From the world bank…sound the general alarm! (sound of klaxons) But see the data at the end.
4-degrees briefing for the World Bank: The risks of a future without climate policy
Humankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases are breaking new records every year. Hence we’re on a path towards 4-degree global warming probably as soon as by the end of this century. This would mean a world of risks beyond the experience of our civilization – including heat waves, especially in the tropics, a sea-level rise affecting hundreds of millions of people, and regional yield failures impacting global food security. These are some of the results of a report for the World Bank, conducted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Climate Analytics in Berlin. The poorest in the world are those that will be hit hardest, making development without climate policy almost impossible, the researchers conclude.
“The planetary machinery tends to be jumpy, this is to respond disproportionately to disruptions that come with the manmade greenhouse effect,” PIK’s director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber points out. “If we venture far beyond the 2-degree guardrail, towards 4 degrees, we risk crossing tipping points in the Earth system.” This could be the case with coral reefs which face collapse under unabated global warming, or with the Greenland ice sheet. To melt the ice sheet would take thousands of years, yet this might be an irreversible process that could start soon. “The only way to avoid this is to break with the fossil-fuel-age patterns of production and consumption,” says Schellnhuber.
Climate impacts: Heat waves, sea-level rise, yield failures
Already today impacts of climate change are observed. The Russian heat wave in 2010, according to preliminary estimates, produced a death toll of several thousand, annual crop failure of about 25%, and economic losses of about US$15 billion. Extreme events like this at 4 degrees global warming would become “the new normal” in some parts of the world, according to the report. In the tropics, the coolest months at the end of the century are likely to be substantially warmer than the warmest months today.
Sea level, under this scenario, would rise by 50 to 100 centimeters within this century, and more so in coming centuries. The rate of rise varies from one region to the other, depending on sea currents and other factors. Projections suggest that sea-level rise will be strongest in countries like the Philippines, Mexico, and India.
Within economic sectors, too, tipping effects with rapidly increasing damages can occur, for instance in agriculture. Already, observations showed that important cereals are sensitive to temperature increases passing certain thresholds, resulting in large-scale yield failure. Changes in the water cycle can aggravate this, when droughts occur or flooding affects farmed land.
World Bank President Kim: “A 4-degree warmer world can, and must be, avoided”
“The report draws from the current state of science and delivers new analysis of heat waves and regional sea-level rise, so of course there remain some uncertainties,” says William Hare, co-founder of Climate Analytics in Berlin and guest scientist at PIK. “We work with that by defining risk as potential damage multiplied with the probability – a rather improbable event can be a great risk if its impacts are huge.”
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim who was nominated early this year by US President Barack Obama and assumed his new position in July, has personally been briefed on the 4-degrees report by Schellnhuber some weeks ago in Washington D.C.. “A 4-degree warmer world can, and must be, avoided – we need to hold warming below 2 degrees,” President Kim now said in a statement. “Lack of action on climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a completely different world than we are living in today. Climate change is one of the biggest single challenges facing development, and we need to assume the moral responsibility to take action on behalf of future generations, especially the poorest.”
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Tom Nelson points out this tweet from “The Carbon Brief””.
Twitter / carbonbrief: The World Bank 4 degree report …
The World Bank 4 degree report in full here: http://ow.ly/foBEX and summary for policymakers here: http://ow.ly/foBGN
From the summary:
This report spells out what the world would be like if it warmed by 4 degrees Celsius, which is what scientists are nearly unanimously predicting by the end of the century, without serious policy changes….The science is unequivocal that humans are the cause of global warming, and major changes are already being observed: global mean warming is 0.8°C above pre industrial levels; oceans have warmed by 0.09°C since the 1950s and are acidifying; sea levels rose by about 20 cm since pre-industrial times and are now rising at 3.2 cm per decade;
.09 degrees? That’s still in the noise band of the measurements…only bankers would tell us we are a few pennies off and this will lead to catastrophe.
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PS: The Report’s Acknowledgment section cited these worthies as peer reviewers, none of whom caught the howler above:
Surface tension blocks physical heat AGW is bunkum. You can’t heat water from above on this planet.
Oh, it is worse than we thought. Germany’s ARD – our version of the BBC – is reporting that it could be even 4.1°C, not just a meager 4 centigrade! and the related losses could be 68.2 billion US-$. Note the precision to 3 digits!
see here: http://tagesschau.de/ausland/erderwaermung-kipppunkte100.html
My experience in assessment of business proposals and the like is that the quality of a report is inversely proportional to the claimed precision. Here is no exception.
Here are a couple of other questionable claims from the Executive Summary (p. 3, column 1):
William Nies says:
November 19, 2012 at 11:24 am
Is this science? Sounds like a trading-floor. Why bother with explicit counter-arguments, references and sources? They never grew up!
When Anthony and guests post science the comments are mostly scientific, along the lines of “explicit counter-arguments, references and sources”. When “… puzzling things in life …” get posted the comments are a commensurate response to the content. Extreme statism, superiority complex and stupidity, in this case, are attracting some rant, ire and disbelief.
There is an overwhelming majority of science posted here but please read the site’s byline.
I am seething at the outright control freakery of the post’s subjects, thanks for asking.
If banks concentrated more on core business rather than things they know zero about then the world banking problem would not have happened.
