Dan wrote:
No time for a long reply, sorry but in response to:
The parallel in Gore's position is his view of the relationship between
global warming and hurricane strength. At the weather underground's
tropical page, Dr. Jeff Master's gave a report from the annual
meteorological conference he attended. He stated that there were very
vigorous debates on the relationship between global warming and hurricane
strength at panel discussions....some of which went far into the night.
Gore, on the other hand, stated that "we now know."
From the Salon article _Did Al get the science right?_
<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/10/truths/index1.html>
"Also, any one event -- like Hurricane Katrina -- cannot be definitively
linked to an overall global trend of more powerful storms, just as any
specific car accident on a highway cannot be blamed on the raising of the
speed limit, even if statistics show a higher speed limit makes accidents
more likely to happen. Yet any one storm and its aftermath can be
presented -- as "An Inconvenient Truth" does -- as an example of what
we're likely to experience in the future because of climate change. In
Gore's defense, says Steig, "Never in the movie does he say: 'This
particular event is caused by global warming.'"
Schmidt agrees. "Gore talked about 2005 and 2004 being very strong
seasons, and if you weren't paying attention, you could be left with the
impression that there was a direct cause and effect, but he was very
careful to not say there's a direct correlation," he says."
Also an interesting article, Ice Sheets and Sea Level Rise: Model Failure
is the Key Issue at http://tinyurl.com/pfmn4 concludes:
"Filing the gap in knowledge between the risk (a significant probability
of many meters of sea level rise) and the current reality (rapid local ice
responses to local warming but small aggregate effect on sea level rise so
far) will require a sharpened focus on all three fronts: observations,
modeling, and paleoclimate assessment. Currently, the resources to do any
one of these at the appropriate level are lacking. And because greenhouse
gas concentrations and ice sheet loss are effectively irreversible, policy
decisions need to be made based on the information in hand, which argues
that deglaciation could be triggered by a modest warming.
Doug
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