Climate scientists have been lying, but not the way you think

Mainstream science has been lying to us about the seriousness of climate change—but not the way you think.

The early reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if anything, have been understating how bad it could be. Why? Maybe because the reality is so severe, so scary, that they didn’t think it was believable.

(Image: Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier on the Amundsen Sea. Credit: NASA.)

Kind of like the staff on the Titanic, choosing between the truth: “We hit an iceberg. The ship is doomed. And two-thirds of you will die.” And the calming lie: “We’ve run into a little problem. Everything will be okay. Meanwhile, please grab a life jacket and calmly head for the exits.”

Or maybe it was political: because they were taking so much heat from the well-funded denial crowd. A Drexel University study found that over seven years 2003-2010, more than half a billion dollars was given to 100 denial organizations by foundations, oil companies and the like.

The Carbon Disclosure Project reported a lot of us are already paying costs for the climate change that’s here now.

In the IPCC report before the current one, the scientists left out sea level impacts of massive melting ice sheets like the one on Greenland and the ones in Antarctica. That, of course, dramatically reduced their estimates of how high sea level can get. 

Ostensibly, they left those numbers out because the science couldn’t yet accurately calculate their impact—even though everyone in the business knew the actual impact would drown any sea level estimates that left them out.

So, now the early climate conservatism is getting hit by a truck. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising faster than it used to. Sea levels are rising faster than they were in the 1900s. There are more warmer-than-normal days and fewer cooler days over most land areas. The regional salinity of the oceans is changing. The oceans are acidifying. Storm, drought, flood and all the other impacts of climate change are already among us.

The permafrost in northern Alaska and Russia has warmed by 3-5 degrees Fahrenheit (2-3 degrees Celsius) just since the 1980s.

“Multiple lines of evidence support very substantial Arctic warming since the mid-20th century,” the new IPCC report says. The Arctic ice sheet is melting, although that doesn’t impact sea level. But the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are both losing ice to the oceans at increasing rates. They do impact sea level, in a big way.

In Hawai`i, we care about sea level. The rate of sea level rise has doubled since a century ago. It hasn’t been rising this fast at any time in the last 2000 years.

The last time temperatures were consistently 2 degrees Celsius higher than now, sea levels were fifteen feet higher than now. 

We’ve been arguing about sea levels in the range of 15 to 30 inches. But the potential of melting land ice—including the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets—is many times that.

Here’s NASA’s scary new report on the “unstoppable” melting of the West Antarctica ice sheets. 

Here are two paragraphs from the press release:

“The study presents multiple lines of evidence, incorporating 40 years of observations that indicate the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica ‘have passed the point of no return,’ according to glaciologist and lead author Eric Rignot, of UC Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. 

“These glaciers already contribute significantly to sea level rise, releasing almost as much ice into the ocean annually as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. They contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected. Rignot said these findings will require an upward revision to current predictions of sea level rise.”

The future is even scarier than we're being told, and it’s time to tell the folks on the Titanic the truth.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2014