Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won't have enough water, top scientists will say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

At the same time, tens of millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and sea levels, according to portions of a draft of an international scientific report obtained by The Associated Press.

Tropical diseases like malaria will spread. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. Pests like fire ants will thrive.

For a time, food will be plentiful because of the longer growing season in northern regions. But by 2080, hundreds of millions of people could face starvation, according to the report, which is still being revised.

The draft document by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focuses on global warming's effects and is the second in a series of four being issued this year. Written and reviewed by more than 1,000 scientists from dozens of countries, it still must be edited by government officials.

parados wrote:

To say they have no value would mean that any argument that they won't happen has no value as a scientific prediction. Any model that shows the climate cooling or not accelerating is subject to the exact same doubt you attribute to the hypothesis you consider extreme.

Since we can apply no probability to the extreme arguments it means we can apply no probability to any arguments. This would mean science can have no predictive value ever.

No, you are wrong. The scientific evaluation of the predictions of the global numerical weather model, and similar models used to forecast doomsday global warming, is that they have no scientific value as predictions. This is the result of the sensitive dependence on initial conditions -- a mathematical discovery that was made in the mid 1960s and which led to the development of a larger more developed theory of chaos in the following decades. Not all mathematical models are subject to chaos. The conditions that can lead to it are now well-known. They are the presence of strong non-linear, coupled components and a parabolic structure among the dimensional derivitives (terms of art used in differential equations, each having very specific meanings).

Science does indeed have predictive value. That is precisely because it is careful enough to identify those areas in which it has none. This is one of those areas.

More doomsday nonsense based on vague subjective predictions, with no detectable scientific basis for them offered, and no evaluation of the costs required to address the imagined problem. Even the governments that support this kind of "study" and unctiously mouth its dire predictions, seem strangely and persistently unwilling to act on these expressed beliefs. It must be George Bush's fault.

No argument that HIV infection isn't widespread, contageous and dangerous. It kills lots of people, and has a slow deadly progress while carriers remain infectuous. Similar things can be said aout tuberculosis and malaria, each of which kill far more people worldwide.

However the history of the AIDS epidemic is replete with examples of denial, hysteria, and misinformation. Initially groups most affected and threatened by the disease exibited strong denial about its infectuous character and the evident concentration of infection among them. (no conspiracy - just human nature and denial). Later, exaggerated claims about the expected spread of infection were widely made. Despite its persistence, the disease, deadly as it is. has not lived up to those exaggerated predictions. We have seen how an otherwise enlightened government in South Africa wasted time resources and lives in denial and fantasy about cause and remedy. We have also seen how another African government in Uganda achieved rapid and effective limitation of the disease's spread by simple self-directed measures of public education and awareness - occasionally even ignoring the prescriptions of the favored measures of international activists.

Why is Uganda interesting?
Uganda is one of the few African countries where rates of HIV infection have declined, and it is seen as a rare example of success in a continent facing a severe AIDS crisis. Uganda's policies are credited with helping to bring adult HIV prevalence (the proportion of adults living with HIV) down from around 15% in the early 1990s to around 5% in 2001. At the end of 2005, UNAIDS estimates that 6.7% of adults were living with the virus. The country is seen as having implemented a well-timed and successful public education campaign.1

Gradually, more and more countries around the world are starting to realise that they must take decisive action if they are to avert a major AIDS crisis. More and more money is being channelled into Africa, especially by the US which has pledged $15 billion to fight AIDS in resource-poor countries. Uganda is lucky enough to be one of the countries on President Bush's list and, given the decline that has been seen in its HIV prevalence, is being held up as an example of good planning and action that others should emulate.

But the results seen in Uganda don't have a simple recipe, and with so many lives and such large sums of money at stake, it is important to look carefully at what has been done there.

Statistics: Worldwide

Last updated November 2006

A total of 39.5 million people now live with HIV/AIDS

2.2 million of them are under the age of 15

In 2006, an estimated 4.3 million people were infected with HIV

530,000 were under the age of 15

Every day 12,000 people contract HIV - 500 every hour.

In 2006, 2.9 million people died from AIDS
380,000 of them were under the age of 15. That's one child dying per minute.

15 million children around the world have been orphaned by AIDS, losing one or both parents to the disease.

