Humans are significantly altering the global climate, but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide. The IPCC assessments have been too conservative in recognizing the importance of these human climate forcings as they alter regional and global climate. These assessments have also not communicated the inability of the models to accurately forecast the spread of possibilities of future climate. The forecasts, therefore, do not provide any skill in quantifying the impact of different mitigation strategies on the actual climate response that would occur.
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"Main Conclusions," Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog (undated)Roger A. Pielke
» Roger A. Pielke - all quotes »
Climate forecasts (projections) decades into the future have not demonstrated skill in forecasting local, regional, and global climate variables.
Roger A. Pielke
The claim by the IPCC that an imposed climate forcing (such as added atmospheric concentrations of CO2) can work through the parameterizations involved in the atmospheric, land, ocean and continental ice sheet components of the climate model to create skillful global and regional forecasts decades from now is a remarkable statement. That the IPCC states that this is a ‘much more easily solved problem than forecasting weather patterns just weeks from now’ is clearly a ridiculous scientific claim.
Roger A. Pielke
The role of urban areas within the climate system is yet another human climate effect whose role was minimized in the 2007 IPCC WG1 Report.
Roger A. Pielke
The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.
Stephen Hawking
"Simply waiting for low-carbon-emitting renewable capacity to be large enough will mean that it will be too late to meet the mitigation goals for reducing [carbon dioxide] that will be required under most credible climate-change models."
Sarah Palin
Pielke, Roger A.
Pieper, Josef
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