Posted on 08/15/2006 2:50:24 PM PDT by blam
'More disasters' for warmer world
A warmer world could make wildfires more frequent, research shows
Rising temperatures will increase the risk of forest fires, droughts and flooding over the next two centuries, UK climate scientists have warned. Even if harmful emissions were cut now, many parts of the world would face a greater risk of natural disasters, a team from Bristol University said.
The projections are based on data from more than 50 climate models looking at the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers gathered results from 52 computer simulations to calculate the risks from climate-induced changes to the world's key ecosystems.
They then grouped the results according to the amount of global warming: less than 2C (3.6F); 2-3C (3.6F-5.4F); and more than 3C (5.4F).
For each of the temperature ranges, the team assessed the probability of changes in forest cover, the frequency of wildfires and changes to freshwater supplies over the next 200 years.
'Dangerous climate change'
Marko Scholze, from the University of Bristol's Department of Earth Sciences, and the paper's lead author, said the findings revealed a direct link between rises in global temperature and damage to ecosystems.
"We show the steeply increasing risks, and increasingly large areas affected, associated with higher warming levels," he said.
"The United Nations says we should limit greenhouse gas emissions so we do not have dangerous climate change. So the question is 'what is dangerous climate change?'.
"In this paper we define the level we think is dangerous and see how likely it will come true," Dr Scholze told BBC News.
Richard Betts, manager of Climate Impacts at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, welcomed the findings.
"This makes an important new contribution to the debate on the effects of climate change," he said.
"We already knew that we cannot rely on just one model, as different models give different answers.
"This work helps us go beyond that vague statement, as it shows how much the models agree on particular levels of impact and how much they disagree."
He said the research was an important first step towards quantifying the risks of damaging impacts associated with particular levels of global warming.
The findings showed areas that would experience the worst forest loss would include Eurasia, eastern China, Canada and the Amazon.
Areas of western Africa, southern Europe and eastern US states were at most risk from dwindling freshwater supplies and droughts as a result of rising temperatures.
The data also showed that any temperature increase of more than 3C (5.4F) could result in land "carbon sinks" releasing their stored carbon into the atmosphere, exacerbating the problem of global warming.
Dr Scholze hoped the collated data would answer some of the concerns among more sceptical members of the scientific community who questioned the accuracy of climatic modelling.
"That is exactly why we did this study," he said. "We used as many models as we could and did not rely on any one study.
"We looked at 52 simulations and the probabilities of dangerous climate change these models showed."
Dr Betts agreed: "Of course it is risky to make these projections when models are continuously being changed, but we do have to make decisions on climate change now so if we wait for the perfect model we will be too late.
"The models give the best encapsulation of current understanding of the climate system, and are the only way of assessing physically plausible futures."
Dr Scholze said he hoped the findings would be used in debates on dangerous climate change and the measures needed to avoid it.
But less freezing to death.
So we have that going for us, which is nice.
* sheesh *
They forgot the rest of the headline: Women and Minorities Most Affected
This planet has been colder, in the past. We're still here. This planet has been warmer, in the past, too. We're still here.
Also: Bushes Fault
I do computer simulations for a living - and, to tell you the truth, every one of their "50 models" would be laughed out of the room for lack of rigor.
This year, we are experiencing more rain and fewer hurricanes. Is that a bad thing?
For the last 4 years our fog bound home near the beach in San Francisco has been like San Diego in the summer and my garden looks great; global warming, I love it.
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Want to see an enviro-whacko's head explode? Show 'em this. The following graphs show that Earth is in a brief period of global warming called an interglacial. The longer time spans, the deep troughs are glacial periods. The line that runs across the graphs is the temperature in 1950 and listed as "0" on the left axis. As can be seen in the last graph (Figure 1-5), Earth appears ready to move toward another ice age in the cycle. I'm more concerned with sustaining global warming to offset global cooling and the next ice age.
This first graph looks bad, doesn't it -- steeper upward temperature trend. Horizontal red line is temperature at 1950.
Figure 1-1 Global warming The second graph shows today's temperature isn't out of the norm. Horizontal blue line is temperature at 1950.
Figure 1-2 Climate of the last 2400 years The next graph shows a downtrend in temperatures from 8,000 years ago to today. The down trend is steeper in the recent 2,000 years. From left to right the upper spikes have lower highs while the lower spikes have lower lows. (The same effect can be seen in Figure 1-2, above.)
