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Meh.
The real situation is what it is, and that seems to be plenty to discuss; I don't see the point in fantasizing catastrophe scenarios that have very little real science behind them.
For a look at what the best actual expectations are for the impact of warming and loss of sea ice, the WG-II report is still the best review: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...
(that's rather long, but the 32 page summary is here: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images... )

By the calculations I did the actual rate of increase in CO2 shows that about 2/3rds of that is absorbed by the biosphere at least because the rate of change in the atmosphere has been less than 1/3rd our emissions.

Humans emit around 26 Gt/year of CO2. Annual atmospheric CO2 increase is currently about 2.1ppm, which works out to about 15 Gt. The difference is being absorbed, primarily by oceans (causing acidification), but clearly it's not enough.

Volcano eruptions are a tiny blip on this process, as I pointed out in the other post.

So this covers 5 years during a solar minimum.... and the imbalance figure is significantly lower than previously thought.

Is it? It's still a significant imbalance - and the overall imbalance figure is of course higher, when the sun is not at a minimum.

An imbalance I would point out does not prove causation

A measurable net influx of energy is precisely what's causing global warming.

What's causing most of this net influx of energy? CO2 has a well-established mechanism, and the calculated effect correlates surprisingly well with our observations. Unless and until someone proposes a new cause that better fits the data, we'd be foolish not to act on what is by far the most likely cause.

whether or not any of this is actually bad is debatable.

It's been studied extensively. The conclusions remain clear - it's bad for our food and water security, it's bad for our health, it's bad for our weather, and it's bad for our coastal communities. There are some upsides (more in the long term), but they are greatly outweighed by the negatives - which will be particularly harsh for the world's poor, who cannot pay the cost of adapting.

The [peer review] process is not infallible.

Nor is it meaningless.

Just because something goes through that process doesn't mean it can't be questioned.

Of course it is questioned - before, during & after peer review - by experts. But when numerous experts have questioned it, and found no cause for doubt, what makes you think a layman is likely to find something they missed?

If you, or me or any layman, thinks we've discovered a mistake in a peer-reviewed paper for any complex scientific field - it's far more likely that it's us that has made the mistake, than the paper's authors AND all the experts who reviewed it, including after publication. Wouldn't you agree?

Dunning-Kruger effect...appeal to authority... You want to call me stupid?

No, not stupid, never said that. Ignorant of the field, yes - just like me. We are both profoundly ignorant of climate science, at least compared to any practicing climatologist. Dunning-Kruger is the assumption that one already knows all one needs to know about a field to make a valid judgement, and says nothing about intelligence. Why do you assume that it's an insult? It's an unconscious bias that we all need to strive to avoid.

I'm deferring to expertise, not appealing to authority. If someone thinks expertise is meaningless, that would be Dunning-Kruger.

Do you want science or politics? I'm not interested in attempts to conflate the two.

Seems to me you're the one conflating scientific consensus with politics.

I wouldn't attribute present day weather patterns to global warming. Undoubtably there will be changes, but it's a bit too early to attribute specific events-- like "more frequent and severe heat waves"-- to anthropogenic warming. There isn't a strong consensus yet. And anthropogenic warming doesn't substitute for natural variations-- natural variations (like heat waves) still occur.
With that said, in terms of modelling effects, what's known and how well it's known keeps getting better. if you do want more details of the current thinking, I'd direct you to the literature. That would be the province of Working Group 2, so I'd probably start with the most recent working group 2 report http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/index....

Stop capitalizing Groups of People You Don't Like. It looks stupid as hell.

At any rate, honest, scientific analyses* of the costs and harms have been done, and it doesn't really endorse this lukewarm attitude.

*These are just summary versions, the actual details of how all these issues are computed requires more than just a 76 page picture book, and you'd have to peruse to the full version, and not only that, the couple hundred of reference citations of each of the chapters.

Now, if you actually did that, it's more effort than I've put into this particular question, which would actually justify these "You don't know what you mean" rants that are so common.

You're going to have to acknowledge you don't actually have any evidence of what you, personally, and not Some Capitalized Group That's Magically Uniform, are saying.

Or you could look at the IPCC analysis, and see that while it sucks balls, it's not an extinction event

I respond to your post because it seems to me you are still suseptible for reason-based arguments.

