The new website has just been launched with climate projections - see it here. See more here - basically scientists believe winters will be wetter, particularly in the north, and summers drier, especially in the south. The projected impacts are "worse than the government had feared," according to a source familiar with the project. See the press release I sent out yesterday here on this with quotes from myself re the report by Kevin Anderson to MPs.
This project has collated data from 400 variations of the model developed by the Hadley Centre, part of the Met Office. Each variant has been checked to see how well it predicted the climate of past decades; and the numbers have been compared with projections of other computer models. This allowed scientists to assign probabilities to various forecasts.
It is alarming stuff - yet last month a report from the Global Humanitarian Forum, the think tank chaired by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, said that the UK was among the 12 countries likely to be least affected by climate change. It is worrying to think how others will face the impacts - of course as we import so much of our food and energy the impact on other nations will still effect us severely.
This should all be food for thought for those writing into the SNJ recently denying climate change even exists - depressing to see the paper printing such material? Is it ignorance that leads to folk giving so much space to those who have not even a handful of scientists to back their cause? I am perhaps being unfair but it is nevertheless astonishing when you really look at what the scientific community are saying....
It is also depressing to read that a decent deal on the climate at Copenhagen looks unlikely - see here. Japan has also just set a week climate target - see here - but on the up side: China makes renewable power play to be world's first green superpower - see here. Plus here read about the 'green supergrid' that could power Europe on an electricity supply based entirely on renewable energy by 2030.
Plus here was that great spoof to show what really might be possible - see here the spoof International Tribune.
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A leading UK climate scientist yesterday warned MPs that the government's policies are "dangerously optimistic". Professor Kevin Anderson, the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the government's planned carbon cuts – if followed internationally – would have a "50-50 chance" of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2C. This is the threshold that the EU defines as leading to dangerous climate change.
Guardian 24th June 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/23/climate-change-targets-optimistic-2020
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