Evidence Builds That Scientists Underplay Climate Impacts
thinkprogress.orgThe warnings were dire: 188 predictions showing that climate-induced changes to the environment would put 7 percent of all plant and animal species on the globe – one out of every 14 critters – at risk of extinction.
Predictions like these have earned climate scientists the obloquy from critics for being “alarmist” – dismissed for using inflated descriptions of doom and destruction to push for action, more grant money or a global government.
But as the impacts of climate change become apparent, many predictions are proving to underplay the actual impacts. Reality, in many instances, is proving to be far worse than most scientists expected.
“We’re seeing mounting evidence now that the scientific community, rather than overstating the claim or being alarmist, is the opposite,” said Naomi Oreskes, a science historian with the University of California, San Diego. “Scientists have been quite conservative … in a lot of important and different areas.”
A decade ago scientists predicted the Arctic wouldn’t be ice-free in summer until 2100. But the extent of summer ice in the North has rapidly shrunk and today covers 70 percent of the area it did in 1979. Now some scientists think the Arctic could be naught but open water within 25 years.
In August, a team lead by University of York researcher Chris Thomas published a study showing that plants and animals are moving to higher elevations twice as fast as predicted in response to rising temperatures. They’re migrating north three times faster than expected, they found
As for extinctions, earlier this year two scientists at the University of Exeter paired predicted versus observed annihilation rates. The real-world rates are more than double what the best computer modeling showed: While the studies, on average, warned of a 7 percent extinction rate, field observations suggested the rate was closer to 15 percent.
Oreskes has spent a career studying climate science. She finds ample evidence that climate scientists are indeed biased – just not in the way portrayed by politicians such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who claimed scientists paint a bleak picture to secure more research funding.
In reality, Oreskes said, scientists skew their results away from worst-case, doomsday scenarios. “Many people in the scientific community have felt that it’s important to be conservative – that it protects your credibility,” she said. “There’s a low-end bias. It has led scientists to understate, rather than overstate, the impacts.”
Fox News' Top 10 Climate Science Distortions And Fabrications | Media Matters
mediamatters.org1. Global warming “doesn’t exist”
2. 2009 was “the coldest year on record”
3. “Nearly all of the [Arctic] ice has returned”
4. “How can there be global warming if it’s snowing and it’s bitterly cold?”
5. “The Earth is actually cooling now”
6. Hacked emails prove scientists are “doctoring” data to exaggerate global warming
7. El Nino is the cause of warming of the past 30 years
8. Climate science warned of global cooling in the 1970s
9. “NASA acknowledges solar cycle, not man, responsible for global warming”
10. Phil Jones told BBC that “the Middle Ages were warmer than the climate now”
NASA scientist: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable.”
thinkprogress.orgImagine what it will be like when much of the South is like this most of the time (other than the occasional record-smashing deluge) — and temperatures are some 9°F to 11°F warmer on average. It will be the great repopulation of the North.
Hansen also has a new paper out on climate change in which he says:
It is time for all of us to get Tea-Party-angry about what our political system has become and about the intergenerational injustice being perpetrated on young people.
And if you think the South looks bad, check out the future drought maps of Europe…
“To avoid passing tipping points, such as initiation of the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, we need to limit the climate forcing severely. It's still possible to do that, if we phase down carbon emissions rapidly, but that means moving expeditiously to clean energies of the future. ... Moving to tar sands, one of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet, is a step in exactly the opposite direction, indicating either that governments don't understand the situation or that they just don't give a damn. ... People who care should draw the line.”
—Scientific American interviewed NASA climatologist James Hansen, who has been warning about the dangers of climate change since 1988, about the proposed construction of the Keystone Pipeline XL to transport oil from Canadian tar sands to the United States. We’ll be talking about Keystone, and the president’s renewed interest in combating climate change, this weekend.
Open Climate 101 Online | RealClimate
forecast.uchicago.eduAre you curious about the science of climate change but you don’t have much of a science background? I’m sure that you’d enjoy this open-source learning site, which was created by climate scientists and university professors David Archer and Ray Pierrehumbert for a general education science class geared towards non-science majors. The online course allows you to access online quizzes, tests, the textbook and other interactive content for free!
Streaming live TONIGHT: 'Climate Change Communicator of the Year', Naomi Oreskes
pics.uvic.caThe Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions has hosted an impressive line-up of climate change researchers over the last two years, but tonight they are hosting a biggie:
Speaker: Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies, University of California San Diego, author and 2011 Climate Change Communicator of the Year
Description: Find out why people mistakenly believe the science of climate change is unsettled. In Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway revealed how a group of high-level scientists, with extensive political connections, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over issues including acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming, DDT, and the harms of tobacco.
This long campaign of sowing doubt, which found its roots in the ideology of free market fundamentalism, has skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.
Time & Location: Mon. June 27, 7:30 - 9:00 pm | Flury Hall (B150), Bob Wright Centre, University of Victoria
You can watch a live webcast of Oreskes’ lecture starting at 7:30pm Pacific time.