If you look for evidence or as the GP states a 'textbook' you could simply start with the latest IPPC reports. Start with the SPM (Summary for Policymakers) (find the 5th report of WG1 the physical science basis, WG2 Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability and WG3 Mitigation of Climate Change here, here and here respectively. All these links can be found on the main page of the IPPC http://www.ipcc.ch

In it you will find the answers to the most common questions asked by deniers: how big is the evidence for global warming? How sure are we that the warming is the result of human activity? What are the consequences? And last but not least: what can we do to reduce the impact?

If you are unconvinced by the figures, maps, graphs and plain language of these documents: they copiously refer to the full report (also available from the main page) where you can readup on the background for each and every conclusion they make. Still not conviced? The full report refers on it's turn to underlying publications etc. And if you're this deep down into the matter that you feel you can question the validity of individual publications: contact the authors and put forward you questions to them.

A number of people are referring to the IPCC consensus, but not to how they achieve their consensus. In addition to whatever may be going on in the whole process, the obvious example of funny business is that the scientists create reports, then the non-scientists meet and create the "Summary for Policymakers". Then the technical reports are edited to match the Summary.

Based on many studies covering a wide range of regions and crops, negative impacts of climate change on crop yields have been more common than positive impacts (high confidence).

Climate-related hazards exacerbate other stressors, often with negative outcomes for livelihoods, especially for people living in poverty (high confidence)... Observed positive effects for poor and marginalized people, which are limited and often indirect, include examples such as diversification of social networks and of agricultural practices.

At present the world-wide burden of human ill-health from climate change is relatively small compared with effects of other stressors and is not well quantified. However, there has been increased heat-related mortality and decreased cold-related mortality in some regions as a result of warming (medium confidence)

IPCC AR5 WGII Summary for Policy Makers, emphasis mine. So yeah, there are recognised positive effects, they're just outweighed by the many negative effects. Sorry the news wasn't better, but there you go.

http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images... Or you can get the link from the summary

Small changes in a global average temperature are extremely important, because we don't ever experience "average" conditions. The frequency distribution of temperature can be roughly approximated by a normal distribution and the full range of the distribution (i.e. "natural variability") is large, relative to projected changes in the mean.

However, even a small shift in the mean of the distrbution results is much more dramatic changes in the tails of the distribution (i.e. "extreme" conditions). These changes include experiencing moderately hot weather more frequently and having the extremely hot weather be much hotter than it has been in the past. Our organization has studied this in detail for a number years at local scale. We typically see events that were 1 in 30 year heat waves in the historic climate (1970-2000) which are projected to be on the order of 1 in 5 events for the future. The details vary depending on what part of the distribution you're interested in (90th/95th/99th precentile), but the trend is always the same: more hot weather and hotter hot weather.

See this figure from the IPCC's Special Report on Extremes (SREX) for a good illustration if distribution shifts.

The last 20 years or so of climate science have focused on means, mostly because we haven't have the computational resources to study climate at high resolution (both spatially and temporally). That has been changing fast in the last few years and we're likely to see a lot more analysis and research on extremes in the future.

At least you're asking the question. For the scientists, the conflict comes between the obligation to try to do accurate and unbiased scientific work versus the funding incentive to report research in a way that elevates the significance of climate change.

So I could see a slight institutional bias but there's still a strong individual bias to prove others wrong. Plus even if you want to show X and the answer is Y you still need to hide Y in your paper, sneak it past the reviewers, and hope no other researcher find your error and scores an easy publication at the expense of your reputation. Again it's economics, the individual scientist's strongest incentive is to publish the most credible piece of research.

For the funding sources, there's a similar conflict between the public obligation to fund accurate and unbiased research versus the bureaucratic benefits to be had from portraying an existential threat, real or imaginary, to modern society. The latter means larger budgets and more power to the bureaucracy that can justify them to society at large.

There's a much stronger bias from politicians who simply want bad news to go away so it's not their fault and they don't have to fix it.

It also reeks to me of a con job. There's always a glib answer to every complaint, language is abused to score propaganda points (such as the widespread use of "climate change" when AGW is meant), everything needs to be done right now, when you scratch the surface on a lot of this research, questionable or sloppy assumptions quickly show up, and these mistakes always favor a more aggressive interpretation of AGW. For example, criticism of a lack of obvious harm from near future AGW were met with the magical discovery of "extreme weather" (something the IPCC is apparently quietly dropping from its latest report BTW).

