Friday, February 02, 2007

Latest IPCC Report

I must admit I did not sleep well last night, but I tend to be a worry wart - here is the summary for Policymakers .

We will probably read this during the last week on energy and climate change while we discuss policy option.

13 comments:

Unknown said...

This report is much more objective and scientific than the somewhate over-the-top New York Times article we read earlier this weeek. For example, the report had a section titled "some aspects that have not been observed" where, for example, it cited that they did not have the statistical evidence to show a correlation between global climate change and certain changes in levels of artic sea ice. Ultimately, the report asserts that most of the warming is due to greenhouse gas and it forecasts the ominous future of the world if nothing is done. Now that the report has established the validity of the problem, the question remains what is the best way to fix it?

Unknown said...

-Andrew Sims

Anonymous said...

In my environmental policy class, we've been talking about the way the media makes environmental issues political. Check out the following headlines and placements, as of right now:

BBC front page:
"Humans blamed for climate change"

FoxNews.com, buried under articles about nudists and Dance Dance Revolution:
"Report: 'No question' on warming"

--John Bovay

Unknown said...

From what John said...
I think that humans are part if not wholly to blame for the rapid increase of global warming. This report re-affirms that fact that land change use and increase burning of fossil fuels are to blame for the change in the climate. Humans are to blame for those occurances and I think that the media is doing the right thing by "blaming" humans. Others need to realize that since we caused the problem, we need to fix it. As the report shows, the sooner the better.

Jon said...

Just to play devil's advocate...

Looks like someone is taking up that offer of $10,000 to offer a counter argument to the "humans are responsible for global warming" argument.

From the Canadian National Post:
"Dr. Shariv, a prolific researcher who has made a name for himself assessing the movements of two-billion-year-old meteorites, no longer accepts this logic, or subscribes to these views. He has recanted: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media.

"In fact, there is much more than meets the eye."
All we have on which to pin the blame on greenhouse gases, says Dr. Shaviv, is "incriminating circumstantial evidence," which explains why climate scientists speak in terms of finding "evidence of fingerprints."n another study, directly relevant to today's climate controversy, Dr. Shaviv reconstructed the temperature on Earth over the past 550 million years to find that cosmic ray flux variations explain more than two-thirds of Earth's temperature variance, making it the most dominant climate driver over geological time scales.

Does anyone find this "quick, find an argument- ANY argument" convincing? Or do we recognize it as an interesting coincidence with no actual correlation?

Jon said...

oops sorry- link: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/
story.html?id=156df7e6-d490-41c9-8b1f-106fef8763c6&k=0

Anonymous said...

The TAR also affirms that the impacts da climatic change fall again of form disproportionate on the developing countries and the populations poor of all the countries, because these are more vulnerable, accenting the iniquity na situation of health and no access the adjusted foods, clean water and other resources.

sarah tilbor said...

On the first day of Professor Greer's Global Climate Change class, she asked us where the Earth should naturally be in the icehouse/greenhouse spectrum. Probably because we have all heard the term "greenhouse" so much, the majority of the class answered just that. Prof. Greer, however, explained that if the Earth were continuing its regular weather cycles, we should be in teh peak of our icehouse stage. I just thought that it was interesting and surprising. The figures on page 18 reminded me of that day because they depict the unnatural changes on the Earth.

Anonymous said...

This BBC article today is germane to the issue of the poorest populations bearing a disproportionate amount of the cost, as communities in Bangladesh and India watch their coastlines and homes disappear.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6319921.stm

Anonymous said...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/17008215/for/cnbc

Interesting article on the Chicago Climate Exchange's agreement to open a live carbin emissions trading market. While watching a segment on CNBC this morning, on commentator described the process as "monetizing global warming". If "monetizing" the process leads to reduction in carbon emissions, so be it!

Anonymous said...

The IPCC has produced a good report — an attempt to summarize what the world's scientists know about global warming. The IPCC squarely tells us that mankind is largely responsible for the planet's recent warming.

Unknown said...

The ice core data I mentioned in class has reconstructed the climate for the past 110,000 years. The core itself was 2 miles long. The main scientist, Richard Alley, has written a book called the Two Mile Time Machine which is really interesting and an easy read for anyone who wants more details. The following website also explains how paleoclimatoligists can reconstruct the past: http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/proxies/paleoclimate.html

Anonymous said...

I have been kept reading WSJ these days and on Wednesday the A section of WSJ and somewhere else on the paper I can't remember reported corporate forces driving the policy makers to sit down and deal with greenhouse gas emissions. The topic itself is a real hot spot these days no wonder, but I was wondering how could that happen on the same day the same news paper there are actully 3-4 articles talking about the same thing...I am quite confused what are the incentives for companies, esp. huge electricity companies/oil companies to get together and push such a change. Why are they doing that when the process is actually accelarating their agenda of pain and the gain is not so sure yet?