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UN Climate Report Fails To Capture Arctic Ice: MIT
An anonymous reader writes "The United Nations' most recent global climate report 'fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends,' says a new research from MIT. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, forecasts an ice-free Arctic summer by the year 2100. However, the Arctic sea ice may be thinning four times faster than predicted, according to Pierre Rampal and his research team of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)."
The anti-Global Warming people will ignore it. The details don't matter, the truth doesn't matter, and if there's the slightest mistake, error, or just plain poorly worded statement, they'll treat it as proof of a conspiracy dedicated to driving man back to the Stone ages, except with less Jesus and more abortions.
Just look at all the hyped up illnesses in the past decade, if all those "predictions" were right all of us would be dead with bird flu/swine flu/MERSA/SARs.
Can you point to a single reputable scientist who claimed that everyone in the world was going to die from a flu pandemic? I'm not a flu expert, but my personal opinion is that the scientists actually understated the threat of a flu pandemic, whilst the media overstated it. The problem with the media is that they deal in the now, and have very little grasp of reporting long-term threats. Scientists tend to be more cautious and won't make predictions that aren't backed up with numbers.
The 1918 flu pandemic infected 32% of the world's population, and killed 3% of the world's population. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no reason why such a pandemic couldn't be repeated today. And whether it will be more or less deadly is impossible to predict - H5N1 killed 60% of infected humans - a mortality rate far higher than the 1918 flu. If H5N1 was as transmissable as the 1918 flu then over 3 billion people would've been killed. This is a number and a risk far in excess of the danger of terrorism, and yet we will spend literally trillions of dollars "fighting terrorism", whilst we spend only millions seeking flu vaccines.
Given the potential danger from flu, and the fact that the victims would be everyone on the planet, it seems like the per capita risk is several orders of magnitudes higher than terrorism. And yet, all of the funding, and all of the political debate, focuses on terrorism. It's crazy, and people who brush it under the carpet by saying "well, we haven't had another pandemic yet", have entirely missed the point. The fact that the 2009 swine flu outbreak didn't kill millions isn't a reason to believe that the threat does not exist - rather, the fact that the 2009 pandemic turned out to be caused by an entirely unseen new variant of the flu that incorporated genes from 5 different viruses should prove beyond any doubt that flu evolution and mutation does pose a continued threat to humanity.
But instead of heeding this warning, people like you will say "Ahh stupid scientists got it wrong! Everyone didn't die". But in fact 18000 did die, and it is only down to chance that this particular flu variant wasn't more lethal and more widely spread. How many dollars have been spent for each victim of 9/11 fighting the terrorism threat? How many dollars have been spent for each victim of H5N1 fighting the flu threat? For whatever reasons, our society is very bad at assessing risk when it comes to long term threats. We judge everything through the lens of the media, which reports current events news, and anything longer than a decade can be kicked into the long grass in the political world.
Rant over...