Q&A, I recalled it was Sir Frederick Houghton, didn't think it was worth a post. Alzheimers? Who knows, I was seriously ill for seven years, and my memory is not quite what it was.

While I'm not a climate scientist, I have expertise in the statistical and modelling techniques which underpin scientific work; and all of the IPCC's 2100 scenario modelling relies on economic modelling. This modelling has been discredited by eminent statisticians, economists and economic modellers; while some IPCC researchers welcomed the initial Castles-Henderson critique as helping them to get to the truth (as Houghton would have done), the IPCC as a whole refused to engage; I've seen correspondence with the heads of the IPCC in which they flatly refuse to revisit the modelling in spite of it being discredited.

Faustino, now I'm actually interested - because there's no question that the "economic modelling" part of the IPCC process is the least scientific and the least certain. Indeed, it's virtually impossible to predict with any real confidence just how much CO2 emissions would go up in the next 100 years even if no efforts were ever made to contain them. A complete collapse of the global economy is entirely possible, as are breakthrough technologies that make fossil fuels largely obsolete. Further, it's obviously nonsense to suggest that we would keep pumping out more and more CO2 even as the evidence continued to grow that the consequences of doing so were slowly making the planet uninhabitable.
However, I'm less than convinced that you could make a reasonable case that it would most likely cost less to continue business as usual and adapt only as needed than it would be to start making changes now, especially as many of the changes really aren't all that expensive when it comes down to it, and carry plenty of other benefits.

Graham, there are some GW alarmists out there, as too there are GW ‘deniers’ … as you are well aware of.

It is not all ‘doom and gloom’ as many alarmists would suggest. Equally, there is no point in putting one’s head in the sand and pretending there is no problem.

GRACE provides data sets to various scientific disciplines that are involved with the study of climate science e.g. those who study; glaciers, permafrost, oceans, atmosphere, ice-sheets, water resources, etc.

GRACE is showing us that the rate of change in our climate may indeed be larger than originally thought.

We can’t put numbers on it (it’s a futile exercise) but if we were to have *catastrophic climate change*, the impacts would take thousands of years, rather than tens-of-thousands of years.

Most of the studies and research papers that went into compiling the AR4 had to be submitted up to no later than 12 months before it was presented to the public.

While GRACE has been orbiting since 2002, much of the work resulting from it had to be validated, calibrated, correlated, analysed, etc. It would not do to submit “faulty” work before it was quality assured.

Based on some work from GRACE, it now appears some of the IPCC’s AR4 findings, in some cases, are too conservative.

For example:

Ocean temperatures are warming faster and deeper than reported;
The Greenland, Himalayan and Antarctic ice-sheets are melting faster than originally expected;
Water loss in the Murray/Darling system is more likely to be associated with climate change than drought;
Siberian tundra collapsing over a wider area;
Arctic sea-ice diminishing at a faster rate than thought, etc.

There is nothing to be scared of; we just need to be more aware.

Wizofaus, you seem to be one of the more sensible posters here, (not that it says much for you), so I wondered about your statement “Further, it's obviously nonsense to suggest that we would keep pumping out more and more CO2 even as the evidence continued to grow that the consequences of doing so were slowly making the planet uninhabitable”.

What evidence do you mean? There is no evidence that CO2 is harmful. There are plenty of baseless statements, like “It must be” or “thousands of scientists say so”.

But I know of no scientific basis for saying that CO2 is harmful, much less the small proportion of it that comprises human emissions. So how would emissions make the planet uninhabitable?

There has been a comparatively larger output of human emissions over the last 9 years during which warming is static, or there has been slight cooling. Just that fact alone, indicates that the alarmist alleged role of CO2, in warming, and “polluting” cannot be sustained.

No detrimental effect from CO2 has been shown. There are some benefits in crop increase, and the greening of the Sahara, but no harmful effect at all. CO2 is not a pollutant.

Q&A
“Ocean temperatures are warming faster and deeper than reported;
The Greenland, Himalayan and Antarctic ice-sheets are melting faster than originally expected;
Water loss in the Murray/Darling system is more likely to be associated with climate change than drought;
Siberian tundra collapsing over a wider area;
Arctic sea-ice diminishing at a faster rate than thought, etc.

Where do you come by this baseless nonsense? You cannot show any sensible reason to believe any of those statements. Are you reading spurious rubbish like RealClimate, or IPCC Summary?

Nobody is claiming that CO2 itself is "harmful", merely it happens to be a greenhouse gas that humans are emitting at a rate faster than the atmosphere can absorb. It could just as well be methane or water vapour. As the greenhouse effect becomes more and more pronounced, less and less of the energy entering the atmosphere by means of solar irradiation can escape, hence the atmosphere necessarily warms up. If it warms up too fast or too much, life will eventually fail to adapt quickly enough and die out. Not exactly rocket science.
The only real point of contention is exactly how pronounced the temperature rise is going to be - if Lindzen is right and it only ends up being a fraction of a degree by the end of the ct

Q&A, I'd like to see citations for what you claim for the GRACE project. It measures gravitational fields and makes inferences about some things from that. That doesn't make them correct inferences. And one that says the water shortages in the Murray basin are due to climate change rather than drought is not likely to be a partcularly secure inference.

For those wondering what gravitational fields have to do with water, it appears that water has such greater mass than other things in the earth's crust that it's presence or absence affects the gravitational field. So, if the mass changes, and all other things are equal, it could be a change in the amount of water lying on that part of the earth that has caused it.

However, this is a 5 year project, and as James Famigletti, a hydrologist at UC Irvine says in this article, linked to from the GRACE site http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20070524-9999-lz1c24grace.html "With only a few years of data...there's no reason to get alarmed about the trends, because everyone knows that climates run in cycles. But the results could reveal much about the workings of region-wide climate."

I think you're cherry-picking and getting well ahead of yourself.