On Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:11:08 -0300, you wrote:

>Uh, não exatamente. Não puseram esses detalhes justamente porque as incertezas 
>quanto à potência desses feedbacks é muito grande.
>E o IPCC só botou no relatório o que era consenso absoluto entre os 
>cientistas. Isso é, o que não restava dúvida. Se havia muitas
>dúvidas quanto à magnitude, simplesmente não punham nos cálculos. Simples 
>assim.

Também tem esse. Lê em especial o quarto parágrafo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/science/02oceans.html

In its 2001 assessment, its third, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change estimated that in the next hundred years sea
level would rise globally by at least a few inches and perhaps as much as three 
feet, a catastrophe for low-lying coastal areas
and island nations.

In Paris today the panel will issue its fourth assessment, and people familiar 
with its deliberations say it will moderate its
gloom on sea level rise, lowering its worst-case estimate.

In theory that is good news, because rising seas bring erosion and flooding to 
coastal areas. But a lower estimate has not been
uniformly cheered.

In letters to and conversations with panel members, and in scientific journals, 
several climate experts said the estimate was
almost certainly wrong because the panel was leaving out a growing body of data 
on melting glaciers and inland ice sheets, which
are major contributors to sea level rise.

Those experts say that unless the finding is modified, the panel — widely cited 
as an authoritative voice on climate change —
risks condemning itself to irrelevance.

Climate experts have “a great deal of confidence” in observations that sea 
level rise is accelerating, said Laury Miller, an
oceanographer at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration who 
was a reviewer for part of the coming report.

Good satellite measurements date only from the last decade or so, he said, so 
it is hard to draw firm long-term conclusions from
them. Also, he said, computer models of how glaciers and ice sheets melt cannot 
account for much of the observed melting, even
though “presumably it is going into the ocean.”

But so far at least, he said, “the observed sea level rise has been tracking 
the upper range” of the 2001 estimate. “It’s pretty
unequivocal,” he said.

Michael C. MacCracken, who led the Office of Climate Change in the Clinton 
administration and who was also a reviewer for some of
the new assessment, said he could understand why scientists on the panel might 
be uneasy about relying too much on models. But in
that event, he said, they should make it known that their estimates did not 
include factors like ice sheet movement and collapse,
which appear to be accelerating.

In a letter to panel members on Jan. 21, Dr. MacCracken said lowering the 
worst-case sea level estimate would “result in a serious
misimpression being conveyed to policy makers and the public.” In fact, he 
said, most American experts have felt that the estimate
was already too optimistic.

Other experts said the panel might have missed some important new developments, 
because it set a December 2005 cutoff date for
submission of scientific papers and other data.

Since then, researchers have reported that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting 
faster than had been thought, that Antarctica is
feeding more melt water into the oceans than had been predicted and that the 
melting of glaciers around the world is accelerating
rapidly.

In a brief report in today’s issue of the journal Science, an array of leading 
climate researchers said recent findings “raise
concern that the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding 
more quickly than climate models indicate.”

But in an interview last week, Susan Solomon, a climate expert at the National 
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and a
leader of one of the climate panel’s working groups, said researchers were 
invited several times last year to comment on the
group’s work. It received thousands of comments, she said.

Drew Shindell, a climate expert at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space 
Studies, said at a House of Representatives hearing on
climate science on Tuesday that part of the problem was the difficulty of 
making firm scientific statements about a field in which
research was moving fast.

Dr. Shindell, who emphasized that he was speaking as an individual, said, “The 
melting of Greenland has been accelerating so
incredibly rapidly that the I.P.C.C. report will already be out of date in 
predicting sea level rise, which will probably be much
worse than is predicted in the I.P.C.C. report.”

James McCarthy, a climate expert at Harvard who was a leader in the 2001 
assessment, noted in an e-mail message that the panel’s
report could be changed until the moment it was made public. Nevertheless, he 
said he worried that unless its discussion of sea
level rise was altered, the panel would so underestimate the problem that it 
would look “foolishly cautious and maybe even
irrelevant” on the issue.

But one prominent critic of mainstream climate science, S. Fred Singer, a 
retired physicist, is already seizing on the report as
evidence that people like former Vice President Al Gore who argue that human 
activity is changing the earth’s climate are now the
contrarians.

Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting.

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Gustavo Molina - [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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