Global Warming worse than current consensus

[barondave]

M.I.T. joins climate realists, doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C. From Climate Progress, my brother's blog:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change has joined the climate realists. The realists are the growing group of scientists who understand that the business as usual emissions path leads to unmitigated catastrophe (see, for instance, “Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path” and below).

The Program issued a remarkable, though little-remarked-on, report in January, “Probabilistic Forecast for 21st Century Climate Based on Uncertainties in Emissions (without Policy) and Climate Parameters,” by over a dozen leading experts. They reanalyzed their model’s 2003 projections model using the latest data, and concluded:

The MIT Integrated Global System Model is used to make probabilistic projections of climate change from 1861 to 2100. Since the model’s first projections were published in 2003 substantial improvements have been made to the model and improved estimates of the probability distributions of uncertain input parameters have become available. The new projections are considerably warmer than the 2003 projections, e.g., the median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is 5.1°C compared to 2.4°C in the earlier study.

With charts and further commentary following.

The economic crisis may be more immediate, but global warming will have a greater impact in your life in the not too distant future.

Comments

[pgdudda.livejournal.com]

Considering that the Arctic seems to be starting its spring thaw a month early this year, with thinner younger ice covering most of it, I worry that "ice-free" may be in 2009 rather than the recently-revised "2040" they projected last summer. Do these folks really look at their own recent data, or are they just afraid to be the nail that gets hammered down by the liars denialists?

[Admittedly, the researchers have been having multiple satellite woes. Two are reporting corrupt data, and the one they just tried to send up crash-landed. Not a good time to be a researcher. Or a NASA scientist, for that matter.]

[galacticvoyeur.livejournal.com]

We are certainly well past the "I told you so" part of this discussion. Meanwhile, the cognitive dissonance does seem a bit thick out there...