Climate not as sensitive to CO2 as projected

Houston Chronicle:
Let’s see if an intriguing new paper in Science, released this afternoon, can break through your somnolent Turkey Day afternoon.
Led by Oregon climate scientist Andreas Schmittner the paper suggests the rate of warming from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be less than the most dire estimates.
Specifically, if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are to double from pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm to 560 ppm, the researchers say Earth’s average temperature is likely to rise from 1.7 to 2.6 Celsius degrees, a decrease from the previous, accepted range of 2 to 4.5 degrees.
Here’s what the research group did to reach this conclusion:
They compiled land and ocean surface temperature reconstructions from the Last Glacial Maximum about 20,000 years ago and created a global map of those temperatures. They then compared those values with those of climate models. There was a big difference, suggesting the models were overcooking the sensitivity of temperatures to carbon dioxide levels.
“If these paleoclimatic constraints apply to the future, as predicted by our model, the results imply less probability of extreme climatic change than previously thought,” Schmittner said.
...
...    the real effect of this paper will be to really impair the credibility of the more extreme environmentalists who have been saying the planet faces certain doom from climate change.
... 
It is their credibility I have been challenging as overblown.  I just do not buy the dire consequences projected by many, and especially Al Gore and other politicians who have been exaggerating in order to scare voters into buying into their ideology.  As I have noted, the world may be warming, but the results are something that we can adapt to.
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more