MIT: Global Warming of 7°C 'Could Kill Billions This Century'

The thing to remember with this kind of research is that we the taxpayers of the US order these “products” through the NSF, DOE, and other government agencies. The researchers merely deliver the “products” to us in the form of a research paper and project reports, many of which have their conclusions (or “goals”, if you will) stated before they start the research.
In this specific case, it appears that Mr. Prinn and his colleagues at MIT received a juicy $2.6 million dollar, multi-year NSF award to generate this “product” for us.
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0120468
It would be interesting to see how this money was spent. What is the salary + benefits for an MIT prof these days?
Perhaps everyone here can contact the NSF to express your appreciation for the “product” delivered to you after (apparently) 7+ years of effort. Also, everyone should search the NSF awards archive at http://www.nsf.gov, using the keyword “climate”, to see for themselves how much money we are spending to stimulate the AGW industry…

Peter Plail (03:56:42) :

What I think it shows is a decreasing temperature anomaly, but since the anomaly is above zero then it does actually show that temperature is still rising, but at an increasing slow rate, and if the trend continues (and I hate straight line trends) it will eventually start to drop.

What the positive number above the anomaly zero line shows is that the temperature has risen since the calculated anomaly period. So no it does not mean that temps are still rising. The graph shows that temperatures in real terms have been falling since 2003. The anomaly zero line is immaterial.
If the anomaly was calculate over a different period of time then it may result in a different anomaly reference point but it would not effect the actual calculated temperature movement between any two given time periods.

Roy Spencer posted his observations on the ‘study’ on his blog:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
Climate science took another step backward last week as a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was announced which claims global warming by 2100 will probably be twice as bad as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted.
The research team examined a range of possible climate scenarios which combined various estimates of the sensitivity of the climate system with a range of possible policy decisions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions which (presumably) cause global warming. Without policy action, the group’s model runs “indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees”.
Since that average rate of warming (about 0.5 deg. C per decade) is at least 2 times the observed rate of global-average surface temperature rise over the last 30 years, this would require our current spate of no warming to change into very dramatic and sustained warming in the near future.
And the longer Mother Nature waits to comply with the MIT group’s demands, the more severe the warming will have to be to meet their projections.
Of course, as readers of this web site will know, the MIT results are totally dependent upon the climate sensitivity that was assumed in the climate model runs that formed the basis for their calculations. And climate modelers can get just about any level of warming they want by simply making a small change in the processes controlling climate sensitivity – especially cloud feedbacks — in those models.
So, since the sensitivity of the climate system is uncertain, these researchers followed the IPCC’s lead of using ‘statistical probability’ as a way of treating that uncertainty.
But as I have mentioned before, the use of statistical probabilities in this context is inappropriate. There is a certain climate sensitivity that exists in the real climate system, and it is true that we do not know exactly what that sensitivity is. But this does not mean that our uncertainty over its sensitivity can be translated into some sort of statistical probability.
The use of statistical probabilities by the IPCC and the MIT group does two misleading things: (1) it implies scientific precision where none exists, and (2) it implies the climate system’s response to any change is a “roll of the dice”.
We know what the probability of rolling a pair of sixes with dice is, since it is a random event which, when repeated a sufficient number of times, will reveal that probability (1 in 36). But in contrast to this simple example, there is instead a particular climate sensitivity that exists out there in the real climate system. The endless fascination with playing computer games to figure out that climate sensitivity, in my opinion, ends up wasting a lot of time and money.
True, there are many scientists who really do think our tinkering with the climate system through our greenhouse gas emissions is like playing Russian roulette. But the climate system tinkers with itself all the time, and the climate has managed to remain stable. There are indeed internal, chaotic fluctuations in the climate system that might appear to be random, but their effect on the whole climate system are constrained to operate within a certain range. If the climate system really was that sensitive, it would have forced itself into oblivion long ago.
The MIT research group pays lip service to relying on “peer-reviewed science”, but it looks like they treat peer-reviewed scientific publications as random events, too. If 99 papers have been published which claim the climate system is VERY sensitive, but only 1 paper has been published that says the climate system is NOT very sensitive, is there then a 99-in-100 (99%) chance that the climate system is very sensitive? NO. As has happened repeatedly in all scientific disciplines, it is often a single research paper that ends up overturning what scientists thought they knew about something.
In climate research, those 99 papers typically will all make the same assumptions, which then pretty much guarantees they will end up arriving at the same conclusions. So, those 99 papers do not constitute independent pieces of evidence. Instead, they might be better described as evidence that ‘group think’ still exists.
It turns out that the belief in a sensitive climate is not because of the observational evidence, but in spite of it. You can start to learn more about the evidence for low climate sensitivity (negative feedbacks) here.
As the slightly-retouched photo of the MIT research group shown above suggests, I predict that it is only a matter of time before the climate community placing all its bets on the climate models is revealed to be a very bad gamble.

