Climate Commission: The critical decade
The following is an excerpt from the Climate Commission report, "The Critical Decade: Key messages"
Over many decades thousands of scientists have painted an unambiguous picture: the global climate is changing and humanity is almost surely the primary cause. The risks have never been clearer and the case for action has never been more urgent. Our Earth’s surface is warming rapidly and we can already see social, economic and environmental impacts in Australia.
Failing to take sufficient action today entails potentially huge risks to our economy, society and way of life into the future. This is the critical decade for action. The following points highlight the key messages arising from the accompanying report The Critical Decade:
1. There is no doubt that the climate is changing. The evidence is overwhelming and clear.
– The atmosphere is warming, the ocean is warming, ice is being lost from glaciers and ice caps and sea levels are rising. The biological world is changing in response to a warming world.
– Global surface temperature is rising fast; the last decade was the hottest on record.
2. We are already seeing the social, economic and environmental impacts of a changing climate.
– With less than 1 degree of warming globally the impacts are already being felt in Australia.
– In the last 50 years the number of record hot days in Australia has more than doubled. This has increased the risk of heatwaves and associated deaths, as well as extreme bush fire weather in South Eastern and South
Western Australia.
– Sea level has risen by 20 cm globally since the late 1800s, impacting many coastal communities. Another 20 cm increase by 2050, which is likely at current projections, would more than double the risk of coastal flooding.
– The Great Barrier Reef has suffered from nine bleaching events in the past 31 years. This iconic natural ecosystem, and the economy that depends upon it, face serious risks from climate change.
3. Human activities – the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation – are triggering the changes we are witnessing in the global climate.
– A very large body of observations, experiments, analyses, and physical theory points to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – with carbon dioxide being the most important – as the primary cause of the observed warming.
– Increasing carbon dioxide emissions are primarily produced by the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, as well as deforestation.
– Natural factors, like changes in the Earth’s orbit or solar activity, cannot explain the world-wide warming trend.
4. This is the critical decade. Decisions we make from now to 2020 will determine the severity of climate change our children and grandchildren experience.
– Without strong and rapid action there is a significant risk that climate change will undermine our society’s prosperity, health, stability and way of life.
– To minimise this risk, we must decarbonise our economy and move to clean energy sources by 2050.That means carbon emissions must peak within the next few years and then strongly decline.
– The longer we wait to start reducing carbon emissions, the more difficult and costly those reductions become.
– This decade is critical. Unless effective action is taken, the global climate may be so irreversibly altered we will struggle to maintain our present way of life. The choices we make this decade will shape the long-term climate future for our children and grandchildren.
Comments on this article
Volcanos
Volcanic activity averages less than 1% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions per anum.
Gerlach, TM 2011, 'Volcanic Versus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide', Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, vol 92, no. 24, pp. 201 - 202, viewed 11 July 2011, <http://www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/2011EO240001.pdf>
A Decade of Scientific Ignorance
Science Lesson #1
30km straight up = -250 C (Space)
30km straight down = +600 C (Moho)
Earth Surface (500 Million km2) = 30% Land + 70% Ocean
Land Surface = 20% Desert + 20% Ice + 20% Mountain + 20% Forest + 20% Arable Land (1% Cities)
If you had to determine the earths average temperature at say sea level for want of a better baseline, how many thermometers would it take and where would you put them allowing for the effects of the sun and the earths energy variations?
Now try and find out how many the ICCP have deployed over what length of time and where they are located and compare that to good scientific experimental design principles.
Conclusion...bad experimental design = bad results = bad advice = bad policies.
More sloganeering fron the deniers
It's disappointing to see the silly attacks in the comments here by climate deniers. Maybe a lot of column centimetres can drown a rational argument. But their value doesn't match their froth. It's amazing - you wouldn't go about building your own atomic reactor, but the deniers are quite ready to claim knowledge in another scientific area that's just as complicated. Alas, the Radio Broadcasters’ One Minute School of Climate Science won't help them in the real world.
Realistic readership of The Climate Spectator
It is reassuring to see that despite the unalloyed climate change alarmism of The Climate Spectator, contributors to the conversations on its articles, such as those below, generally introduce a welcome breath of intelligent realism. The taxpayer-funded one-sided Climate Commission's report is shameless - a transparent piece of political propaganda whose every claim can be exposed as arrant nonsense, which Bob Carter et al are now thankfully proceeding to do and we will have their response shortly. I challenge The Climate Spectator to publish it!
Climate CONTROL?
There is wide spread talk now of criminal charges to leading scientists and news editors for the neocon-like false war of climate change and it’s 25 years of needless panic. Meanwhile, climate change has come at the expense of 3rd world fresh water relief, starvation rescue and 3rd world education and population control for just over 25 years of climate crisis warnings and countless billions wasted that could have relieved so much poverty, suffering and injustice in our society.
Call the courthouse for this was an Iraq War for science, journalism and progressivism. My parents told me not to waste because kids were starving in India. Now, it’s “Don’t waste or the planet will die.” SAVE THE PLANET was the grunt of mankind’s most embarrassing era next to sacrificing virgins.
Climate
The vast majority of voters now are former climate change believers and voting for taxes to make the weather colder is not going to happen. Pollution is still a great concern even after defeating the smoggy 70’s when a river caught fire in Ohio but now can be assured we do not have to condemn our children no longer to a death by CO2.
Now we can put the CO2 mistake behind us and face the future challenges of environmental stewardship with confidence, courage and optimism instead of fear of the great unknown like trailer park intellectuals.
Climate Crimes
Strange don’t you think that after 25 years of “catastrophic” warnings, it’s the media that are now left as the only ones acting like climate change is still a global emergency, having to resort to writing their own stories of global gloom instead of the usual lazy copy and paste journalism they excel at so well.
Science has walked away from climate change as we see them watch in silence as Obama never even mentioned the crisis in his state of the union speech and as all American IPCC research funding for climate change science was pulled. If this was real science, the scientists would have been marching in the streets to regain support for their climate mitigation action that they said we needed to avoid their promised h e l l on earth from human CO2.
Bleedingly obvious
@Martin DAVIS: You are right in so much as it may be easier to persuade an icelandic volcano to chill out, than to sway the opinion of jugheads who prefer the convenience of half baked contrarian opinions than the overwhelming and uncontestable science that we are now living in the Anthropocene Epoch... that is, if you believe Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams from the University of Leicester Department of Geology; Will Steffen, Director of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute and Paul Crutzen the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist of Mainz University. According to them, "The Anthropocene represents a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other. Geologically, this is a remarkable episode in the history of this planet."
But who knows, they could be wrong, and Barnaby Joyce could be right, but I stake my money on the science, erm, and the bleedingly obvious...
Global warming
Think you better talk to the Icelandic govt. first and get them to make those damn volcanoes behave themselves first.
The Critical Decade
Helped by a cynical self serving opposition, these dire warnings are like water off a duck's back to a vast number of Australians. It's been critical to take action since the mid 1990's and each year of delay adds to the cost and impact for consumers. While the catch cry continues to be "we will if you will" nothing will happen although judging by the climate change commentary I read other nations are quietly getting on with their adaptions and we are being left behind. By the time we wake up we will have no choice but to pay for the pollution we create on terms set by the advanced economies of the world; and we won't be one of them.