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Climate Change To Drive Weather Disasters, Say UN Experts
mdsolar writes "Climate change is amplifying risks from drought, floods, storms and rising seas, threatening all countries, but small island states, poor nations and arid regions in particular, UN experts warned on Tuesday. In its first-ever report on the question, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said man-made global-warming gases are already affecting some types of extreme weather. And, despite gaps in knowledge, weather events once deemed a freak are likely to become more frequent or more vicious, inflicting a potentially high toll in deaths, economic damage and misery, it said."
You are painting a painfully simple version of the field of climate science, missing out on practically all the actual science and just summarising the findings in a hideously-childish fashion, one presumes for some sort of critique which never really manifested...
Actually the republican party would prefer someone gets behind them, as they are known for having quite a wide stance.
Sure, let me pile right in. It's already happening, except for the little problem called "evidence", where the evidence is that it is not, in fact, already happening.
Sadly, I confound your predictions of personality type. I'm if anything moderately left of center. I don't care much for bombing people of any color. I dislike multinational corporations and view them as a threat to civil liberties as they often become politically powerful enough to function as shadow governments and are very definitely corrupting influences. I have zero rich friends, and while I don't favor excessive regulation, I don't favor zero regulation either. I believe in applying things like "common sense" and "reason" to decisions of whether or not to regulate somebody, some company, some activity, not "dogmatic assertion of socialist/capitalist/communist/humanist principles".
Equally sadly, I'm not railing against "the science". I am a scientist -- a physicist. Good scientists are generally skeptical ones, and take the time to look at all of the evidence and not just carefully cherrypicked slices of it.
Naturally, you would like to preserve the illusion that all scientists "believe in" CAGW (a horrible misappropriation of religious terminology that is alas foundational to "the cause" propounded by such as Hansen, Jones, and Mann). But the truth is that they don't, and it is also the truth that there is nothing wrong with this. Climate science is anything but settled. For example, over the last 15 years the Earth's bond albedo has increased by roughly 6% compared to what it was at its minimum during the grand solar maximum of the latter 20th century. If one actually looks at the blackbody radiation formulae that are the foundation of the Earth's energy balance and hence mean temperature (to the extent that such an idea makes sense in a non-equilibrium open system) this increase corresponds to an expected decrease in the Earth's mean temperature of roughly 2K. That exceeds the total warming observed from the Dalton minimum, if not the LIA.
This is not only sound physics, it is simple physics, physics that kicks in before the GHE, as it is a direct modulator of insolation that raises the greybody temperature from which the GHE proceeds. You can your very own self google up the NASA papers that report this interesting fact.
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.