GLOBAL WARMING: An upcoming scientific congress in Denmark aims to update the science of climate change.
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When the world's governments gather in December 2009 in Copenhagen to negotiate a treaty to restrain global greenhouse gas emissions, the science on which they base their decision could be as much as four years out of date. The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered its synthesis of existing research in February 2007 and it was based on studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals only through 2005.
Stepping into that gap—at the request of the Danish government—will be the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, a collection of the world's top scientists and economists set to meet in Copenhagen in March 2009 to deliver an updated state of the science on global warming. The prognosis is grim: Emissions throughout the world, both in countries pledged to restrain such pollution and those that have ignored or sidestepped the issue, continue to grow, and impacts can be felt from the Arctic and Antarctic to the Amazon.
ScientificAmerican.com's David Biello spoke with Katherine Richardson, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen and chair of the climate congress, to discuss the event and what it hopes to achieve.
Tell me about the climate change congress and where the idea came from.
The idea for doing this came from the Danish prime minister's office. [Denmark is] the local host of the meeting in December 2009 and [it is] worried about two things: One, people argue that it is economically problematic to invest in climate. [To deal with that] business people are arranging a conference in May next year on how, in some cases, it can pay to invest in climate. For example, Denmark, despite the fact that we're at 20 percent renewables [in our energy supply], is experiencing tremendous growth.
Two, this meeting is coming in the middle of an IPCC period. The IPCC report is absolutely crucial for starting negotiations. That has been accepted by everyone so you don't need to argue whether it's right or wrong. It's based on consensus.
But that is both a strength and a weakness. It takes a long time to get consensus. There were no scientific results in the 2007 [IPCC] report that came after 2005. By the time you sit down at the table in December 2009, you are missing the last four years of what we now understand about climate, adaptation, mitigation, security and about all sorts of interactions with our society.
So with an international alliance of universities, we will try to carry out a scientific meeting where we simply synthesize all this new information. We will try to put it all together into something understandable for the people coming to this meeting in Copenhagen. That's my goal.
So how is it working?
What we are trying to do now is to reach out to the scientific community at large. We have contacted every scientific meeting that we could find. This is our chance as scientists. We've been asked to put this together in real-people language: What do we really know?
There will be 57 different sessions and none of them will be on whether there will be a four-inch glacier melt or a two-inch. So your ice is melting, what does this mean for sea level rise? Is there a technical fix? What's the cost of not fixing it? We will bring the scientists out and get them to answer questions.
So far, there has been tremendous interest in this. We have received more than 1,000 abstracts from 70 different countries. It's going to be great and it's going to be big.
And what we're hoping to do with it, most of us, as scientists, were taught: Don't get your hands dirty with policy once you get your results. Let politicians figure it out. But these challenges are so big that we have to get out there and help the politicians understand what's happening. This is science's chance to describe the urgency of what's happening.
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22 Comments
Add CommentHow much do worldwide insurance companies think they will have to pay for climate change claims against agricultural crop failures? These figures should surely be accessible to governments and the IPCC...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi like to be active in this field
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thischeckout "cosmoclimatology"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo far, no evidence that changes in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have a detectable influence on the climate has ever been presented. It will be interesting to hear whether somebody has found some.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey don't need evidence Vince, because they have computer models. Science used to mean a theory was tested by evidence. Climate science tests theories against computer models, which embody that theory. This is easier than looking for evidence. It ilso easy to get a consensus when you only invite people who agree with you, as the IPCC does. Nice of them to tell us in advance that this so-called Congress will be more of the same.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDavid Wojick, Ph.D.
http://www.climatechangedebate.org
It is more complicated than that. There is indeed evidence, but it is still circumstantial in that there is no way to gather evidence for something on this scale without doing an experiment. We are already doing the experiment. On the other hand, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is not up for debate. That the concentrations of CO2 are growing in the atmosphere is not debatable. That the concentrations are sufficient to cause a temperature increase is also not debatable. So, what more evidence does a person need? Clearly what people want shows an unrealistic attitude about what science or evidence can supply. There are many things out there for which no evidence, not even circumstantial, exists but that which have many believers....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt certainly is debateable whether the CO2 increase is sufficient to cause a discernable temperature increase. That is precisely what the scientific debate is about. Moreover, the fact that CO2 has risen significantly during the last decade, while temperature has not, is prima facie falsification of the theory that a CO2 rise caused the warming from 1975-1998, the only warming in the last 70 years. We have a 70 year period of steady CO2 increase with just a 20 year warming spurt. The physical evidence is just not there, only the selfserving evidence of the models.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDavid Wojick, Ph.D.
http://www.climatechangedebate.org
thank God we won't be working from the completly out of date figures of the IPCC
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswe are dangerously close to the tipping point ; every northern summer more permafrost is melting and we are racing towards a hothouse climate
got another planet you can go to???
Shouldn't our best efforts be put into generating diversities of manners by which we can capture photons from the sun and then transfer their energy to electrons?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHigh tech research centers, garages, kitchen, Silicon Valley, Medicon Valley, science fairs. The places and forums abound. The minds even more so.
We've done it in the past.
There was a wonderful diversity of design during our attempts to build heavier than air machines. We only needed one that worked.
