Cut & paste: UN report contradicts exaggerations by Al Gore and co
February 08, 2007
Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, in Project Syndicate, on the panic mongering over global warming
LOST among the hype [that greeted the report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last week] is the unexciting fact that this report is actually no more dire than the IPCC's last report, issued in 2001. In two important ways, this year's effort was actually less dire...
First, the world's scientists have rejigged their estimates about how much sea levels will rise. In the 1980s, America's Environmental Protection Agency expected oceans to rise by several metres by 2100. By the 1990s, the IPCC was expecting a 67cm rise. Six years ago, it anticipated ocean levels would be 48.5cm higher than they are currently. In this year's report, the estimated rise is 38.5cm on average.
This is especially interesting since it fundamentally rejects one of the most harrowing scenes from Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. In graphic detail, Gore demonstrated how a 20-foot (6m) rise in the sea level would inundate much of Florida, Shanghai and Holland. The IPCC report makes it clear that exaggerations of this magnitude have no basis in science, though clearly they frightened people and perhaps will win Gore an Academy Award.
The report also revealed the improbability of another Gore scenario: that global warming could make the Gulf Stream shut down, turning Europe into a new Siberia. The IPCC simply and tersely tells us that this scenario - also vividly depicted in the Hollywood movie The Day After Tomorrow - is considered "very unlikely". Moreover, even if the Gulf Stream were to weaken over the century, this would be good, as there would be less net warming over land areas...
Climate change is a real and serious problem. But the problem with the recent media frenzy is that some seem to believe no new report or development is enough if it doesn't reveal more serious consequences and more terrifying calamities than humanity has considered before.
Indeed, this media frenzy has little or no scientific backing. A 38.5cm rise in the ocean's levels is a problem, but by no means will it bring down civilisation. Last century sea levels rose by half that amount without most of us even noticing.