I am a Democrat who for the past 20 years believed global warming was caused by CO2. Now, I think the wheels are coming off the man-made global warming theory. More and more it looks like is a natural phenomenon to me.
A year ago I launched http://www.energyplanusa.com where I try to bring common sense discussion to our country’s energy policy. Since energy policy is closely tied to global warming (i.e. climate change) I set out to find the ‘smoking gun’ that proves global warming is driven by CO2. Instead, I found that the wellspring of man-made global warming theory, the UN’s IPCC reports on climate change, are compromised by politics, and that man-made global warming theorists cherry pick facts and ignore contradictory evidence from reliable studies. In short, there is no smoking gun and the man-made crowd refuses to entertain other possibilities.

Better 7 deg C warming (vs which baseline?) than 5 deg C cooling.

Can anyone say…”this is a bunch of bull!” How do scientists justify their studies on this crap basing it on things that happened 10 million years ago (when there was no modern science to record such things), as if they know for a fact the earths history over that time. Also, say they do a study of the ground in certain places. How do you go supposedly 10 million years back in the earths history. We can’t get that deep if the earth is constantly changing. AAAAAHHHGGGGGG…I can’t take it anymore!

May 26, 2009
American Thinker Blog: Is Big Oil behind Global Warming Scaremongering?
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/05/is_big_oil_behind_global_warmi.html
Is Big Oil behind Global Warming Scaremongering?
Richard Henry Lee
If the website, Exxon Secrets, is correct, then Big Oil has switched sides and now forecasts unprecedented global warming.
A new MIT study warns that global temperatures might increase twice as much as originally predicted.
The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees.
But as discussed in an article at the WattsUpWithThat website, the MIT study is full of holes. In particular, the temperatures have been dropping since the original study in 2003, not rising as models had predicted.
But these scary predictions can be dismissed on other grounds. It appears that Big Oil has its sticky fingers all over this study. According to the Exxon Secrets website, the lead author, Andrei Sokolov, is merely a tool of Exxon Mobil since he works at MIT, and that educational institution has received almost $1 million from the oil giant.
Exxon Secrets makes a habit of smearing any and all climate researchers who disagree with the “scientific consensus” that humans are causing unprecedented global warming. It is therefore quite amusing that they are now smearing one of their own.
We also wonder how long it will take for the Exxon Secrets website to be “updated”. We grabbed a screenshot just in case.

So what has changed since 2003…?
The hype and nothing but the hype.

TonyB,
Thank you for mentioning Agenda 21. Probably about less than 1% of the world population understands what UN Agenda 21 is really about. Global warming, which I like to call ‘the weather’, is the vehicle to bring it about.
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
– Club of Rome,
premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations

Ashish (09:04:51) :
I think MIT is one of the known universities in the world. I don’t see any reason why they would do all this carelessly, at least I would support their report and follow precautions to reduce the effect, rather than listing to some of us here who think they know better sitting in their homes and workout the model and facts predict what will happen.
Earlier I posted

John Galt (06:42:20) :
Well, if a computer says so, then it must be true. They wouldn’t go to all this trouble to write-up this report if it wasn’t true. Why would they lie?

That was sarcasm.
This is just more junk science created in order to support their already determined conclusion. The assumptions that went into the computer model are not based upon reality.
Computer climate models do not output facts. That is a fact you should keep in mind.
What I don’t understand is how this passed any of MIT’s internal review processes.
The scientific method is dead. GIGO is alive and well.

Does anybody have a psychiatrist friend, to invite him to give his opinion on this issue?. This is not longer a case for physicists, chemists and least for meterologists.
Is there that kind of research in China, Japan, Russia or India?, Is this kind of research made in countries of the EU, US and Canada only?. If that is the case then we have found something in common, perhaps an unconcious projection of an era ending, the era of the so called “occidental culture”.

What did adolf hitler postulate about lies ?
If the public is not accepting it , just make them bigger and it will be accepted.

You can get here the PDF:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html