This week we’re to get an update from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on how much closer we are to destroying the planet we inhabit since the panel’s last assessment in 2007.
The reported indications are that the IPCC scientists are even more sure than they were last time that human activities have caused more than half the global warming observed since the 1950s — so sure that they’ve substituted their “very likely” in 2007 for “extremely likely” in their latest assessment, according to leaked documents.
Now, I’ve been tracking the minimum temperatures around here for almost a year, and they’ve been consistently well above normal. It’s clear — to me, anyway — that the world’s getting hotter.
But there’s a funny thing about global warming: From 1998 to 2012 the rate of warming was about half of what it was since 1951. If the scientists on the intergovernmental panel were tempted to ignore this little detail, they can’t.
Most governments around the globe have been persuaded that the threat of global warming is real, if only because their voting citizens are convinced it is — even if they’re not prepared to do as much as they have to do to combat it.
So as the leaked documents reveal, several national governments reviewing the draft of this week’s report have been putting pressure on the scientists to explain the reduced rate of warming to curb the enthusiasm of climate-change skeptics — and, probably, stop them looking like dupes of Al Gore and the Henny Pennies of the environmental lobby.
Germany wanted the reference to the warming slowdown deleted from the final report, arguing that a 14-year trend is misleading to track changes that must have been going on since before thermometers were invented.
Belgium objected to using 1998 as the start of the lull in surface warming because that was a particularly warm year. Using 1999 or 2000 as a beginning would give a more upward curve — sure, like that laughable hockey-stick graph manufactured for the IPCC’s third assessment report in 2001?
The U.S. government identified the “leading hypothesis” for the cooling of the warming trend that it wants included in the final report: the absorption of heat in the ocean depths. This, of course, raises the question of how much heat the ocean can take.
I have another question: Why are governments presuming to tell the world body of scientists what they should tell the public? Maybe Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s muzzling of federal scientists — a cause of cross-country rallies of protest last Monday — is more honest.
The Union of Concerned Scientists website explains government involvement in IPCC reports this way: Since the report is meant to “inform” international political negotiations on climate issues, governments “as the key stakeholders in these negotiations play an essential role in the report’s production.”
They propose authors and contributors participate in the review process and “help reach a consensus” on its major findings.
“This can result … in language that is sometimes weaker than it otherwise might be,” say the concerned scientists, but at least governments can’t easily dismiss reports that they’ve helped “shape.”
There’s a lot of conspiracy theory in global-warming denial already, so I hope I haven’t done a mischief in explaining this. I respect, still, the integrity of scientists engaged on the panel’s work. I think, still, that their science is “robust,” as they like to say, even if a lot of it has to be educated supposition.
As educated supposition goes, astrobiologists at the University of East Anglia take the prize. They’ve predicted that Earth will be habitable only for another 1.75 billion years or thereabouts.
Between then and 3.25 billion years in the future, our planet will be a “hot zone” because of the sun, they say, and temperatures will be so high that the seas will evaporate and all life forms will face “catastrophic and terminal extinction.”
Human beings will be among the first to go, because they can’t stand even small increases in temperature, increases that they, by their selfish follies, are contributing to.
The IPCC won’t mention this, of course. In a way, it makes their message pretty pointless.
