I read a story a few days ago which stated the 2007 IPCC report reduced their previous statements regarding the effects of climate change by 25%
Can either of you independently confirm or refute that statement?
The reason given was due to the recent unexpected plateau in temp change of the last few years.
Predicated rises in ocean levels was also scaled back by an unmentioned percentage.

I wish I could remember which site I ran across that story on but can't.

Blitz, I know an awful lot of research scientists and I can attest that there is damn little money for environmental causes. I probably shouldn't respond right now because I don't have links, but it is pretty easy to dig up dollar figures to show the amount that environmental causes have contributed to campaigns compared with energy companies. It is like a thousand to one, actually, probably more. I saw a chart the other day that was downright numbing.

Obviously, campaign donations aren't the same as research grants, but they are indicative of who has the deeper pockets, it sure as hell ain't the Polar Bears!!

When it comes to refuting climate change, there have been big, big bucks in play from the folks who have been selling us $4/gallon gasoline and trying to get us to continue buying their gas guzzling cars. There has been no single competing funding organization that can compare to energy and automotive.

I certainly am not backing the writing that appears in RealClimate. I don't know them. Unlike others in these forums, however, I have had a ton of personal experience with national media. I tend not to trust television reports, but find that most print journalists (not columnists) at the national level are quite ethical. When your stuff is printed in black and white and a direct comparison is made on a daily basis to other information that has been published, it gets pretty easy to ween out inaccuracies. Inaccurate reporters do not make it in the big-time for long.

My favorite news source is Google News. Find your topic and dig down into all the stories that have been written on that topic. It is amazing to see how different publications handle the news. It doesn't take long to figure out who the journalists are who are worth trusting and who aren't.

I'm anxious to hear Hellfighter's take on the National Post, a newspaper that was created as an advocacy publication for conservatives in Canada. This isn't even "Fair and Balanced" Fox News, an organization that attempts to trick you into thinking it doesn't cover the news with a right-wing perspective.

Speaking of Fox News, I can't count the number of stories I covered alongside Fox "journalists" and then later turned on the television and saw how they mangled the facts. They were absolutely the most inaccurate news organization I had ever encountered, and I certainly never drank their Kool-Aid.

For global warming to be a hoax, the schemers would have had to bring in just about every reputable scientist in the world. Will all of their predictions become reality? Certainly not, but I absolutely reject the notion that an underfunded research scientist would gin up his research in the hopes of what, getting another grant? Just like inaccurate reporters, inaccurate scientists are discovered practically instantly and they lose their funding, they lose their jobs, they lose all credibility.

I don't believe that a scientistwould gin up their results either. just only in certain areas or for a certain hypothisis

My only tought is that if the ICPP's main goal and mission is to prove man-made global warming, and started researching to that end then it has an axe to grind. They started with the answer and set out to find data that proved their point, subjective data that could go either way would be ignored.

They stared the ball rolling most likely in the 80's with the 1990 ipcc study.

There are huge ties with this movement to the environment, no-oil save the trees, grenpeace crowd. They are deeply tied with academia as well.

There is also huge monitary rewards /political in passing legeslation in the form of carbon credits and carbon taxes.

Lastly, as you mentined in your article, with China and other develoing countries coming on whatever we do wih cap and trade, or carbon credits will be worthless other than wealth transfer.
If we are not planning on Free Maket inventiveness, prizes, and other incentives to create the new low emission technologies that are cheaper for China to implement than high carbon output options it will make no difference globally, other than to wreck economys.

It has to be a solution of techmology driven / alt power / nuclear / Etc that lowers CO2
Not the only eat meat once a month, no oil, wear wooden shoes crowd. Restrictions on a global scale will never work.

Nice reply Hamma.... Need Coffee Will post later



Man one word made a diff there.
Robert, am I an idiot, I can't figure out how to edit?

Here is the IPCC's mandate:

The IPCC was established to provide the decision-makers and others interested in climate change with an objective source of information about climate change. The IPCC does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters. Its role is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change, its observed and projected impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy, although they need to deal objectively with policy relevant scientific, technical and socio economic factors. They should be of high scientific and technical standards, and aim to reflect a range of views, expertise and wide geographical coverage.

Couple of key points - they don't do the research, their mandate stresses objectivity.

I've had the opportunity to meet the co-lead scientist for the NECIA (sorry, more gobbledygook, this is the New England Climate Impacts Assessment). This was a group of a hundred or so scientists who felt their research was showing such significant change, they couldn't wait for the typical peer-review process. They wanted to get their results in the hands of the policy makers as fast as possible. This was a highly unusual step for a group of scientists, in fact, I can think of no prior example when scientists have taken such a bold step.