New York in the twenties had a wide variety of vehicle designs. One third ran on gasoline, one third on electricity and one third on steam.
Let's find ways to grow diversity and have it flourish.
So-called "tipping points" are a convenient way to ignore all the data. The temperature has not risen for a decade, but we are told a tipping point is magically near and we are racing toward it, so everything is suddenly going to change. There is no evidence to support this speculation, except the fact that a computer model can be made to do it. This is all simply wild speculation artfully disguised as settled science by the UN IPCC. The Congress of Speculation described in this article is just another attempt to keep the hype going. But as Vince Gray points out, there is no physical evidence for any of this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDavid Wojick, Ph.D.
http://www.climatechangedebate.org
David Wojick, haven't you figured out that they don't care about the facts. It is all a scam, the sea is not rising and the temperature is not increasing but no one cares...it doesn't fit the agenda. It all presented as this could happen, this may happen. We got loads of data on CO2 and temperature from the past but they won't show "them" what is wanted, so just ignore it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for trying.
Lon
How can the public have any confidence in the predictions made by the likes of Hansen when it is clear he's "cooking the books"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/14/the-evolution-of-the-giss-temperature-product/
As the World Congress described in this article shows, public confidence in dangerous warming is not based on Hansen alone. It is due to a network of several hundred activist scientists, backed by numerous environmental groups with many thousands of supporters, and adopted by many political groups. This is an idelogical movement, not just a scientific debate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDavid Wojick
http://www.climatechangedebate.org
Reply to David Wojick...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou appear to be an intelligent guy, state you have a Ph.D, claim a lot of your "facts", and refer us to your website on this climate debate. But yet I cannot find one peer-reviewed journal, accredited article, or paper that you have written on climate change. Why is that?
All I can find on you are links to a now-defunct coal industry group called the Greening Earth Society. Oh yeah, and you appear to sell used books at: www.bydesign.com/blackcatbooks
If your attempt is to get people to join your "right-wing" band wagon, you should be able to backup your facts with your own research and findings. Myself, I try to keep an open mind and listen to the other side, but when the scientific evidence doesn't balance out, it's hard to take your side seriously.
Question for you... how long would you last if you tried to breathe the exhaust from your car's tailpipe? A minute? Less than a minute?? Where exactly do you think these green-house gases are going? Again, references to your own peer-reviewed journal would be nice!
-Jeff
The increase in World average temperature is but .5°C theses last 50 years. Yet we cannot even feel one half a degree of difference on our skin. So what is all the climatic fuss about, say the skeptics...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut just realise that the inrease in World average temperature from the height of the last glaciation 18,000 years ago was just 2°C. So half a degree in fifty years is real cause for concern. No need for computer models here...
Either the cause of global warming (greenhouse gases or sun activity), it is a fact. And the remarkable thing of this meetings is the emergence of a new paradigma where we realized that this planet is our home and none else.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not saying global warming is a hoax, but citing computer models as evidence is not sufficient.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA computer model is only as reliable as the people who wrote it. The systems being discussed here are indescribably complex, and any model will be a product of which parameters are included and the initial state that is specified by the authors. Ten teams could create ten models and you will most likely get ten different results.
Where modeling is most useful is in comparing a hypothesis against an actual event, such as how is a star formed... create a model, then compare how close you come to actual observed results. To think that you can then extrapolate what will happen to the star next is just plain cocky.
Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas - provable...
Carbon Dioxide levels are higher now than before - provable...
We should be careful about what we release to the atmosphere - debatable, but I would agree
But saying we know what will happen with the strength of hurricanes in 2020 or the climate in the American southwest in 2050, or that a "tipping point is close" based on a computer model is just naive.
Unverified or unverifiable computer models are utterly irrelevant. A case in point: A number of years ago, while taking my MBA, one of our finance assignments was to write a computer program that would historically mimic the movement of the stock market. It was not all that difficult. However it was a complete and utter failure at any sort of prediction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother case in point, several years ago, while taking my M.Sc., part of my research involved building a computer model for analyzing geological systems. Again, the best that the model could say was that the hypothesized effects could not be dis-included, but the five variables (it was a simple model) each contained enough variability that I quickly realized that discrete outcomes impossible to project. Furthermore, even a range of outcomes with a high level of confidence to be useful were also impossible to predict.
Computer models such as those used in sciences such as sub-atomic particle physics are only validated AFTER experimental verification and have no standing prior to that. To put it into perspective, the $10 thermometer in my backyard (-20C this a.m.) has more scientific validity than any untested and unverified computer program yet devised by man.
If you want facts, look here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-4123082535546754758
If you want facts, look here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-4123082535546754758
Global Warming (or should I say Climate Change) is taken very seriously by Insurance Companies, who have to pay out huge sums of money whenever major meteorological catastrophies such as Katrina occur. They pay great attention to all the climate data being collected by scientists worldwide. And so do the IPCC, who have to advise governments on policymaking, despite the sabotage efforts of the powerful AGW energy company lobbies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishmmmm...i have survived the bomb, another ice age, famine, drought, hurricane devastation, tornado ruin, population bomb and what really keeps me nervous....that guy on the corner with the sign "Repent!! The End Is Near".....when will the 12th Imam arrive??? OMG!!! Help!!! save us!!!
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