The World Bank is a major backer for the UN’s secretive REDD program, where rainforest all over the world are being set aside and sold for carbon credits. It is in the best interest of the World Bank to say the planet is warming and we’re all gonna die. They are making buckets of money from it.
If you don’t know about the REDD program its not surprising, our media is avoiding the subject like the plague. Time to have a look.
“In Uganda, for example, a case was documented where 22,000 people were violently evicted from the Mubende and Kiboga districts earlier this year to make way for the United Kingdom-based New Forests Company to plant trees, to earn carbon credits and ultimately to sell timber. Similar incidents happened to indigenous peoples all over the world, said Overbeek. “REDD+ is about making more profit, continuing pollution and disrespecting the rights of forest people all over the world. It’s about land grabbing,” he warned. “It’s time to stop thinking about REDD+ and start protecting local populations and their land rights.”
Read about REDD http://www.ips.org/TV/cop17/forest-dependent-communities-lobby-for-end-of-redd/
@John M
“If banks concentrated more on core business rather than things they know zero about then the world banking problem would not have happened.”
A Harvard prof gathered the top bankers in the US to show them that if they stopped lending to the bottom 2.5% of their loan portfolio the number of bankruptcies in the USA would fall by 70%. One replied that they make 50% of their profit from that 2.5%. In other words they profit most from the destruction of shaky enterprises and families and they plan on doing so as a conscious act. What happened in 2008 was just the same thing on a grander scale. They were doing really well on the repo business, about 50k income from each home they siezed back, until demographics caught up with the scam and killed the reselling market. Harry S Dent talks about the latter in his books.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/11/ipcc%E2%80%99s-chairman-pachauri-conflicted/
Bankster!!!!
I was surprised at the degree to which RCP3PD fluctuated to track historical observations, never mind the discrepancies between modelled and historical. I just found out why, by looking at the spreadsheet. It is a battery of forcings, which have been adjusted to make it fit as well as possible to what actually happened. Historical retro-tuning went up until 2005. Forward prediction starts then. GHG forcing reaches a peak in 2046, then starts sliding back. Apparently, we all come to our senses then.
The fact that carbon will be traded on Wall St tells you exactly who is behind the whole scam.
Extracting their ‘cut’ from the UN ETS scheme the maintenance of a climate of fear is imperative. What they don’t get is that a decade of thrashing the public in general with this stuff guarantees global desensitisation. The vested interests grow ever clearer. What’s interesting to me though is that World Bank President Jim Yong Kim would sign off on this stuff. I’d really want to be fully conversant in all aspects of the discourse and evidence. What the Chief Bankster has demonstrated is that he is a party apparatchik and dependent drone.
davidmhoffer says: November 19, 2012 at 8:28 am
Well, Pachauri gave the World Bank his blessing in 2010 (while he was busy shifting gears from “all peer reviewed” to some grey literature cannot be ignored):
Yet the World Bank’s latest and greatest “academic work” contains the following disclaimer:
I wonder if any of the Board of Executive Directors is aware that whatever funds the WB may have expended on Turn Down the Heat would have been far better spent on a report that urges Turn Down the Hype.
4°? If and only if CO2 is the dominant forcing force. Which is being roundly refuted by real world data in every way possible. Reality doesn’t give a flying fig for forced fake consensuses, howsomever hard they push and loudly they shout.
The real world will have its way.
This report is the bugle-call for the Doha meeting. PIK is funded by Merkel. Schellnhuber is the leading German alarmist. On his board sits the leading Swedish alarmist Rockström. These are the invenots of the two centigrade target they now feel is not scary enogh. With this alarm report they want to establish a new four grad C scare to be met allready the year of 2060. Swedish MSM have bullhorned this for about a week now and I was a bit astonished that the rest of the World turned out to be missing the News of The Week. PIK is also dependent of funding from Munich Re (Worldleading in Reinsurance). In Sweden we have SNF (a local copy of the WWF). Since all climate-journalists abandoned them for kissing the feet of our climate-tsar Rockström, SNF tried to launch a six centgrade scare to get back into the papers. It miserably failed however.
This WB-report is just another scam instgated by the bank itself. They are trying to vitalize the multi biljon dollars Big Green Fund off which the culprits hope to recieve great cuts for the noble Cause of giving them all the Power in this World!
PSE read “inventors” and “instigate” where appropriate above!
At least as worrying as the damage being done to science, is the observation that the contributors seem to lack fundamental understandings of what they are saying. Take this extract from the report as an example
“To melt the ice sheet would take thousands of years, yet this might be an irreversible process that could start soon. “The only way to avoid this is to break with the fossil-fuel-age patterns of production and consumption,” says Schellnhuber.
I don’t know Schellnhuber, I just hope he has no qualifications because if he does he shouldn’t. “The only way to avoid THIS …” he writes. But he evidences no “THIS” to be avoided. What we have is – “would”, “might”, and “could”. In other words nothing exists. One cannot ever know if one has avoided that which cannot be shown to exist; nor if one does can one know if one’s actions were the cause of the putative avoidance.
Not that Herr S. should worry – depletion rates of fossil fuels will do his bidding without any interference.
These people are genuine idiots. The Greeks of 3500 years ago would have been aghast at the illogic. We appear to have regressed since then.