Scientists claim nothing will stop climate change

Jonathan Leake and Guy Dennis, Times of London SCIENTISTS have warned thousands of government officials and politicians gathering for international climate talks in the Hague that the rise in global temperatures is irreversible, and that the best they can hope for is to slow it down by a fraction of a degree.

Their research shows that even if delegates implement all the proposals before them in full, this will cut only about six-hundredths of a degree from a temperature rise that could be as much as 5C by 2100.

The warning comes from researchers at the Hadley Centre, the British Meteorological Office's climate change prediction centre, who will present the results in the Hague next week.

The aim of the talks is to find ways to implement the agreement in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 under which developed countries would reduce emissions of gases, mainly carbon dioxide, to 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2012.

Geoff Jenkins, head of the Hadley Centre, said: "This has to be seen as just the first stage. If we want to minimise global warming we have to achieve emission cuts of 60% or more within the next few decades."

The centre's research shows that even with 60% cuts, the rise in temperatures will not be halted but could be restricted to only about 2C by 2100. This would cause a sea level rise of about 30cm.

However, with cuts of just 5.2%, temperatures would rise by up to 5C and sea levels would rise more than 60cm, flooding many low-lying areas.

The obstacles facing even a 5.2% reduction are huge. This weekend Michael Meacher, the environment minister, said the key was to persuade America to cut its emissions. "The US has just 5% of the world's population but it emits a quarter of all the gases," he said.

Meacher and others are worried that America favours emissions-trading, under which countries would get quotas for emitting gases which could be sold on the open market. It could then buy the right to emit gases without making real cuts.

Britain has led the way in climate change negotiations. At Kyoto it volunteered to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2010.

Meacher and John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, will propose a tough regime to force every developed country to make real cuts and promote renewable energy sources.

The rise in temperatures has led to increasingly unpredictable weather. Last Christmas Eve a storm hit northern France, killing scores of people and ripping up more than 400,000 trees. Recently towns and cities across Britain have been hit by flooding.

This weekend residents in Sussex were again bracing themselves for severe floods.Ray Kemp, of the Environment Agency, said the critical time would be between midnight last night and this morning, with up to 25mm of rain expected in some places.

-- America's Emissions at Fault (dump@your.SUV), November 12, 2000

Answers

Yep, we're going to have runaway greenhouse, and it will be the end of all but the most tenacious species of life on this planet. Humans, being one of the more sensitive species, will be among the first to die off.

It's going to occur much sooner than scientists are willing to say. Let's put it this way... if you are younger than 40, you're probably not going to have to worry about collecting your social security benefits.

-- (goodbye@blue.sky), November 12, 2000.

So if we are all gonna die why should I quit driving my SUV?

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), November 12, 2000.

Unc:

You shouldn't. While there is no general scientific agreement on what is causing a slow but real warming in the climate [NASA said a few weeks ago that it looked like the result of a normal solar cycle], everyone agrees that human changes would not have any effect on temperatures. Therefore, we need to make changes to adapt. I just bought beachfront property in Kansas.:^)

Best wishes,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), November 12, 2000.

America had a choice in the presidential election to elect someone who WOULD get something done about the enivornment. Instead the chose tweedledee and tweedleDUMB.

-- Bush and Gore (weak@on.environment), November 12, 2000.

For once here is an article on climate change that I almost agree with. man can do little to affect the natural changes in our climate. If the world's climate is changing then it is has more to do with natural phenomena than with anything that man may be doing.

This is confirmed in a paper by titled New Confirmation of Strong Solar Forcing of Climate by Dr Theodor Landscheidt of the Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Dr Landscheidt has produced a number of papers based on original research which show that our changing climate is cyclical, and is based on the sun, not on man.

Something else to remember when reading articles such as the one reproduced for the Hague conference, is that in many cases these papers are prepared many months in advance, and seldom contain the most recent data. In this particular case the presenters may be rather embarrassed when it is pointed out to them that the model used in their predictions has a major flaw, and that a new model has just been introduced which is producing totally different answers as shown in the following description.

A new paper (GRL, v.27, no.21 p.3513, 1 Nov 2000) by Barry Saltzman of Yale, Haijun Hu of Harvard, and Robert Oglesby of Purdue Univ, Indiana, demonstrates the degree to which model predictions of global warming are highly sensitive to assumptions about the behaviour of positive and negative`feedback effects'.

This latest paper shows that previous calculations of H2O feedback have been overestimated. The authors compared the H2O response of the `CCM1' model at the National Center for Atmospheric Research(NCAR), Boulder, Colorado, with their more recent `CCM3' model. The comparison was quite staggering. While the `CCM1' model predicts a warming of 3.5B0C for a doubling of CO2 (130 years into the future), the`CCM3' predicts only 1.6B0C.

One of the main points made in the paper prepared for the Hague conference has to do with Sea Level change. Data being collected from satelite measurements and presented here shows that their assumptions are very inaccurate. A detailed paper on Sea level changes has been produced for the Greening Earth Society, and this paper shows that the levels are not changing in the way suggested. Sea level changes may have more to do with the El-Nino / La-Nina cycle than with any long term changes in climate.

-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), November 12, 2000.

I have yet to get an answer to this question; "If global warming is caused by human activity, what caused the last ice-age, and what caused the warming in between the ice-ages before the last one?"

ANYONE?

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), November 12, 2000.

Unmitigated Dinosaurshit Unk.

-- Doc Paulie (fannybubbles@usa.net), November 12, 2000.

LOLOL, very good! Hee hee!

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), November 12, 2000.