Thursday, September 30, 2010

Its a strange world we live in

It is indeed a bizarro world we seem to live in these days when those opposing the science of climate change hail the new Royal Society document Climate Change a Summary of the Science as a victory for their side. It appears to start with an article from The Times and then was picked up by the usual suspects.

The Times article has disappeared behind a paywall but the little description on its front page says Britain’s leading scientific institution admits there is greater uncertainty over future temperature rises than previously thought.

I am not sure where they get this from, from reading between the lines it appears there may be an earlier statement from the Royal Society where they didn't put in enough words like probably or with a high probability. If so the language may be a little clearer in the new one.

But it is very obvious if you read the document that the Royal Society acknowledges the work of the IPCC is accurate and thorough. It acknowledges that the IPCC is the most comprehensive source of climate science and its uncertainties.

It talks about the strengths and weaknesses of climate models and concludes that From such simulations, one can derive the characteristics of climate likely to occur in future decades, including mean temperature and temperature extremes.

Recently, one of the new cries has been that climate models can't simulate clouds well. That is a valid observation and as the Royal Society report says Climate models indicate that the overall climate sensitivity (for a hypothetical doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere) is likely to lie in the range 2oC to 4.5oC; this range is mainly due to the difficulties in simulating the overall effect of the response of clouds to climate change mentioned earlier.

Lots of good stuff in the report. I encourage anyone interested in the science to give it a read. Scientists doing science - perhaps we can seem more of this instead of the ridiculous probaganda attacks we have seen recently.

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