"Smoking Gun" Report on Global Warming is coming

[ChasingBlueSky 0]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070123/ap_on_re_us/warming_climate_report

Report has 'smoking gun' on climate By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
Mon Jan 22, 8:50 PM ET



Human-caused global warming is here — visible in the air, water and melting ice — and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.

"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling."

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist and study co-author, went even further: "This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles."

The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is being released in Paris next week. This segment, written by more than 600 scientists and reviewed by another 600 experts and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries, includes "a significantly expanded discussion of observation on the climate," said co-chair Susan Solomon, a senior scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She and other scientists held a telephone briefing on the report Monday.

That report will feature an "explosion of new data" on observations of current global warming, Solomon said.

Solomon and others wouldn't go into specifics about what the report says. They said that the 12-page summary for policymakers will be edited in secret word-by-word by governments officials for several days next week and released to the public on Feb. 2. The rest of that first report from scientists will come out months later.

The full report will be issued in four phases over the year, as was the case with the last IPCC report, issued in 2001.

Global warming is "happening now, it's very obvious," said Mahlman, a former director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab who lives in Boulder, Colo. "When you look at the temperature of the Earth, it's pretty much a no-brainer."

Look for an "iconic statement" — a simple but strong and unequivocal summary — on how global warming is now occurring, said one of the authors, Kevin Trenberth, director of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also in Boulder.

The February report will have "much stronger evidence now of human actions on the change in climate that's taken place," Rajendra K. Pachauri told the AP in November. Pachauri, an Indian climatologist, is the head of the international climate change panel.

An early version of the ever-changing draft report said "observations of coherent warming in the global atmosphere, in the ocean, and in snow and ice now provide stronger joint evidence of warming."

And the early draft adds: "An increasing body of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on other aspects of climate including sea ice, heat waves and other extremes, circulation, storm tracks and precipitation."

The world's global average temperature has risen about 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1901 to 2005. The two warmest years on record for the world were 2005 and 1998. Last year was the hottest year on record for the United States.

The report will draw on already published peer-review science. Some recent scientific studies show that temperatures are the hottest in thousands of years, especially during the last 30 years; ice sheets in Greenland in the past couple years have shown a dramatic melting; and sea levels are rising and doing so at a faster rate in the past decade.

Also, the second part of the international climate panel's report — to be released in April — will for the first time feature a blockbuster chapter on how global warming is already changing health, species, engineering and food production, said NASA scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, author of that chapter.

As confident as scientists are about the global warming effects that they've already documented, they are as gloomy about the future and even hotter weather and higher sea level rises. Predictions for the future of global warming in the report are based on 19 computer models, about twice as many as in the past, Solomon said.

In 2001, the panel said the world's average temperature would increase somewhere between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit and the sea level would rise between 4 and 35 inches by the year 2100. The 2007 report will likely have a smaller range of numbers for both predictions, Pachauri and other scientists said.

The future is bleak, scientists said.

"We have barely started down this path," said chapter co-author Richard Alley of Penn State University.

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AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch/

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you can burn the land and boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me....
I WILL fly again.....

[rehmwa 2]

"This segment, written by more than 600 scientists impressive

and reviewed by another 600 experts nicely done

and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries,huh?"

Edit: The smart scientists are staying quiet and buying up land in Greenland, northern canada, and northern russia

...
Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[livendive 8]

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"This segment, written by more than 600 scientists impressive

and reviewed by another 600 experts nicely done

and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries,huh?"

Edit: The smart scientists are staying quiet and buying up land in Greenland, northern canada, and northern russia

Get out of my head...I was going to comment on the bureaucrat thing.

Blues,
Dave

"I AM A PROFESSIONAL EXTREME ATHLETE!"
(drink Mountain Dew)

[rehmwa 2]

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head...I was going to comment on the bureaucrat thing.

it was pretty apparent.

But it would be cool to the see the before vs after version of that report.....

I also wonder exactly what they mean by "experts". Perhaps seeing all 3 versions would be entertaining.

...
Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[ChasingBlueSky 0]

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head...I was going to comment on the bureaucrat thing.

it was pretty apparent.

But it would be cool to the see the before vs after version of that report.....

I also wonder exactly what they mean by "experts". Perhaps seeing all 3 versions would be entertaining.

I'm not sure why they brag about the editting part...it's....odd.

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you can burn the land and boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me....
I WILL fly again.....

[nathaniel 0]

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"This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles."

I wasn't sure what they meant by 'smoking gun', thanks!

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[Amazon 7]

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I'm not sure why they brag about the editting part...it's....odd.

1

Isnt that what needs to happen to any scientific article in this country now??? review by the Administration for political "accuracy"

[speedy 0]

Form Junkscience.com today..

The infamous "smoking gun," from bombshell to bomb...

In Earth's Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications Hansen, et al, state: Our climate model, driven mainly by increasing human-made greenhouse gases and aerosols, among other forcings, calculates that Earth is now absorbing 0.85 ± 0.15 watts per square meter more energy from the Sun than it is emitting to space. This imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of increasing ocean heat content over the past 10 years.

The associated media release is entitled "Earth’s Energy Out of Balance: The Smoking Gun for Global Warming"

When that paper was written the model output was a fair wiggle-fit with Willis (2004) and Levitus (2004).

So, Hansen's model is dumping heat into the oceans at roughly 0.8 Wm-2 and the bulk ocean heat rise mid-1993 - mid-2003 sort of matched that -- if only the world would remain constant and conform to the models we'd have this "global warming" thing sorted. Like all happy accidents, however, this good thing came to an end, too.

Lyman et al (2006), using updated data from the same source, show that the period 2003-2005 involves a sudden ocean cooling at a rate of -1.0 ± 0.3 Wm-2 over the period, which means Hansen's model is calculating wrongly in both magnitude and sign. No one expected this loss of one-fifth of the heat stored in the ocean since 1955 and no model predicted it. Its cause is unclear but we appear to be witnessing Earth dumping heat to space via the atmosphere.

Now Hansen's model has three years of data (to date) where it's incorrectly dumping heat into the oceans at a rate of >0.8 Wm-2 when it should have been removing it at -1.0 Wm-2, making net error of +1.8 Wm-2 over more than 70% of the planet -- call it excess global forcing of at least 1.25 Wm-2 for that period.

Lyman et al. go so far as to state: Including the recent downturn, the average warming rate for the entire 13-year period is 0.33 ± 0.23 W/m2 (of the Earth's total surface area). Think about that for a moment -- that's just 0.1 - 0.56 Wm-2.

Dave

Fallschirmsport Marl

[rehmwa 2]

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I'm not sure why they brag about the editting part...it's....odd.

1

Isnt that what needs to happen to any scientific article in this country now??? review by the Administration for political "accuracy"

Isn't that what needs to happen to any global warming scientific articles in 154 countries now???

Wouldn't this be evidence that the global warming debate is less about science and more about politics? This just puts global warming on par with creationism as valid science......

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Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[lawrocket 3]

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and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries,huh?"

The Report is being prepared by the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." This organization was established by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteoroligal Organization.

This means that it is a policy document - inherently political - as much as it is a scientific document. I suspect that it has at the core raw data, interpretation and analysis of the data, and policy recommendations. The bureacrats will probably be editing that last part.

I don't have a problem with it. It's the way things are. You cannot escape politics with it, and I believe that this report has a structure that allows competing viewpoints to be published with the reports.

My wife is hotter than your wife.