TT On-The-Go
TT Feed
| How's that global climate change conspiracy going, again? |
|
 |
 |
 |
Font Size 
And what's more amazing, of course, is that this breakthrough was discovered by careful investigative work by climate-skeptic bloggers and journalists, fighting through the veil of secrecy which climate scientists have thrown over anything which casts doubt on the "settled science" "consensus" of the AGW alarmists' vested-interest fantasies.
Wait, sorry, let me rephrase that. What's more amazing is that this breakthrough was made by glaciologists and climatologists working at the University of Boulder, Colorado, and published in Nature, with press releases sent to all major news outlets. That's right: scientists studying the effects of climate change, researching and publishing their research. But I thought they were all engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to cover up the lack of warming?
Nope. As always, when we learn something unexpected about climate change, it's because the much-derided climate scientists have found it, and published it in an open forum, as scientists do (regardless of the ridiculous furor about the UEA emails).
And as so often, this isn't actually all that huge a story. It's true that the high mountains of Asia have only lost about four billion tons of ice since 2003, not around 50, as previously believed – a pretty hefty overestimate.
But worldwide, that's fairly small beer: when all glaciers and ice caps, including Greenland and Antarctica, are taken into account, ice loss is estimated at 4.3 trillion tons.
The Nature study says its findings overall are largely in agreement with that, and the implication for projected sea level rises by 2100AD is small: about 5cm lower than the 30cm to 1m currently estimated.
But the main point to take away from this is: science, including climate science, is an open process. Just as when The Times Atlas misleadingly printed a map of Greenland showing that the ice cap had reduced in size by 15 per cent in 12 years, it was Arctic research scientists – not climate skeptics – who pointed out the error.
When the IPCC stupidly included a prediction that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear entirely by 2035 – apparently because some idiot had misread (or, conceivably, deliberately misrepresented, as Bishop Hill claims in a response to this piece) "2350" in a non-peer-reviewed hydrology article – the error was not picked up by any of the army of internet skeptics, but by a glaciologist at Ontario's Trent University called Prof J Graham Cogley.
There are tens of thousands of scientists working in climate-related fields worldwide, publishing thousands of papers each year. The vast majority of those papers add weight to the hypothesis that the world is warming and we are causing it.
Sometimes, new findings overturn old research. That's how science works. These findings show that some earlier research was inaccurate. But more importantly, they show that suggestions that no climate scientist dares break with the AGW status quo are as fatuous as claims that we never landed on the Moon.
(Source: Daily Telegraph)
  Socialize this Subscribe to our RSS feed to stay in touch and receive all of TT updates right in your feed reader
|
|||
