Posted on 04/07/2007 11:27:17 AM PDT by Graybeard58
As the world gets hotter by degrees, millions of poor people will suffer from hunger, thirst, floods and disease unless drastic action is taken, scientists and diplomats warned Friday in their bleakest report ever on global warming.
All regions of the world will change, with the risk that nearly a third of the Earth's species will vanish if global temperatures rise just 3.6 degrees above the average temperature in the 1980s-90s, the new climate report says. Areas that now have too little rain will become drier.
Yet that grim and still preventable future is a toned-down prediction, a compromise brokered in a fierce, around-the-clock debate among scientists and bureaucrats. Officials from some governments, including China and Saudi Arabia, managed to win some weakened wording.
Even so, the final report "will send a very, very clear signal" to governments, said Yvo de Boer, the top climate official for the United Nations, which in 1988 created the authoritative climate change panel that issued the starkly worded document.
And while some scientists were angered at losing some ground, many praised the report as the strongest warning ever that nations must cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.
The report is the second of four coming this year from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of 2,000 scientists. The new document tries to explain how global warming is changing life on Earth; the panel's report in February focused on the cause of global warming and said scientists are highly confident most of it is due to human activity.
All four reports must be unanimously approved by the 120-plus governments that participate, and all changes must be approved by the scientists.
That edict made for a deadline-busting contentious final editing session that was closed to the public.
However, The Associated Press witnessed the hectic final 3½ hours of objections and conflict.
At one point, Chinese and Saudi Arabian delegates tried to reduce the scientific confidence level about already noticeable effects of global warming.
They lower the confidence level from 90 percent to 80 percent. Scientists objected, and one lead author from the United States, NASA's Cynthia Rosenzweig, left the building after filing an official protest.
"There is a discernible human influence on these changes" that are already occurring through flooding, heat waves, hurricanes and threats to species, she said.
Under a U.S.-proposed compromise, the final report deleted any mention of the level of confidence about global warming's current effects.
And that may have saved the day, according to some scientists who said the report had appeared doomed over that issue.
There were other disputes where scientists lost out:
n Instead of saying "hundreds of millions" would be vulnerable to flooding under certain scenarios, the final document says "many millions."
n Instead of suggesting up to 120 million people are at risk of hunger because of global warming, the revised report refers to negative effects on subsidence farmers and fishers.
Often it was the U.S. delegation who stood with scientists and helped reach compromise, said Stanford University scientist Stephen Schneider, a frequent critic of the Bush administration's global warming policies.
British scientist Neil Adger said he and others were disappointed that government officials deleted parts of a chart that highlights the devastating effects of climate change with every rise of 1.8 degrees in temperature.
Some scientists bitterly vowed never to take part in the process again.
Still, Adger and other scientists and even environmental groups hailed the final report as the strongest ever.
"This is a glimpse into an apocalyptic future," the Greenpeace environmental group said of the final report.
The tone of the report is urgent, noting those who can afford the least get hit the most by global warming.
"Don't be poor in a hot country, don't live in hurricane alley, watch out about being on the coasts or in the Arctic, and it's a bad idea to be on high mountains with glaciers melting," said Schneider, the Stanford scientist who was one of the study author's.
Africa by 2020 is looking at an additional 75 million to 250 million people going thirsty because of climate change, the report said. Deadly diarrheal diseases associated with floods and droughts will increase in Asia because of global warming, the report said.
The first few degrees increase in global temperature will actually raise global food supply, but then it will plummet, according to the report.
"The poorest of the poor in the world -- and this includes poor people in prosperous societies -- are going to be the worst hit," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "People who are poor are least able to adapt to climate change."
But even rich countries, such as the United States say that the report tells them what to watch for.
James Connaughton, the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality noted that food production in North America would rise initially, but so will increased coastal flooding.
The head of the U.S. delegation, White House associate science adviser Sharon Hays, said a key message she's taking home to Washington is "that these projected impacts are expected to get more pronounced at higher temperatures," she said in a conference call from Brussels. "Not all projected impacts are negative."
Schneider said a main message isn't just what will happen, but what already has started: melting glaciers, stronger hurricanes, deadlier heat waves, and disappearing or moving species.
It all can be traced directly to greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels, according to the report.
