IPCC

Last week, two conservative Republican Senators, James Inhofe of Oklahoma and John Barrasso of Wyoming, called for an independent probe of the IPCC -- the international scientific body that summarizes the latest climate science -- and asked the Senate to halt all climate action until that happens.

The senators claim that because there were some errors included in the IPCC's 2007 report -- for instance, how quickly the Himalayan glaciers might melt -- the entire phenomenon of climate change must now be questioned.

I am not a scientist by training, but even I know their reasoning doesn't hold up. The few errors that have been uncovered in the thousand pages or so of the IPCC report have nothing to do with the science of whether and why climate change is occurring. Instead, those errors are about a few specific projections about what might happen in the future.

The North Carolina Coastal Resource Commission just finished the first study of sea level rise in the United States. The most significant part of the study was what the report said about what the market has decided about sea level rise.

... even if the public and governments drag their feet on reacting to a changing coast, others aren't waiting to adapt. State Farm, for example, announced this week that it will no longer write or renew insurance policies for structures on barrier islands to reduce its exposure in areas prone to catastrophic events like hurricanes.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the largest, most complex collaboration of people working together on a common problem from all over the world. The scientists involved with this work received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work. The IPCC process is not perfect; finalizing all of the findings takes a lot of time and then the final report needs to be reviewed by the respective scientists' home countries. They issued their 4th major report in 2007, which reflected work that was completed a few years prior. In the meantime, many hundreds of papers have been published about human-induced climate change. The next full report is not due out until 2013.

I guess the United States isn't the only country where the government tries to tell scientists what their data actually says or should say. According to articles out in news media around the world, China, Saudi Arabia and other countries have joined the United States in requesting/requiring that scientists tone down the dire warnings contained in reports on Global Warming.

From the LA Times:

A new global warming report issued Friday by the United Nations paints a near-apocalyptic vision of Earth's future: hundreds of millions of people short of water, extreme food shortages in Africa, a landscape ravaged by floods and millions of species sentenced to extinction.

Despite its harsh vision, the report was quickly criticized by some scientists who said its findings were watered down at the last minute by governments seeking to deflect calls for action.

More below the fold...

Yesterday while holding my nose and taking a dip in the scum pool at Ann Coulter(giest's - hat tip to A) website, I saw this rant that she wrote that has been picked up and spread by her followers. LET THEM EAT TOFU! A few weeks ago in our local newspaper, someone wrote a lte that there was no Global Warming, it's just a liberal scare tactic being promoted by Al Gore. So I wrote this article and posted it on my blog. This morning's cartoon by Stormbear and the following comments helped make my decision to post it here.

The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency has a whole section dedicated to Climate Change. Under “State of Knowledge” they have three categories; What’s Known/What’s Likely/What’s Not Certain. (In Summary)