Can the greenhouse sceptics please get with the plot?
February 12th, 2007
The Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made headlines by concluding there is a 90% chance that human activities are the main driver of global warming. The conservative report is laced with terms such as ‘likely’, ‘more than likely’ and ‘very likely’ when assessing the known global indicators such as hurricane intensity, temperature rise and sea levels.
Yet if the blogs of major newspapers are any indication, most advocates of the old fossil fuel economy have not read the report and are still trotting out anti-greenhouse arguments based on pseudo-scientific ‘factoids’.
The report is also conservative because it deliberately does not take into account much of the ice sheet melt now taking place, mainly because the data are insufficient for strict scientific evidence.
But Australian of the Year Tim Flannery has pointed out that the IPCC stopped its data collection at 2005. Since then, ice sheet melt had accelerated alarmingly.
While this is still not absolute proof, it is yet another of the global indicators which all point in the same direction. Even some greenhouse sceptics are starting to talk in slightly greener terms as, one by one, their furphies are rebutted.
One of these furphies, that ‘all this has happened before and it’s part of a natural cycle’ is put to rest. The report explains that indeed global temperatures shot up 25,000 years ago and average sea levels rose 6-7 metres. But that was caused by differences in the earth’s orbit around the sun and not by any greenhouse effect. At the time, carbon dioxide levels were much lower than today, at around the same levels they had been for the past 650,000 years.
But now, since industrialisation, carbon levels have suddenly skyrocketed and so has global warming. The comparative graphs are clones of each other. Maybe there is no causal effect but it’s MORE LIKELY there is, to use the report’s careful approach to terminology.
So while the report limits itself to predictions of relatively minor sea level rises, there is a precedent for rises of 6-7 metres. If this were due to cosmic influences there would be little we could do about such massive destruction of our civilisations. But if it is due to our own activities we would be crazy to continue down our high-consumption fossil-fuelled trajectory.
Yet even now the fossil-fuel industry is offering scientists $US10,000 for each published paper which
casts doubt on the IPCC report. So check the sources of anything you read (including this!).
Meanwhile we could have Sydney 100% solar-powered within a few years using proven solar thermal technology, ‘just in case’ the IPCC is right.
Or we could keep acting like ostriches, and hope…
To download the 21-page summary of the IPCC report, click below.