Martin Parry, who conducted the tough closed-door negotiations, said that with 29,000 sets of data from every continent include Antarctica, the report firmly and finally established "a man-made climate signal coming through on plants, water and ice."
"For the first time, we are not just arm-waving with models," he said.
But many of the worst effects aren't locked into the future, the report said in its final pages. People can build better structures, adapt to future warming threats and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, scientists said.
"There are things that can be done now, but it's much better if it can be done now rather than later," said David Karoly of the University of Oklahoma, one of the report authors.
"We can fix this," Schneider said.
-- -- --
On the Net:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch/
The summary of the report: http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM6avr07.pdf
The banning of DDT is probably the one of the most glaring examples but..
BARF ALERT
“The Medieval Warm Period or Medieval Climate Optimum was from approx. 800ad -1300ad. “
I love to use the MWP as a tool to stuff a cork into the
pie hole of pompous Goreons.
I remember reading about some grant funded moron stating that “We have to get rid of the MWP” as in the history books. It just does not fit their template.
What happened to the ice age that these same “scholars” and “scientists” predicted and provided evidence of in the 1980’s?
Also, based on the assumption that solar cycles are implicated in any temperature rise, is there a prediction of when any recent warming might turn to cooling? Is there a 22 year cycle that could be involved?
The UN issued a report a couple of months ago saying that the worst places in the world to raise children are the United States and the UK. The international collectivist and socialist morons no doubt think kids do better in Sudan, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Siberia, Lesotho, etc.
Anything and everything coming from the UN is total rubbish.
"...Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out. This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.
I don't mean global warming. I'm talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.
The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful --- and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing --- that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well know to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.
The theory of eugenics postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race. The best human beings were not breeding as rapidly as the inferior ones --- the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degenerates, the unfit, and the "feeble minded." Francis Galton, a respected British scientist, first speculated about this area, but his ideas were taken far beyond anything he intended. They were adopted by science-minded Americans, as well as those who had no interest in science but who were worried about the immigration of inferior races early in the twentieth century --- "dangerous human pests" who represented "the rising tide of imbeciles" and who were polluting the best of the human race..."
That last statement is the craziest of the lot. Weathermen where I live base their forecasts on weather models and they miss that about half the time or more. So how are these idiots determine what is going to happen in 50-100 years based on their models when, as he said, they don’t use data. Must be using a crystal ball or getting this from a vision of some sort.
Oh you mean The Inconvenient Error.
Remember the hole in the ozone layer?
“Global Warming” is the TULIP MANIA of the 21st century
Expect the rhetoric on the new liberal leftist buzzword global warming to ratchet up during the summer. Global Warming is just a buzzword that encompasses everything without definitively explaining anything just like the scare which drove govt to outlaw aerosol cans or how about Y2K scare that had people stocking up on water and basic essentials because the computers were “going to crash”. Let’s not make albore rich and a so-called expert because “he blew the whistle on nothing.”
Excerpt.
"... Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.
This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.
I don't mean global warming. I'm talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.
The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful --- and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing --- that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well know to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.
The theory of eugenics postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race. The best human beings were not breeding as rapidly as the inferior ones --- the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degenerates, the unfit, and the "feeble minded." Francis Galton, a respected British scientist, first speculated about this area, but his ideas were taken far beyond anything he intended. They were adopted by science-minded Americans, as well as those who had no interest in science but who were worried about the immigration of inferior races early in the twentieth century --- "dangerous human pests" who represented "the rising tide of imbeciles" and who were polluting the best of the human race..."
One of the better comments I’ve recently heard about man-made global warming compares it to, of all things, the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, where the leftists said:
“The nature of the evidence is irrelevant; it’s the seriousness of the charge that matters.”
But in the case of man-made global warming, what the left is now saying is:
“The validity of the science is irrelevant; it’s the seriousness of the consequences that matters.”
From this point of view man-made global warming is just proclaiming that a giant, invisible asteroid(*) is heading towards Earth and unless we give them power and money, then we shall all be destroyed.
(*) Or Cthulhu. Or the Daleks. Whatever.
Warning: Global warming is real! Minorities to be hardest hit! LOL
we’ll be singing the internationale in no time.
TRY John McCain
He sees the $$$$$$$$$
I’m in Alabama, freeze warnings, global warming?
Bring it on.
Global warming, global cooling...One way or another, critters go extinct.
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