4/15/13,
"'Anthropogenic’ Climate Change is a Priority for Kerry in Asia," CNS News, Patrick Goodenough
"Kerry called climate change a global threat as he addressed an energy
cooperation seminar on Saturday also attended by Chinese State
Councilor Yang Jiechi.
“We are seeing the science of climate change come back to us now at a
rate that is far faster and with far greater levels of damage than
anything that scientists predicted 10, 15, 20 years ago,” he stated.
“Every prediction that has been made is coming true, but coming true
bigger and more dangerously.” "...
==================================
Following are just 6 of many recent scientific climate predictions that have failed:
==================================
1. In 2000, two eminent scientists, one from CRU at University of East Anglia and one from Hadley Center for Climate Prediction, predict the end of snow:
3/20/2000, "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past," Independent UK, Charles Onians
"According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".
- "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
The effects of snow-free winter in Britain are already becoming apparent.
This year, for the first time ever, Hamleys, Britain's biggest
toyshop, had no sledges on display in its Regent Street store. "It was a
bit of a first," a spokesperson said....
Warmer winters have significant environmental and economic implications, and a wide range of research indicates that pests and plant diseases, usually killed back by sharp frosts, are likely to flourish.
But very little research has been done on the cultural implications of
climate change - into the possibility, for example, that our notion of Christmas might have to shift....
British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes - or eventually "feel" virtual cold.
The chances are certainly now stacked against the sort of heavy snowfall in cities that inspired Impressionist painters, such
as Sisley, and the 19th century poet laureate Robert Bridges, who
wrote in "London Snow" of it, "stealthily and perpetually settling and
loosely lying"."...
--------------------------------------------------------------
2. SCIENTISTS SAY ARCTIC WILL BE ICE FREE BY 2013:
"Former US Vice President Al Gore cited Professor Maslowski's analysis on
Monday in his acceptance speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in
Oslo."
.
.
12/12/2007, "Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'," BBC, Jonathan Amos
"Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.
Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.
Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting
that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving
ice loss....
"Our projection of 2013 for the removal
of ice in summer is not
accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher
from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to
the BBC.
"So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative."...
Professor Maslowski's group, which includes co-workers at Nasa and the
Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), is well known
for producing modelled dates that are in advance of other teams."...
===============================
3. NASA SCIENTIST SAYS ARTIC COULD BE ICE FREE BY 2012:
12/12/2007, "Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?" AP, Seth Borenstein
"This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay
Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at
the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.""...
-------------------------------------------------------
4. ARCTIC TO BE ICE FREE BY 2015 SAYS LEADING UK OCEAN EXPERT:
11/8/11, "Arctic sea ice 'to melt by 2015'," UK Telegraph, Nick Collins
"Arctic sea ice could completely melt away by the summer of 2015, destroying
the natural habitat of animals like polar bears, one of Britain's leading
ocean experts has claimed."
"Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, said the ice that forms over the
Arctic sea is shrinking so rapidly that it could vanish altogether in as
little as four years' time.
Although it would reappear again every winter, its absence during the peak of
summer would rob polar bears of their summer hunting ground and threaten
them with extinction.
.
The mass of ice between northern Russia, Canada and Greenland waxes and wanes
with the seasons, currently reaching a minimum size of about four million
square kilometres."...
-------------------------------------------
5. SINCE 2013 DIDN'T PAN OUT, NOW SAY ARCTIC WILL BE ICE FREE BY 2016. Scientist says he wants to inform governments so they can plan "national defense:"
.
4/7/11, "New warning on Arctic sea ice melt," BBC, Richard Black
.
"Scientists who predicted a
few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say
summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade.
The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski's team a deal of criticism from some of their peers.
Now they are working with a new computer model - compiled
partly in response to those criticisms - that produces a "best guess"
date of 2016.
Their work was unveiled at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting....
"In the past... we were just extrapolating into the future
assuming that trends might persist as we've seen in recent times," said
Dr Maslowski, who works at Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
California.
"Now we're trying to be more systematic, and we've developed a
regional Arctic climate model that's very similar to the global climate
models participating in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) assessments," he told BBC News."...
===================================
6. In 2005 UN predicted 50 million climate refugees by 2010.
That didn't happen. In 2011 at the annual meeting of AAAS, an environment researcher said the UN now "warns of 50 million environmental
refugees
by 2020."
4/18/11, "Feared Migration Hasn't Happened: UN Embarrassed by Forecast on Climate Refugees" Der Spiegel, by
Axel Bojanowski
"Six years ago, the United Nations
issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50
million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows
have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the
forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that
had been identified as environmental danger zones."
"It was a dramatic prediction that was widely picked up by the world's
media. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the
United Nations University declared that 50 million people could become
environmental refugees by 2010, fleeing the effects of climate change.
But now the UN is distancing itself from the forecast: "It is not a UNEP
prediction," a UNEP spokesman told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The forecast has
since been removed from UNEP's website.
Official statistics show that the population in areas threatened by
global warming is actually rising. The expected environmental disasters
have yet to materialize.
.
In October 2005, UNU said: "Amid predictions that by 2010 the world
will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects
of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University
experts say the international community urgently needs to define,
recognize and extend support to this new category of 'refugee.'"
.
It added that "such problems as sea level rise, expanding deserts and
catastrophic weather-induced flooding have already contributed to large
permanent migrations and could eventually displace hundreds of
millions."
In 2008, Srgjan Kerim, president of the UN General Assembly, said it had
been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million
environmental migrants by 2010. A UNEP web page showed a map of regions
where people were likely to be displaced by the ravages of global
warming. It has recently been taken offline but is still visible in a
Google cache....
.
The UNU statement from 2005 highlights the difficulties involved in
predicting the impact of global warming. The Yemeni capital Sanaa was
cited as an example of the threat of climate migration. Sanaa's ground
water was falling "by 6 meters a year and may be exhausted by 2010,
according to the World Bank," the statement said.
In 2010, the IRIN news agency, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs,
reported
that Sanaa "may run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017."
Meanwhile the city's population has increased: between 2004 and 2010,
it expanded by 585,000 people to almost 2.3 million. Nevertheless, there
is no sign of an exodus resulting from a shortage of water.
The same applies to other nations that were classified as
particularly endangered on the UNEP map of the world, such as
Bangladesh, the Cook Islands and Western Sahara. In these countries and
others, the population numbers have increased, according to official
data. Even the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu still has its 10,000
inhabitants, even though their relocation had already been planned. The
reason may be that many low-lying Pacific islands are actually
increasing in size
despite the rise in ocean levels, because of a build-up caused by coral
debris eroded from reefs and deposited on the islands by storms and sea
currents.
.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which
regularly issues a report summarizing the latest research, is vague when
it comes to diagnosing environmental change. For example, the change in
precipitation in the African Sahel zone has so far shown no clear
trend. But the forecasts based on climate simulations for the next 90
years indicate drought for the region.
The UNEP spokesman said land degradation, the loss of forests and
other environmental changes were accelerating, and that UNEP was
concerned about the "impact such trends will have on lives and
livelihoods and movements of people."
Meanwhile a new forecast is doing the rounds. At the annual meeting
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in
February, Cristina Tirado, an environment researcher at the University
of California in Los Angeles, warned of 50 million environmental
refugees in the future. That figure was a UN projection she said -- for
2020."
.
.
