A few links for anyone interested.
The Bush government's
hand-picked climate change expert, Dr Rajendra Pachaurihas, is trying to get global warming taken seriously in the US (bless.) But with a
little help it looks like they may have managed to spin it into another attack on the IPCC and more importantly the UN.
Meanwhile, the “
Biggest-ever climate simulation” predicts climate-change could be far worse than the experts have predicted.
Some choice quotes from the above articles for non-clickers:
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if humanity is to "survive".
His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue.
Why should Exxon have such influence?
"It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming," he wrote. "My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy."
Says the guy who blames periodic climate shifts and slight warming of the ocean for the increase in hurricanes... How could global warming not have an effect?
Policies aimed at keeping greenhouse-gas levels below a safe threshold may miss the point, says team member Myles Allen, a physicist at the University of Oxford. Uncertainty over global warming may mean that no such threshold can be determined; rather, we may need to keep cutting greenhouse gases for many years to come. "The danger zone is not something in the future," he says. "We're in it now."
-zudo
