Thursday, October 26, 2006

Go on an eight-week carbon diet. - By Meaghan O'Neill and treehugger.com - Slate Magazine

Go on an eight-week carbon diet. - By Meaghan O'Neill and treehugger.com - Slate Magazine:
"There's no longer any real doubt about it: Global warming is happening. The average temperature of the Earth's surface has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past hundred years, and overwhelming evidence suggests that most of the increase is due to greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide released by humans. Though a 1-degree increase might not seem like much, even a small rise in global temperature significantly changes the climate, potentially resulting in major storms and droughts, disruption of the food supply, and the catastrophic spread of disease."
I call BS. The first part is right, of course, the earth has warmed a degree in the last century. But there is NOT overwhelming evidence that "most" of the warming is caused by GGs. To quote from the International Panel on Climate Change:
From the body of evidence since IPCC
(1996), we conclude that there has been a discernible [a small 1% effect is discernible] human influence on global climate. Studies are beginning [beginning = the science is not settled] to separate the contributions to observed climate change attributable to individual external influences, both anthropogenic and natural. This work suggests [but does not show conclusively] that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are a substantial [substantial could mean 10% or 80% of the contribution, the scale is still unknown] contributor to the observed warming, especially over the past 30years. However, the accuracy of these estimates continues to be limited by uncertainties in estimates of internal variability, natural and anthropogenic forcing, and the climate response to external forcing.

More importantly, there is zer0-zip-nada evidence that modest warming will result in "major storms, droughts, catastophic spread of disease" (which is why Meaghan uses the sneaky word "potentially" when describing these horrors.)

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