UN underestimating global warming impacts

Scientific American has been writing some excellent articles on the science behind climate change and the importance of tackling humanity's contribution to CO2 levels as urgently as possible.  This month they bring us a report from the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.   James McCarthy of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and Global Environment provided a detailed analysis of UN data in comparison to measured, observable climate change.  To date, the UN models are proving to be highly conservative, underestimating the effects of global warming.   Notably, these UN models are the very data that Climategate supposedly called into question as worst case scenarios...

“If you were to go back and map the IPCC projection for sea level rise and temperature in 1990, look at it in 1995, look at it in 2000. In retrospect you would find that they were conservative. So we talk about errors. If you were to do two ledgers—here are IPCC overestimates, here are IPCC underestimates—over the 20 or so years that these assessments have been running, the underestimate ledger would be much larger than the overestimate. Even with glitches—clearly erroneous editing or sloppy editing that led to these erroneous statements that got us in trouble recently.”



It is unfortunate but our media, notably television media, will run with the initial headline of questions over the accuracy of some sources of UN climate data due to the questionable commentary in some emails from one University (out of hundreds) working on the UN's climate change analysis, but that same media remains mute when it becomes apparent that even so, the UN climate change data is still significantly underestimating the rate of warming.   This is significant, and the public at large remains oblivious to the fact that climate change data is holding together, and in most cases, the forecasts previously derided are proving to have been best case scenarios.

[source : http://www.scientificamerican.com/ ]

On the subject of climategate, a significant amount of misinformation has been spread regarding the accuracy of climate data and models.   The following video by Peter Sinclair provides a good summary of the degree of misinformation being perpetuated in the mainstream media and via chain emails regarding climategate.   A lot of cherry picking of sentences is leading to a lot of intentionally out of context interpretations of scientific analysis.



[referenced article : An imperative for climate change planning : tracking earth's global energy ]