Quote of the Day
From The Australian, referring to Greg Combet's thinly veiled threat to business to pressure the opposition into supporting the ETS (see here):
So very true.
Read it all here.
For all the Government's hot air about saving the planet, Mr Combet is playing coldly calculated politics.
So very true.
Read it all here.
posted by Simon from Sydney at
11:54 AM
1 Comments:
“The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth’s climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago and could be even worse than that,” says MIT’s statement about a new study published in the Journal of Climate. The study, funded by the U.S. Global Change Research Program through the Dept. of Energy, underscores the urgent need for policy action, and also for a major research effort on the likely impacts and consequences of this magnitude of climate change. Serious support for such research is not happening now, and poses a challenge for the science leadership of the Obama Administration in restoring the credibility of the federal climate research program.
Post by Rick Piltz
A May 19 statement (“MIT: Climate change odds much worse than thought New analysis shows warming could be double previous estimates”) by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology news office says:
The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100 [9.4 degrees F], with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees [6.3 to 13.3 degrees F]. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees [4.3 degrees F]. The difference is caused by several factors rather than any single big change….
The study uses the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change since the early 1990s….Other research groups have estimated the probabilities of various outcomes, based on variations in the physical response of the climate system itself. But the MIT model is the only one that interactively includes detailed treatment of possible changes in human activities as well such as the degree of economic growth, with its associated energy use, in different countries….the MIT model, unlike any other, looks in great detail at the effects of economic activity coupled with the effects of atmospheric, oceanic and biological systems.
Study co-author Ronald Prinn, director of MIT’s Center for Global Change Science, said the study results should prompt an increased sense of urgency about the need for strong policy action:
While the outcomes in the “no policy” projections [i.e., scenarios in which there are no policies in place that specifically induce reductions in greenhouse gas emissions] now look much worse than before, there is less change from previous work in the projected outcomes if strong policies are put in place now to drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions. Without action, “there is significantly more risk than we previously estimated,” Prinn says. “This increases the urgency for significant policy action.”…
“There’s no way the world can or should take these risks,” Prinn says. And the odds indicated by this modeling may actually understate the problem, because the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Including that feedback “is just going to make it worse,” Prinn says….“The least-cost option to lower the risk is to start now and steadily transform the global energy system over the coming decades to low or zero greenhouse gas-emitting technologies.”
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May 30, 2009 at 2:58 AM
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