Climate Change Worse than Predicted

As I reported at the time, when the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published its report, it excluded data prior to the year twenty hundred. This was something the IPCC acknowledged, but the main intention of the report was to examine the science and determine if Climate Change was manmade.

As while anyone who attended the University of the Bleeding Obvious (that most of us) already knew this, there were a vocal minority that were claiming that it was Sun Spots, or not drilling enough oil, or it was all the fault of aliens or some other equally improbable reason, this had to be established first. Even if the naysayers just used the report to wipe away the oil coated dollars from their eyes, the report showed conclusively that burning fossil fuels was damaging the climate, the weather systems and the atmosphere of our planet.

The reason why the IPCC set this cut off date was simply that proving that Damaging Climate Change was real was more important. Delaying could have provided better predictions of what we could expect from the pollution we cause. However silencing the (so called) scientists, funded by the oil companies and other polluting industries was more urgent.

Therefore, the volume of Co2 released into the environment and the effects were severely under estimated. The most obvious example of where the under estimated impact of Climate Change can be seen in the lost of Sea Ice in the Arctic. The most pessimistic predictions in the IPCC report were saying that the Summer Sea Ice would not be lost until 2050. Yet we are already seeing losses that are far ahead of any prediction. The only scientist of international repute that has got this prediction close to accurate is Dr James Hanson. His data shows the loss of Summer Arctic Sea Ice by 2013, that is four years away. I know that my reader can do the math, but it was worth making that clear.

We have been sleepwalking towards a metaphoric precipice. Often in the name of profit, the problem is we are now all paying the price for this.

While there is still time to take action, the effects of climate change will still cause significant problems in the coming years, decades and centuries, what we all do now really does matter.

A link to the Media Story