Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Read This Now - The IPCC Is Fudging The Numbers

Only not how the skeptics want you to think. Stefan Rahmstorf at RealClimate is calling it Sea Level-gate...

First, although the temperature scenarios of IPCC project a maximum warming of 6.4 ºC, the upper limit of sea level rise has been computed for a warming of only 5.2 ºC – which reduced the estimate by about 15 cm. Second, the IPCC chose to compute sea level rise up to the year 2095 rather than 2100 – just to cut off another 5 cm. Worse, the IPCC report shows that over the past 40 years, sea level has in fact risen 50% more than predicted by its models – yet these same models are used uncorrected to predict the future!
This isn't a new problem, serious scientists have been pointing out the issues with the AR4 sea level rise predictions since before the report was published (as Rahmstorf details). A slew of recent papers have used a semi-empirical model based on the strong correlation between global temperature and sea level to show that sea level rise is extremely likely to outpace IPCC predictions.

With nearly 200 million people living at less than 1 meter of elevation and it looking increasingly likely that we'll see at least that much sea level rise in the next century it's long since time to be worried about this.

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