Robinson & Kelly Rigg.

In the 2001 assessment report, the IPCC projected a sea-level rise of 2mm a year. By 2007 .. Satellite data showed that sea level rise had risen by an average of 3.3 mm per year from 1993 to 2006.

Today the discussion amongst experts is for a sea-level rise this century of at least one metre and perhaps in excess of 2 metres. Evidence that Antarctica by itself has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100, and that at 1 deg C of warming, West Antarctic glaciers ar ein “unstoppable” meltdown for one-to- four metres of sea-level rise, only add to grave concern that the IPCC reports are simply irrelevant on theis matter.

Summary

Human-induced climate change is an existential risk to human civilisation: an adverse outcome that will either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential, unless carbon emissions are rapidly reduced. Current processes will not deliver either the speed of the scale of change required.