Blitz, I know that if you had the opportunity to sit down and listen to these folks talk about their research, you would change your mind about the quality of their work. They are passionately committed to the truth of science. When they speak, you don't hear a bias, you hear a seriousness of purpose, you hear an honest approach to learning precisely what is happening on our planet. These are not modern-day Cassandras, they can not predict the future, they can only report what their research indicates.

As for your claim that there are "huge ties with this movement to the environment," I would agree. Most climate scientists were drawn to their profession because they had a natural love of the outdoors. Are they really any different from someone who loves to hunt and fish and spends as much time outside as possible. In reality, they are not any different. I know a limnologist (they study lakes and ponds) who got into his profession because he wanted a job where he could fish whenever he wanted. A couple of biologists I photographed spent a part of their day seining for fish to measure mercury content, but they had their fly rods tucked on board so they could do some catch and release on their own.

Obviously, climatologists are "deeply tied to academia," as these problems far exceed what a lay-person is capable of discovering. You could probably head to Greenland and operate the ice core drilling equipment, but what the hell would you do with the ice core once you extracted the ice? I sure wouldn't know what to do. I wouldn't know how to measure the hydrogen and oxygen isotopes to determine the temperature when the ice became ice, would you? You kind of have to go to school to learn that stuff.

My point is, scientists are really just like you and me, although I will admit they can sometimes be quite a bit geekier and some tend to mutter a lot! Sure, in any group of people, you will find those that have ulterior motives and those that don't always toe the ethical line, but I'm convinced that the vast majority are interested in only one thing, the truth.

I agree exactly on this point, I myself love the outdoors, grew up in the country with a stream 3/4 mile walk thru our woods. Spent a lot of my mis-spent youth, fishing for salmon and steelhead on that river (was recently declared scenic and wild by the state of Ohio)

My best friend went to college and recieved an environmental sciences degree from Ohio State. He spent his summers doing disolved oxygen, water quality and invertabrate studies in lakes and absolutly loved it.

He went on to start his carear and after 5 years had to leave it, because it was way to political. It did not fit with the rest of his believes, and the environmental causes were used as a political tool.

I grew up in the Cleveland area in the 70's and saw what bad environmental policy does. We are light years away from there, and we still have a long way to go to get better.

I spend 6 months of the year fly fishing for steelhead trout From Ohio to Pa, to NY and have strong beliefs in good environmental stewardship. I long for the day, when there are setbacks from streams allowing the natural wetlands to come back, limiting the ag runoff and hopefully bringing back cool water streams. (Ohio has only a couple small streams left)

I just think it could be done without the political knives being weilded around.
New technologies, grants, incentives, and other options could solve the problem and maket the envrioment and economy better global warming or not.

Maybe it's not always the data, it's the political hack solutions of restriction is the only answer that piss me off. I'm no scientist and this is all over my head, but the solutions scare me, and there are other options



This is where I spent my childhood....

Wow, now that is spectacularly beautiful!

I have a different picture of Ohio in my mind. Over a decade ago I traveled to Columbus to meet with the heads of American Power (this was an Enron company). They gave me a tour of one of their coal fired power plants. I was mightily impressed with their operation and will never forget the experience of taking an outside elevator halfway up a smoke stack, before climbing the rest of the way to the very top where I could poke my head through a small doorway and watch the smoke race for the sky. They had to build incredibly high smoke stacks to meet local environmental regulations.

What disturbed me on that trip was sitting in their boardroom and hearing them claim that mercury from their coal wasn't reaching Maine waters. At the time, fish advisories had been posted on all the freshwater lakes and streams in Maine due to mercury pollution. These powerful industry executives looked me in the eye, and told me a baldfaced lie.

Research has now proven that their mercury has been spread far and wide, and through bio-accumulation has been working its way up through the food chain. They subsequently were forced to install expensive scrubbers to remove as much mercury from their stacks as technically feasible. We still can't safely eat the fish we pull from crystal clear waters in Maine, and I doubt you can do the same in Ohio.

Of course, it isn't just the power plants, mercury pollution comes from trash incinerators and other sources, but that experience taught me that dirty coal pollutes in many ways beyond the obvious CO2. It also taught me that left to their own devices, industry will always work to improve their bottom line. Maine politicians were powerless to stop the pollution that was falling on their pristine waters. It was up to the Federal Government to regulate that pollution.

