Trajan
conscientia mille testes
or the GW game is worth fronting anymore I guess.....for an advocate who has spent no small amount of ink banging that drum, this is, well, mitigation is quite a turn around. Sounds to me like they are thinking [on], instead of 'feeling' the issue now....
A sensitive matter
The climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean the problem is going away
Mar 30th 2013 |From the print edition
OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earths surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.
Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models range within a few years.
If, however, temperatures are likely to rise by only 2°C in response to a doubling of carbon emissions (and if the likelihood of a 6°C increase is trivial), the calculation might change. Perhaps the world should seek to adjust to (rather than stop) the greenhouse-gas splurge. There is no point buying earthquake insurance if you do not live in an earthquake zone. In this case more adaptation rather than more mitigation might be the right policy at the margin.
more at-
Climate science: A sensitive matter | The Economist
A sensitive matter
The climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean the problem is going away
Mar 30th 2013 |From the print edition
OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earths surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.
Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models range within a few years.
If, however, temperatures are likely to rise by only 2°C in response to a doubling of carbon emissions (and if the likelihood of a 6°C increase is trivial), the calculation might change. Perhaps the world should seek to adjust to (rather than stop) the greenhouse-gas splurge. There is no point buying earthquake insurance if you do not live in an earthquake zone. In this case more adaptation rather than more mitigation might be the right policy at the margin.
more at-
Climate science: A sensitive matter | The Economist
