The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has released a draft (the proposed chapter outine can be found at this .pdf file link) of the second of 4 scientific reports to be included as part of its “Climate Change 2007” Fourth Assessment Report. This document, prepared by the IPCC’s Working Group II, is titled: Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerabilities. Based on the efforts of roughly 1000 scientists, this draft report is not likely to change significantly when the final version is approved early next month. The draft report’s findings are alarming, to say the least:
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The report includes these likely results of global warming:
• Hundreds of millions of Africans and tens of millions of Latin Americans who now have water will be short of it in less than 20 years. By 2050, more than 1 billion people in Asia could face water shortages. By 2080, water shortages could threaten 1.1 billion to 3.2 billion people, depending on the level of greenhouse gases that cars and industry spew into the air.
• Death rates for the world’s poor from global warming-related illnesses, such as malnutrition and diarrhea, will rise by 2030. Malaria and dengue fever, as well as illnesses from eating contaminated shellfish, are likely to grow.
• Europe’s small glaciers will disappear with many of the continent’s large glaciers shrinking dramatically by 2050. And half of Europe’s plant species could be vulnerable, endangered or extinct by 2100.
• By 2080, between 200 million and 600 million people could be hungry because of global warming’s effects.
• About 100 million people each year could be flooded by 2080 by rising seas.
• Smog in U.S. cities will worsen and “ozone-related deaths from climate (will) increase by approximately 4.5 percent for the mid-2050s, compared with 1990s levels,” turning a small health risk into a substantial one.
• Polar bears in the wild and other animals will be pushed to extinction.
• At first, more food will be grown. For example, soybean and rice yields in Latin America will increase starting in a couple of years. Areas outside the tropics, especially the northern latitudes, will see longer growing seasons and healthier forests.
Here on some quotes from scientists who worked on this report:
“Things are happening and happening faster than we expected,” said Patricia Romero Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado …
Global warming soon will “affect everyone’s life … it’s the poor sectors that will be most affected,” Romero Lankao said.
And co-author Terry Root of Stanford University said: “We truly are standing at the edge of mass extinction” of species. […]
“This is the story. This is the whole play. This is how it’s going to affect people. The science is one thing. This is how it affects me, you and the person next door,” said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver.
Water shortages, disease, starvation, mass extinction events, floods, hundreds of millions of refugees from coastal areas, etc. This is a recipe for mass migrations and innumerable conflicts over scarce resources. How many people will die as a direct or indirect result of global warming over the next century is anyone’s guess, but with water shortages expected to effect from 1.1 to 3.2 billion people by the year 2050, I suspect any reasonable estimate would have to place that number in the hundreds of millions.
With so many reputable scientists claiming that such massive human and ecological disasters are highly likely to occur unless we act quickly toc urb our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, is it any wonder that the cottage industry of global warming deniers have been out in full force of late? Here’s the latest from a climate change sceptic and so-called scientific expert, Phillip Stott, Emeritus Professor at the University of London (via ABC News):
Extreme weather events are ever present, and there is no evidence of systematic increases. Outside the tropics, variability should decrease in a warmer world. If this is a “crisis,” then the world is in permanent “crisis,” but will be less prone to “crisis” with warming. […]
Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age, most rapidly about 12,000 years ago. In recent centuries, the average rate has been relatively uniform. The rate was higher during the first half of the 20th century than during the second. At around a couple of millimeters per year, it is a residual of much larger positive and negative changes locally. The risk from global warming is less than that from other factors (primarily geological).
The impact on agriculture is equivocal. India warmed during the second half of the 20th century, yet agricultural output increased markedly. The impact on disease is dubious. Infectious diseases, like malaria, are not so much a matter of temperature as of poverty and public health. Malaria remains endemic in Siberia, and was once so in Michigan and Europe. Exposure to cold is generally more dangerous. […]
The global warming “crisis” is misguided. In hubristically seeking to “control” climate, we foolishly abandon age-old adaptations to inexorable change. There is no way we can predictably manage this most complex of coupled, nonlinear chaotic systems. The inconvenient truth is that “doing something” (emitting gases) at the margins and “not doing something” (not emitting gases) are equally unpredictable.
Climate change is a norm, not an exception. It is both an opportunity and a challenge. The real crises for 4 billion people in the world remain poverty, dirty water and the lack of a modern energy supply. By contrast, global warming represents an ecochondria of the pampered rich.
