IPCC Scientists Acknowledge That Their Projections Are Likely Too Conservative - PI

VALENCIA, Spain -- They are seen as the gurus of global warming, and their reports are accepted almost as the gospel of climate science. Esteem for the panel of scientists was immortalized when it shared this year's Nobel Peace prize. But experts and the scientists themselves acknowledge the reports are conservative and have a poor track record of predictions.

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in this Mediterranean coastal city to finish its fourth report in two decades, it must decide whether it will produce a fifth. "Next year would complete 20 years of the IPCC," said chairman Rajendra Pachauri. "That clearly is a point where we should carry out deep and detailed introspection on what we have achieved, what we could have achieved further, and how we might be able to ensure achievement in the future."

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"We need to understand that the worst impacts in the report may not in fact be the worst that will happen, or the worst that appear possible," said Peter Altman, the climate policy project manager for the National Environmental Trust, a Washington lobby. "What's in the report now is scary enough. But in most of the predictions the IPCC has made, just about everything is happening faster and more intensely than we thought," he said. "This issue is not being overstated. If anything, it is being understated."

A joint report this month by two U.S. security institutes said they compared predictions of climate change by the panel and other researchers in the last two decades with changes that actually occurred, and found the scientists had consistently fallen short. Part of the reason was the lack of data, but it also could be that the scientists shied away from controversy and wanted to avoid being discredited as "alarmists," said the paper by the Center for Strategic International Studies and the Center for a New American Security.

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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1103ap_climate_panel.html

It almost seems like a geometric progression or a spiral curve; as the climate starts to warm
and other processes kick in the equation speeds up. and with every increase the process spins faster.
One thing is for sure "bushco" needs to get its head out of its ass and help.!

and, yet, Congress is still out for a Sunday stroll in the 1950's . . .

Or, they're protecting the oil industry and others who control our natural resources ---

Both?

They take the most ridiculously (in my opinion) optimistic petroleum availability forecasts from the U.S. Energy Information Agency and from the International Energy Association.

I can't remember their predictions exactly, but their idea was that there would be 140,000,000 gallons of oil per day produced from this earth. Today, we pump about 85,000,000 and many, if not most, of the big fields are in decline, and the Saudis can't seem to pull 5 million gallons per day out of nowhere anymore. No one seems to know where the next Saudi Arabia will be, but seem to get very excited by the 100 days of global oil found off the Brazilian coast recently.

I don't think that we're going to have the oil component of green house gases as high as they think in 20-30 years.

I wish that they would recalculate based on the more conservative numbers suggested by recent data on field declines and the more pessimistic data coming out of the IEA recently.

Frankly, it made me wonder whether their other basic numbers are based in reality or not.

You think scientists, no matter how hard we try, are immunue from the ravages and imperatives of primate psychology?

No way. I have no doubt that, at every step of the way, the science was pushded back in favor of the unrealistically low estimates contained in the IPCC report by denial, wishful thinking, and a desire not to be so "doom and goom" so as to trune evrybody off and be ignored.

Do I think that the IPCC scientists planned this out in a smoke-filled back room? Hell, no, and I think it is very possible for a group of relatively honest people to groupthink themselves into denial.

It's just simple primate psychology. Put some monkey-humans in a room under a given set of conditions, and thus and so is likely to happen.

Primate psychology won out, and their report, which many even stupider, more shortsighted monkeys continue to call alarmist even as the IPCC's tepid conclusions are obsolete by underestimation from the moment the report was issued.

I apologize if this offends anyone. I apologize if the fact that human beings are tool-using primates offends anyone. I am sorry for the fact that the sciences of adveristing, psychology, and public relations have shown that, far from a creature of reason, we mokey-humans are scarcely any different than our tree-dwelling cousins. They have shown that far from being creatures of reason, that we are infantile mixtures of emotions and illogic that is so easily manipulated by other monkeys that it is amazing to me that the improababe Age of Enlightenment, now over, ever really even happened.

I apologize for reality.