Global Warming – Only 99 Months Until the End of the World

I ran across this story by Andrew Simms at the Guardian which predicts imminent doom and sets the time conservatively at 100 months. Their rational is standard affair.

They start with this cool picture of earth.

Good effect, everyone likes Earth, most of us live there. They follow it with this statement.

Because in just 100 months’ time, if we are lucky, and based on a quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change.

Yup, it’s the tipping point again. Didn’t we reach the tipping point last week when all the ice melted? Quite Conservatively?

When these gases accumulate beyond a certain level – often termed a “tipping point” – global warming will accelerate, potentially beyond control.

So the standard doom and gloom followed by the not facetiously ‘terrifying’ tipping point. It is pretty scary, if it were true.

The implications of which, according to a growing litany of research, are potentially catastrophic for life on Earth. Such a change in the state of the climate system is often referred to as irreversible climate change.

Ok, so if we don’t act now and shut down big evil oil and coal we will be doomed to a Florida like climate for ever, for ever, for ever………………Sorry couldn’t resist. This kind of thing makes it hard to focus on science.

So, how exactly do we arrive at the ticking clock of 100 months? It’s possible to estimate the length of time it will take to reach a tipping point.

These are the guys who can tell us when we “really” reach the tipping point. Didn’t we reach it last week? I’m getting confused.

We followed the judgments of the mainstream climate science community, represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on what it will take to retain a good chance of not crossing the critical threshold of the Earth’s average surface temperature rising by 2C above pre-industrial levels.

So they followed something from the UN based IPCC. Already, widely discussed on this blog and others, the IPCC will only present the most extreme global warming research because this research and subsequent programs are at least a 35 billion dollar industry for the UN and likely over 100 billion when national governments programs are included. Without extreme global warming the IPCC will collapse as an organization.

For example, collapse of the Greenland ice sheet is more than likely to be triggered by a local warming of 2.7C, which could correspond to a global mean temperature increase of 2C or less. The disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet could correspond to a sea-level rise of up to 7 metres.

Ok, these guys claim to follow the IPCC but they have actually gone well beyond even the most extreme (and ridiculous) IPCC predictions of 5 deg C in 100 years. Now they have said that in 100 months we will reach a 2 C temperature increase which will cause a 2.7 degree temperature change in greenland and the world will flood. Pretty bold statement, 100 months (8.3 years) considering that the past 8.3 years the planet has actually cooled off, yup cooled off and it seems to be accelerating downward. See the graph below.

I took this graph of actual data from Digital Diatribes of a Random Idiot. He does the best job on the web of breaking down actual trends in the data which are presented in an unbiased fashion. Highly recommended HERE.

For the last 8 years the trend has been DOWN?? What? Yup its true, that’s why the ice sheet grew this year in the arctic and antarctic, another fact they don’t want you to know. For you numbers guys the “anomaly” on the left means 1/100 of a degree C from the arbitrary normal temperature at 0. Let’s look at the long term trend to see how fast the earth has warmed.

This trend shows a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees C per century, but this is about the worst we have ever measured in the industrial age. Still it is at the far far low end of the IPCC prediction and well within what climate paleontologists would call natural variation.

Lets take a quick look at the long term trends. Again this is from Digital Diatribes of a Random Idiot.

This trend for over a century corresponds to only 0.5 degrees per century. But the guardian states that we will conservatively see a 2C rise in the next 8 years while even the IPCC says 5C in a hundred as one of the worst case scenarios.

This is clearly not reasonable.

Why would intelligent people tell us these things if they aren’t true?

Let’s see their conclusions. These relate to Britan but they sound the same as what we here in the US.

Addressed at the triple crunch of the credit crisis, high oil prices and global warming, the plan is to rein in reckless financial institutions and use a range of fiscal tools, new measures and reforms to the tax system, such as a windfall tax on oil companies.

New measures and reforms like “Windfall tax on oil”, this ignores all the facts about oil company profits but that is for a different blog. So we’re saying increased taxation to deliberately slow the economy and reduce usage.

Goodbye new airport runways, goodbye new coal-fired power stations.

Ok, no more airports and coal. I guess we’ll have to walk.

Oil companies made profits when oil was $10 a barrel. With the price now wobbling around $130, there is a huge amount of unearned profit waiting for a windfall tax.

More taxation of oil. The above statement ignores the increased cost of deep drilling completely, pretty strange for a site which claims to be working primarily on economics.

A transition from “one person, one car” on the roads, to a variety of clean reliable forms of public transport should be visible by the middle of our 100 months. Similarly, weaning agriculture off fossil-fuel dependency will be a phased process.

Ok, we’re going back to public transportation, but now it’s mandated across the board.

The solution is clear, increased taxation, give up your cars, planes and tractors and the government will take care of you. After you reveiw the rest of the site, this same group wants us to give up our form of money, supporting all kinds of various monetary exchange which significantly limits big business and adds in an incredible way to big government.

I started this blog a few weeks ago to discuss science because I am comfortable with science. Science makes sense to me. I feel a bit down today because this argument by the Guardian has no science in it. In fact, I’m starting to think anthropogenic global warming has absolutely nothing to do with science, this site is nothing but a mechanism for promoting the ideology of increased government.

I need a drink.

Please feel free to comment, even Dave, I need some kind of comfort after this BS. After all the end of the world is coming, and the Guardian proved it with Science.