We can no longer afford to cling to the anti-human doctrines of outdated environmentalist thinking. The “crisis” is the global warming political agenda, not climate change.
Most of his argument, by the way is false, or misstates the results of current research by climate scientists. No one is arguing that climate change has been occurring since the earth was created, it is the accelerating rate of that change over the last 150 years, an observable fact that few deny, which is abnormal and proving to be dangerous to all forms of life on this planet.
As for Stott’s claim that the growth in diseases like malaria are unrelated to global warming, but merely correspond to the poverty of the nations in which they occur, that is a pure canard. It is true that the effects of malaria are felt most significantly in poorer countries, but the spread of the disease outside of it’s traditional tropical ecosystems is directly correlated with the rise in regional temperatures caused by global warming.
Here in New York where I live, we now have an increasing number of insect borne disease vectors, like West Nile virus, which used to occur primarily in tropical and sub-tropical regions. That is directly attributable to a warmer climate and a lengthier warm season in which mosquitos which spread the diseases can breed, because our winters have become shorter and milder over the past 25 years. The same is true for other temperate zone regions of the world. Indeed, pests of all kinds are on the rise in temperate regions, because the killing effect of winter on those species has diminished to such an extent.
As for Professor Stott’s expert credentials, I imagine that many of you will not be surprised to discover that he has no real experience as a climate scientist. Here’s how the Source Watch article on Professor Stott describes his career and academic background:
Philip Stott is a professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, and he was Editor-in Chief of the international ‘Journal of Biogeography’ (Blackwell Publications, Oxford) (he retired in 2004 after 18 years).
Since his retirement from academia, he has become a commentator and media pundit on the subject of environmentalism. He publishes a blogsite – EnviroSpin Watch – to monitor UK media coverage of environmental issues and science. “The aim is to assess whether a subject is being fairly covered by press, radio, and television. … It will also bring to public notice good science that is being ignored because it may be politically inconvenient,” the site states. […]
Stott’s dominant theme is that environmentalism is a “hegemonic myth” promulgated in the media by reporters who are subconsiously controlled by the dominant language (“words of magic”). For example, he says, “forests are never ‘developed’ or simply ‘used’; they can only be ‘exploited'”.
Stott uses his “linguistic analysis” approach to promote an “environmental” agenda similar to that promoted by Bjorn Lomborg. He stresses the possible benefits of genetic engineering; questions attempts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions; and argues that the ‘tropical rain forest’, as signified in popular parlance, is a socially-constructed myth. He has also criticised recycling as “ideological rubbish”. […]
While Stott disputes the consensus of the worlds leading climate scientists, he notably avoided responding to the challenge that he had no climate science qualifications. In response, Stott commented to SourceWatch that “he does not challenge the consensus that climate is changing (and partly under human influence); what he challenges is our understanding of the complexity of this change, the historic significance of the change, and the way humans might respond best to change, all of which has been at the heart of his professional work as a biogeographer for the last 30 years. He is thus entirely confident of his credentials to comment on climate change sensu lato.”
Stott’s primary area of research, according to the website of the University of London, is “the construction of environmental knowledge over the last 30 years, especially in relation to the following metanarratives: biodiversity, biotechnology, climate change (global warming), organic agriculture, and tropical rain forests (see edited book: Political ecology: science, myth and power). He is especially concerned to unravel the power relations within and between these narratives.”
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Despite his utter lack of any experience related to ongoing research and studies in climate science and related fields, Professor Stott nonetheless is awarded expert status by the mainstream media such as ABC, and allowed to propagate his misinformation regarding the research results of actual climate scientists. He is given a megaphone to broadcast his list of phony talking points so that the media’s false narrative of a “global warming controversy” can continue to be foisted on the non-scientific public.
In that regard, perhaps Professor Stott, with his “linguistic approach” to analyzing environmental science, and his study of “metanarratives” regarding “biodiversity and biotechnology and global warming” is the perfect pundit for the job. Who needs a real scientist when you can employ an expert in deconstructing the language of scientists, instead? Thus does the media counter the dominant and overwhelming scientific consensus, as represented by the IPCC report on global climate change, that man made global warming is changing the planet in ways that are harmful to all life: by employing a bullshit artist.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