Today, our country is like those local Maine politicians. Pollution is impacting us from China and India. We need to figure out a way to accurately measure the impacts and costs of that pollution. We have to find an international regulatory mechanism for ensuring that China's tall smokestacks don't just push more pollution in our direction. The challenge is how to get all of the countries to recognize that they have to take action for the public good. We can't do that if we don't have scientists measuring impacts.

If you can think of a better process than the IPCC, I'd love to hear it.

ABC news reports that Arctic sea ice has hit a record low.

The money quote:

"Five years ago, if you'd gone to a conference of scientists and said, 'by 2013 the Arctic sea ice in summertime is going to be gone,' you might have been laughed out of the room," he said.

"No one is laughing now."

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the 2008 melt season was the higher-than-average retention of first-year sea ice (see earlier entries, including April 7). Relatively thin first-year ice is more prone to melting out completely than older, thicker ice. However, more of this year’s first-year ice survived the melt season than is typical. Sea ice age maps from Sheldon Drobot, our colleague at the University of Colorado at Boulder, show that much more first-year ice survived in 2008 than in 2007. This is one of the reasons that 2008 did not break last year's record-low minimum.

One cause of the high first-year ice survival rate was that this summer was cooler than in 2007. Lower temperatures slowed the melt rate in the early part of the season. While conditions in August favored rapid ice loss, they were not enough to make up for this early-season "cushion."

From the report you linked to above:

NSIDC Senior Scientist Mark Serreze said, “When you look at the sharp decline that we’ve seen over the past thirty years, a ‘recovery’ from lowest to second lowest is no recovery at all. Both within and beyond the Arctic, the implications of the decline are enormous.”

...

In the end, however, summer conditions worked together to save some first-year ice from melting and to cushion the thin pack from the effects of sunlight and warm ocean waters. This summer’s weather did not provide the “perfect storm” for ice loss seen in 2007: temperatures were lower than 2007, although still higher than average (Figure 5); cloudier skies protected the ice from some melt; a different wind pattern spread the ice pack out, leading to higher extent numbers. Simply put, the natural variability of short-term weather patterns provided enough of a brake to prevent a new record-low ice extent from occurring.

NSIDC Research Scientist Julienne Stroeve said, “I find it incredible that we came so close to beating the 2007 record—without the especially warm and clear conditions we saw last summer. I hate to think what 2008 might have looked like if weather patterns had set up in a more extreme way. ”

The melt season of 2008 reinforces the decline of Arctic sea ice documented over the past thirty years (Figure 6). NSIDC Lead Scientist Ted Scambos said, “The trend of decline in the Arctic continues, despite this year's slightly greater extent of sea ice. The Arctic is more vulnerable than ever.”

So, the Arctic had cloudier skies than in 2007. Are you trying to suggest that this is proof of global cooling???

I'm much more interested in what happened to the Greenland ice sheet last summer. Anyone know?

I was not claiming that cloudy and colder seasons means no loss in ice.

I was pointing out the headline was a little bit of sensationalisim when buried in the article on page 2 (i did not see it the first time) you find the following

"2007 broke the record for the lowest extent of sea ice, and 2008 came in second. The third-lowest year on record is 2005, part of a dramatic downward trend that has lasted three decades and doesn't appear to be slowing. "

While their headline reports... "Arctic Sea Ice Shrinks to Record Low"

That was the only point I was trying to make was that their hedline was an attention graber that was false.

Secondarily it seems that the ice is still melting at a fast clip while the planet's temperature is steady.

I would assume that is because of warm water, but why is the water temperature increasing out of pace with the atmosphere thus causing theice melt.
Is the increase in Antartic ice pack changing the ocean currents?

No point to the questions just questions. Thought maybe you might have some on hand knowledge, rather than me searching forever.

Okay, a couple of quick points. The ABC article's headline referenced the Arctic ice volume, not acreage. The Sat photos record acreage. The volume has apparently reached an all-time low. You are right, however, to criticize the copy editor as the word "apparently" should have been in the head and not just the sub-head.

The ice is melting rapidly because of solar gain. Ice is much more reflective than water. Water therefore absorbs more energy from the sun and speeds the melting of the ice.

I wonder when we are going to see some honest attempts at dealing with the solar gain. For years we've been reading about various methods from deploying solar shields in space to seeding clouds. One would think they'd try SOMETHING before the Arctic ice disappears completely.

It sure is getting exciting.....

The only planet I care about is Uranus.