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........
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/
We blame the farmers for everything.
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?
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.