Global Challenges | Number of People Worldwide Living With HIV/AIDS Increases in All Regions; Nearly 40M People Have Virus, UNAIDS/WHO Report Says
[Nov 21, 2006]
The number of people living with HIV/AIDS over the past two years has increased and the worldwide total now stands at nearly 40 million, according to a report released on Tuesday by UNAIDS and the World Health Organization, Reuters UK reports. The report, titled "AIDS Epidemic Update: December 2006," estimates that 4.3 million new HIV infections occurred worldwide this year and that about 2.9 million people died of AIDS-related illnesses. The report compared adjusted figures from 2004 rather than from 2005 because of changes in methodology and data (Nebehay, Reuters UK, 11/21). According to the report, 40% of new infections among people age 15 and older occurred among young people ages 15 to 24 (Baert, AFP/Yahoo! News, 11/21). In addition, there were 2.8 million new HIV infections in Africa in 2006, and 2.1 million people on the continent died of AIDS-related illnesses, the report said (Reuters, 11/21). The most evident increases in HIV incidence occurred in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, with a nearly 70% increase in new infections over the past two years, according to the report (BBC News, 11/21). The number of new HIV infections in South and Southeast Asia increased by 15% since 2004, and the number of new infections in North Africa and the Middle East since 2004 increased by 12%, according to the report. The number of new HIV infections in Latin America and the Caribbean and North America remained stable. In addition, the number of HIV-positive women worldwide has reached 17.7 million, an increase of more than one million over the past two years, the report said. In sub-Saharan Africa, women account for 59% of people living with HIV/AIDS (Engeler, AP/Kansas City Star, 11/21).

There may be a type of cultural AIDs.

I bet you didn't think of that Foxy.

So george, what is the likelyhood of next June 13th having a high of -30 degrees F in New Orleans? Now tell me what the likelyhood is that it will be 80 degrees? I can't predict what that temperature will be exactly because of chaos theory. I think we can both agree that the second temperature is much more likely than the first.

There is a difference between probability and predictability. Chaos theory means I can't predict where the ball on a roulette wheel will fall on a given spin. But probability theory tells me the likelyhood of it falling into the 00. If I put a second 00 on the wheel, I still can't predict based on chaos theory but I have changed the probability of the ball falling on the 00. I can quite easily figure that probability.

2007, the year that spring stole a surprise March on summer

Juliette Jowit
Sunday March 11, 2007
The Observer

It's early March and spring is in full bloom. Indeed for many plants it is almost over; for others it never seems to stop.
A record of how the seasons have changed over the last 50 years has been produced by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew showing that almost all of 100 monitored plants have started to flower and fruit earlier, in some cases by more than a month. One type of narcissus has brought forward its flowering from the second week in March to late January. More anecdotally, this year a spring crocus was found flowering on New Year's Day, and an English oak tree has been in leaf all winter.

The Kew records are believed to be the longest comprehensive collection of such information - but they happened only because one man made it his lifetime's work. Nigel Hepper began collecting dates of the first flowers and leaves when he was growing up in Leeds in the 1940s and 1950s. After getting a job at Kew, he kept up his diaries both at home in Richmond and at work, going out with his notebooks in his lunch hour. Hepper carried on for years after he retired before he offered his priceless collection to the Gardens.
Kew has now selected 100 species for which it has the best records and analysed the figures. It plans to publish the results on the internet. Of those 100, a few have not changed their first flowering because, according to Dr Nigel Taylor, the Gardens' curator, they are triggered by a change in length of days rather than temperatures. The six-week change to the Narcissus pseudonarcissus daffodil in Kew's woodland garden, however, is among the most extreme.

The Met Office last week forecast a '70 per cent' chance that this spring would be hotter than average. Climate scientists have also predicted that this year could be the warmest since records began in 1850. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has estimated that the growing season in Britain - when temperatures stay above 5C for at least five days in a row - has extended since the Second World War from about 250 days to 280 days. In 2000 it peaked at 330 days.

Well good luck Walter. Has any EU country even come close to meeting their goals originally scheduled after signing Kyoto? Is it reasonable to think they will then meet even more strict and tougher to meet goals? How about the USA saying that it will emit NO greenhouse gasses of any kind by 2010? Would that make anybody happy? We could say that just as easily as anybody can say anything.

But if your new goals are what you want to do, power to you. If it doesn't harm your economy it will certainly do no harm. I wish you well.

Robin McKie, your veteran science editor, was quite right to criticise the Channel 4 programme, The Great Global Warming Swindle (Comment, last week). This programme misrepresented the state of scientific knowledge on global warming, claiming climate scientists are presenting lies. This is an outrageous statement.

