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Old 10-15-2007, 12:25 PM
Silent A Silent A is offline
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Default Re: Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

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The IPCC. In 2001 they projected 2100 temperatures would be 2.4-10.8C higher. In 2006 the projections are now 1.1-6.4C higher. In the meantime we have had China and India grow to the point China is going to pass the USA as the largest source of CO2 within the next 10 years.

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This ultra-simplistic "argument" of yours completely betrays your lack of understanding of the basic principles behind the Earth Sciences.

However, in case someone here might find your above statement compelling ...

The IPCC reports are based on the results from several climate models under several plausible scenarios. Each scenario is indicative of a certain set of political decisions made over the next 100 years. The decisions include things like:

- population growth rates
- emphasis on either economic growth or pollution control
- rate of introduction of alternative energy sources
- global technological homogenization (or lack thereof)

None of the scenarios are a prediction. Rather it is expected that the scenarios together form a reasonable representation of the choices humanity can make over the next 100 years. I'm pretty sure that these scenarios were identical for the 2001 and 2007 reports, so any recent increases in CO2 is irrelevant for these studies.

One of the scenarios involves relatively rapid population growth, an emphasis on economic growth over pollution control, continued intense fossil fuel use, and global homogenization (i.e. developing countries become more like western industrialized countries). This is a pretty extreme scenario and is meant to address what might happen in a worst-case scenario.

The changes in the temperatures expected under this scenario represents improvements to the climate models over the last 6 years (and they have certainly improved significantly). They certainly don't suggest that there is no link between CO2 and global temperatures since the low emission scenarios still consistently produce less warming than the high emission scenarios. The results you mention only suggest that the worst-case might not be as bad as previously thought.

Also, if this was more about propaganda than science, you'd think they tweak the results to make the worst-case scenario look even worse. The fact that the 2007 IPCC results are less dramatic than the 2001 results doesn't fit well with a propaganda model. The important change is that the uncertainties are decreasing, both in terms of the reality of anthropomorphic climate change and our confidence in the models.

Here is a link to the IPCC FAQ about the 2007 report. It's probably as sensible and accurate an information source as you're going to find:

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/...Print_FAQs.pdf
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