Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Views on Global Warming

Here is a nice graphic from a report by Pew Research Center with results from polling the public on their views on global warming:

Click to Enlarge

It is pretty clear that the heyday for spending trillions to avert the "impending catastrophe" (impending since the alert first went out in a UN resolution in 1988) is now passed. Concern is slowly dying out. Why? It is 22 years after the early clarion call by global warming doomsters and public is slowly coming to the conclusion that "imminent doom" may not be all that imminent!

Here is the IPCC prediction:
Based on current models, we predict: under [BAU] increase of global mean temperature during the [21st] century of about 0.3 oC per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 oC per decade); this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years; under other ... scenarios which assume progressively increasing levels of controls, rates of increase in global mean temperature of about 0.2 oC [to] about 0.1 oC per decade.
Here is the measured temperatures:
If you pick your start/stop points carefully, you can claim that this graph validates the IPCC prediction. But I think most people will look at this graph and no see much of a "signal" of increasing temperatures. Sure there's been a bit, but it isn't very clear that it is a sustained upward increase.

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