The physics of the greenhouse effect is well understood: water vapour in the atmosphere, and to a lesser extent naturally occurring carbon dioxide, warms the planet by about 30C. Humans are adding to the amount of carbon dioxide and, by the same physics, warming the planet further.

Other factors do affect our climate, such as variations in the sun's energy and volcanic eruptions and we do not dismiss them. But their net effect is small. The observed warming has been caused predominantly by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

We defend the right of people to be sceptical, but for C4 to imply that the thousands of scientists and published peer-reviewed papers, summarised in the recent international science assessment, are misguided or lying lacks scientific credibility and simply beggars belief.

Alan Thorpe, Natural Environment Research Council
Brian Hoskins, University of Reading
Jo Haigh, Imperial College London
Myles Allen, University of Oxford
Peter Cox, University of Exeter
Colin Prentice QUEST Programme

re the program on Channel 4 Foxfyre mentioned earlier:



From "Letters" in today's The Observer (not online, copied/pasted)

Quote:

Robin McKie, your veteran science editor, was quite right to criticise the Channel 4 programme, The Great Global Warming Swindle (Comment, last week). This programme misrepresented the state of scientific knowledge on global warming, claiming climate scientists are presenting lies. This is an outrageous statement.

The physics of the greenhouse effect is well understood: water vapour in the atmosphere, and to a lesser extent naturally occurring carbon dioxide, warms the planet by about 30C. Humans are adding to the amount of carbon dioxide and, by the same physics, warming the planet further.

Other factors do affect our climate, such as variations in the sun's energy and volcanic eruptions and we do not dismiss them. But their net effect is small. The observed warming has been caused predominantly by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

We defend the right of people to be sceptical, but for C4 to imply that the thousands of scientists and published peer-reviewed papers, summarised in the recent international science assessment, are misguided or lying lacks scientific credibility and simply beggars belief.

Alan Thorpe, Natural Environment Research Council
Brian Hoskins, University of Reading
Jo Haigh, Imperial College London
Myles Allen, University of Oxford
Peter Cox, University of Exeter
Colin Prentice QUEST Programme

I wonder how one "defends the right of people to be sceptical' while beggaring belief when the people are? Are they not saying the 'sceptics' are misguided or lying?

Also the signers of the letter are stating some things as absolutes with no qualifications or margin for error when even the IPCC was not willing to do that. Should that not give people at least pause for thought re the importance of this joint statement?

To present valid data disputing whatever evidence is shown in the program is one thing and would be commendable. But to join with those who seem to be saying that the skeptics should have no voice at all is quite another thing and, to me, is alarming. I think valid science should never adopt a single view and refuse to consider any other. That may not be the intent of those signing the letter, but it would be easy to take it that way.

We have quite a bit of commentary from people disputing a lot of the science in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". I wonder if this group presumed to defend any of them in their critiques?

Foxfyre wrote:

I wonder how one "defends the right of people to be sceptical' while beggaring belief when the people are? Are they not saying the 'sceptics' are misguided or lying?

Also the signers of the letter are stating some things as absolutes with no qualifications or margin for error when even the IPCC was not willing to do that. Should that not give people at least pause for thought re the importance of this joint statement?

To present valid data disputing whatever evidence is shown in the program is one thing and would be commendable. But to join with those who seem to be saying that the skeptics should have no voice at all is quite another thing and, to me, is alarming. I think valid science should never adopt a single view and refuse to consider any other. That may not be the intent of those signing the letter, but it would be easy to take it that way.

We have quite a bit of commentary from people disputing a lot of the science in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". I wonder if this group presumed to defend any of them in their critiques?

Well, certainly you may critisise those for their letter to the Observer's editor.

And certainly you have some right to critise the work and science done at/by the Natural Environment Research Council, the University of Reading, the Imperial College London, the University of Oxford, the University of Exeter and the QUEST Programme.

But then can refer to it and their publications as well, I think.

I just did. They were unprofessional in stating absolutes that cannot be proved to be absolutes.

Foxfyre wrote:

I just did. They were unprofessional in stating absolutes that cannot be proved to be absolutes.

Seems that Letters to the Editor are different in papers I read (including your local Albuquerque Journal, the Washington Times, the Jerusalem Post ... ...) than those you have here in mind.

It's actually quite a long one.