Figure 1-3 Climate of the last 12,000 years This graph shows that agriculture and stationary societies emerged 8,000 years ago during a time frame when global temperature was much higher than normal, or average.
Figure 1-4 Climate of the last 100,000 years The next graph shows that the recent 8,000 years was one of five brief hot spikes when glaciers were at minimums. With much longer troughs when glacials (ice ages) were the norm most of the time.
Figure 1-5 Climate for the last 420 kyr, from Vostok ice The graph below is reversed. That is, the left side is present day and the right side is 3 million years ago. It shows a 3 million year down trend toward widening extremes in the temperature cycle.
Figure 1-6 Climate for the last 3 million years |
I won't claim to be an expert or anything but I do know that a truly accurate climatic model of our planet would require billions of data points, factors and all their variations.
The editors at the BBC aren't concernd with the validity of these computer models. They found some doofus in a lab coat willing to say that we're all doomed because of global warming. That's all they care about -- promoting the lie.
CC - A "model" has no time component, just like a plastic model of a WWII tank.
If you grab the tank, and move it, it is a "simulation" - it now reflects performance over time. A simulation, of course, can contain many models. Entity-based simulations can, for instance, comtain on the order of 12m mathematical models.
Simulations are tested by a process called "validation" - the inputs are set to reflect an historical event, the simulation is run, and if the outputs reflect the real-life conitions produced by the event in question, the model is said to be "validated." Independant validation and verifaction are the gold standard of the industry, usually leading to "accreditation" for some predetermined use, by a controlling authority in the field in question.
For a climate simulation, then, validation would require that an independant scientific group should be able to input the climate conditions extant prior to the Mt. Ste. Helens eruption, run the simulation with the eruption inserted as an unanticipated event (MESL), and the simulation output should mirror the climate conditions extant for a couple of years after the eruption.
No climate simulation has ever passed this test, for ANY historical event.
So they are, collectively, worthless.
There is a direct correlation between the amount of government grant money a scientist receives and the amount of hot air emitted from the scientist.
There you go! :)
Remember global cooling? It was the scare of the day a few decades ago, when Time magazine made it a cover story calculated to make us all buy heavy underwear or move to the Equator.
Second-rate scientists tend to grab whatever slice of data suits their purpose. Look at the latest "studies" showing that global warming has made our hurricane seasons worse and you'll note that they use data dating back to 1970 -- when the latest high-storm cycle began to crank up. There were really strong hurricane seasons in the 1930s and 1940s, and earlier in the 1890s and 1900s, but ... well, those don't count.
But nobody can beat the news media for hyping global warming on dubious or even false "evidence."
Remember the South Pacific islands that claimed they were being drowned by a rising ocean due to global warming? Well, duh, if the ocean was really rising several feet don't you think Florida and California would have noticed? Of course, the news media that bit for this piece of nonsense must never have heard of land subsiding, just as it has for two thousand years in Venice, which was built on a soggy swamp.
Or recall the "global warming" in Alaska, where the temperature in some places was rising by four or five degrees? Some of the media loved that one. They never stopped to think that global warming includes the word "global," and that no other areas were reporting such increases. Could it have been a shift in currents in the ocean adjacent to the warmed-up areas? Gee, maybe so.
Then there are the folks who say changes in the feeding or mating grounds of insects and small mammals prove that there is global warming. Could be -- or maybe it was a cyclical change in the places where the creatures they feed on were to be found, or maybe there was a local or regional change in rainfall. It's doubtful that Nature has kept her creatures anchored to the same places indefinitely. In fact, if that were the case there would be no spread of species from one area to another, and we know that's not so.
Priests of the global warming faith, such as Al Gore, seem to think that human beings are responsible for every change in our environment and that we can control our climate.
What would they have thought (if humans existed then) when the ocean was 30 feet higher than it is now, and the coastal regions (and most of what is now the state of Florida) were under water? It certainly couldn't be blamed on SUVs or coal-burning power plants.
No, the truth is that human beings are just tiny mites on a huge and quite impersonal chunk of iron and silicon and other elements. And if we disappear, the planet will go happily along, still going through ice ages and warm spells -- cyclical global warming, if you will.
The United Nations, there's an unimpeachable source.
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