Climate scientists funded by the US government have announced new research in which they have established that the various doomsday global warming scenarios are in fact extremely unlikely to occur, and that the scenarios considered likeliest - and used for planning by the world's governments - are overly pessimistic.

By Lewis Page, The Register
Climate scientists funded by the US government have announced new research in which they have established that the various doomsday global warming scenarios are in fact extremely unlikely to occur, and that the scenarios considered likeliest - and used for planning by the world's governments - are overly pessimistic.
The new study improves upon previous results by including data from the remote past, rather than only examining records from recent times.
"Many previous climate sensitivity studies have looked at the past only from 1850 through today, and not fully integrated paleoclimate date, especially on a global scale," says Andreas Schmittner, professor at the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State uni.
"When you reconstruct sea and land surface temperatures from the peak of the last Ice Age 21,000 years ago - which is referred to as the Last Glacial Maximum - and compare it with climate model simulations of that period, you get a much different picture.
"If these paleoclimatic constraints apply to the future, as predicted by our model, the results imply less probability of extreme climatic change than previously thought," Schmittner adds.
The baseline assumption of climate science at the moment is that given a doubling of atmospheric CO2 compared to pre-industrial levels the most probable result is that the Earth would see a surface temperature rise average of 3°C - and that there would be a significant chance of much bigger, perhaps fatal rises.
Read more here.

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