“My best advice to both candidates is to just leave the issue alone. Sea-level rise does not represent a national threat, and trying to do something about it through our energy policy would cause hardship without a discernible impact along our coasts.”
With the final presidential debate set for October 22 in Boca Raton, a group of Florida “city and county officials and scientists,” with help from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), have sent each candidate an open letter asking them to “address this issue” of sea level rise while they are in campaigning and debating in Florida.
This publicity play for climate crusaders will probably not work because …. facts are facts. There just isn’t much there to get away from real, here-and-now issues that have otherwise dominated most of the debates.…
The scientific findings of the human influence on the climate system have been, and perhaps will always be, a mixed bag. Assuming strong positive feedback effects, and thus a high climate sensitivity, it certainly can be argued that the bad outweighs the good. But if feedback effects are more neutral, the sign of the externality flips from negative to positive given that, on net, a moderately warmer, wetter, and CO2-fertilized world is quite arguably a better one.
Earth Day 2012 yesterday brought forth predictable cries of doom-and-gloom. But there are plenty of positives on closer inspection on the climate front, developments which have undoubtedly spilled over into making the earth a better place for humanity at large.
Here is my Top 10 list of positive climate developments based on the recent empirical data and the latest scientific literature:
10) The growing season across the Northern Hemisphere is expanding;…
“The short-term rate of global sea level rise has decreased by about 25% since the release of the AR4—and a new paper shows that some 15% of the observed rise comes not from global warming, but instead from global dewatering…. [R]ather than raising its projections of sea level rise, perhaps the IPCC ought to consider lowering them once again.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is under pressure to revisit its projections of the expected amount of sea level rise by the year 2100. Many rather influential types are pushing for the IPCC to dramatically increase its central estimate by some 2-3 times above the value given in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).
Not so fast!
Nature speaks with a contrary voice, political agendas aside. The short-term rate of global sea level rise has decreased by about 25% since the release of the AR4—and a new paper shows that some 15% of the observed rise comes not from global warming, but instead from global dewatering.…