Well "climate change" is used because while the globe as a whole is getting warmer individual climates (like Europe) could get a lot colder.

As for "extreme weather" they've got a brochure on it but I'm not really sure what you're talking about.

As for the mistakes, when someone makes a mistake that favours a too aggressive scenario the denialists go "Ahah! They're trying to scare people!" and when the mistake underestimates the danger the denialists go "Ahah! We told you they were exaggerating!"

When one of the first real reports, the Stern review to attempt to quantify future harm of AGW was created, it made a major sloppy assumption by assuming discount rates about half as large as world chained GDP growth (completely ignoring that chained GDP growth is a better measure of ability to pay for future harm) and justified this on a major bogus basis, that a more reasonable discount rate was "immoral". That change alone ended up doubling for every 50 year period out future estimated costs of AGW. And of course, there's the recent weakening of recent climate predictions by the IPCC to reflect that current climate trends don't agree with the old models the IPCC used in previous reports.

I don't know a lot about the Stern review but it sounds like it may have had some issues, but a bad report doesn't mean that AGW isn't an issue.

This reminds me of a saying I've heard credited, apocryphally perhaps, to Will Rogers. "You expect cashiers to make mistakes on occasion. But when the mistakes are always in the cashier's favor, you have to wonder."

But if you only look at the mistakes that are in cashier's favour you're going to think every cashier to be dirty.

It's expensive to rebuild all of the world's largest harbours, plus neigbouring infrastructure, in a different, few meters higher, place.

It's expensive to move all the farms where wheat can be grown productively now, a few hundred kilometers more north. And rice and sago etc. have MUCH less protein content than wheat.

It's expensive when more workers get afflicted with formerly tropical diseases such as Dengue, West Nile Virus and Malaria, because less insect vectors are killed off by the milder cold seasons.

You can read the IPCC report from WG II (impacts, adaptation an d vulnerability) for yourself; the old AR4 one from 2007 because WG I reports this week, but WG II not until march 2014.

Just the fact that you don't use sarcasm quotes on the word leak leads me to believe that what you read was most likely quoting directly from the original (and creative) Daily Fail beat up.

Realise that when people talk about useful idiots, they are talking about you! Wake up and smell the coffee, don't make it worse by getting angry with Science, make it better by getting angry at the people who are using you to squeeze the nuts of your local congress critter.

Posted anonymously - no need to thank me for the education.

There is limited to medium evidence available to assess climate-driven observed changes in the magnitude and frequency of floods at regional scales because the available instrumental records of floods at gauge stations are limited in space and time, and because of confounding effects of changes in land use and engineering. Furthermore, there is low agreement in this evidence, and thus overall low confidence at the global scale regarding even the sign of these changes. Projected precipitation and temperature changes imply possible changes in floods, although overall there is low confidence in projections of changes in fluvial floods. Confidence is low due to limited evidence and because the causes of regional changes are complex, although there are exceptions to this statement.

To be sure, there are some paragraphs in which they have medium or high confidence of this or that, for instance more people are killed by natural disasters when they occur in poor countries. Well, smack my ass and call me a monkey, good thing the UN spent millions on a showy conference in Africa to tell us that. It was in Africa of course, because that's where they want the rich countries making all the CO2 to send trillions of dollars. That is the purpose of the UN (if most of the members were honest enough to tell you).

Opportunities exist to create synergies in international finance for disaster risk management and adaptation to climate change, but these have not yet been fully realized (high confidence)

You can see the report for yourself here: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/

I am curious how and by whom you think actually discovered the flaw in the IPCC's claims. Science requires that scientific work, claims, publications etc. undergo some degree of peer review which is exactly what happened. The IPCC made a claim which was analyzed and corrected by a scientist. Error correction is one of the most remarkable traits of science that is completely absent in its alternatives (pseudoscience, political infighting etc.)

Sorry, but that's naive BS. Removed this week after British media reports? People were talking about this two months ago...

Here's a blog post from 12/1/09:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-imminent-demise-of-glaciers-due-to-a-typo/

See the primary sources here:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0010/001065/106523e.pdf (p 66)
http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/AR4/website/10.pdf (p 493)

And I'm sure *someone* knew about this before then, but simply didn't go public about it.

Someone want to remind me why I should trust the IPCC (or climate "science") again?