Climate change will shake the Earth
guardian.co.uk
The idea that a changing climate can persuade the ground to shake, volcanoes to rumble and tsunamis to crash on to unsuspecting coastlines seems, at first, to be bordering on the insane. How can what happens in the thin envelope of gas that shrouds and protects our world possibly influence the potentially Earth-shattering processes that operate deep beneath the surface? The fact that it does reflects a failure of our imagination and a limited understanding of the manner in which the different physical components of our planet – the atmosphere, the oceans, and the solid Earth, or geosphere – intertwine and interact.
If we think about climate change at all, most of us do so in a very simplistic way: so, the weather might get a bit warmer; floods and droughts may become more of a problem and sea levels will slowly creep upwards. Evidence reveals, however, that our planet is an almost unimaginably complicated beast, which reacts to a dramatically changing climate in all manner of different ways; a few – like the aforementioned – straightforward and predictable; some surprising and others downright implausible. Into the latter category fall the manifold responses of the geosphere.
The world we inhabit has an outer rind that is extraordinarily sensitive to change. While the Earth’s crust may seem safe and secure, the geological calamities that happen with alarming regularity confirm that this is not the case. Here in the UK, we only have to go back a couple years to April 2010, when the word on everyone’s lips was Eyjafjallajökull – the ice-covered Icelandic volcano that brought UK and European air traffic to a grinding halt. Less than a year ago, our planet’s ability to shock and awe headed the news once again as the east coast of Japan was bludgeoned by a cataclysmic combination of megaquake and tsunami, resulting – at a quarter of a trillion dollars or so – in the biggest natural-catastrophe bill ever.
In the light of such events, it somehow seems appropriate to imagine the Earth beneath our feet as a slumbering giant that tosses and turns periodically in response to various pokes and prods. Mostly, these are supplied by the stresses and strains associated with the eternal dance of a dozen or so rocky tectonic plates across the face of our world; a sedate waltz that proceeds at about the speed that fingernails grow. Changes in the environment too, however, have a key role to play in waking the giant, as growing numbers of geological studies targeting our post-ice age world have disclosed. [read more]
| words by Bill McGuire
Diamond planets, climate change and the scientific method
theconversation.edu.auRecently my colleagues and I announced the discovery of a remarkable planet orbiting a special kind of star known as a pulsar. […] we had discovered a planet made of diamond.
[…] our research received amazing attention from the world’s media. The diamond planet was featured in Time Magazine, the BBC and China Daily, to name but a few.
I was asked by many journalists about the significance of the discovery. If I were honest, I’d have to concede that, although worthy of publication in Science, in the field of astrophysics it isn’t that significant. […] it isn’t that important.
And yet the diamond planet has been hugely successful in igniting public curiosity about the universe in which we live.
In that sense, for myself and my co-authors, I suspect it will be among the greatest discoveries of our careers. […] The attention we received was 100% positive, but how different that could have been. How so? Well, we could have been climate scientists.
Imagine for a minute that, instead of discovering a diamond planet, we’d made a breakthrough in global temperature projections.
[…] Instead of sitting back and basking in the glory, I suspect we’d find a lot of commentators, many with no scientific qualifications, pouring scorn on our findings.
People on the fringe of science would be quoted as opponents of our work, arguing that it was nothing more than a theory yet to be conclusively proven.
[…] Before long our credibility and findings would be under serious question.
[…] It may come as a big surprise to many, but there is actually no difference between how science works in astronomy and climate change – or any other scientific discipline for that matter.
We make observations, run simulations, test and propose hypotheses, and undergo peer review of our findings.
We get together […] and discuss and debate our own pet theories, […]
If you are a solid state physicist, an astronomer, or doing laser optics, the world is happy to celebrate your discoveries, use them in new products such as WiFi, and wonder about the growth in knowledge and technology.
[…] Sadly, the same media commentators who celebrate diamond planets without question are all too quick to dismiss the latest peer-reviewed evidence that suggests man-made activities are responsible for changes in concentrations of CO2 in our atmosphere.
The scientific method is universal. If we selectively ignore it in certain disciplines, we do so at our peril.
If you are interested in science and science communication, read this article by Matthew Bailes.
16 climate deniers gain an audience at the WSJ
16 scientists signed their names to a piece in the WSJ today which claimed that there is no scientific reason to decarbonize our economy and that climate change is not a public threat. Now, this is obviously another iteration of denialism. And it is disappointing that the WSJ continues to provide a platform for an excruciatingly small minority of the scientific community. It’s analogous to medical doctors denying the carcinogenic nature of cigarettes and then being given a platform within the media to spout such dangerous ideology. Very disappointing indeed. This minority of anti-climate scientists, who continue to find voice at the national level, will be judged very sternly by history. In 50-100 years, our society will look back at the people who willfully stalled the political process at such an important time. And they will be villified as the most sloppy and harmful scientists of their generation. Same thing for the obstructionistic, anti-science media and the political leaders they support.
