Well it seems to me to joke about uncertainty is only what the political groups that do not want to do anything like to have.

Normally when youhave uncertainty is not bad to prepare for a bad scenario (stay within errors but be safe this is what they tought me in hazards managment!)

Joking for the errors for an earth scientist seems to me even more funny (1-4 bilion people). Well when I attended the class of physic of atmosphere (early 90) the forecast that were given on the italian tv were of the order of 40-50% this means it was more luckly that they were wrong than correct (well it is not completely true since the other phenomena were adding up even if they had very little probability).

Well the Meteo department are often within earthsciences (and I am a geophysicist/geodesist) and I do not find absolutely funny to joke about large uncertaninty. What about predicting earthquakes??? Parkfield should have happen few years before isn't it? And for many place we can only say there will be an earthquake in the future but the max we can say is in the near future or far future (what about this kind of errors). Still I think incredibly important to warn people that they live on a fault and that in the future (probably even not within their life) they can have a catastrofic event and to ask them to plan accordingly. Or should we have the people in Salt Lake City not to care that they live on a fault only because we do not know if it will rupture soon????

Sincerely

Prof Rocco Malservisi

I am pleased that there is now a global warming section on accuweather.com. This is an important move towards helping the public think about global warming in different contexts.

However, I am dismayed that your featured article aims at pointing out inconsequential details of the Stern Report. The details that you call into questions fail to give the reader a comprehensive evaluation of this very comprehensive report. It is clear that the article intends to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of readers on an issue that all credible scientists agree can no longer be avoided or discredited. Yes, the range 1-4 billion is rather large, but we are predicting years ahead into the future, not days as a weather forecaster. No matter if this number is 1 billion or 4 billion, we know for sure that global warming could mean deaths on a larger scale than the world has ever seen. This statistic should not be taken lightly; it is hardly something to "chuckle" over.

I suggest that future articles featured in the science section of your website focus solely on scientific data related to global warming that will help inform the public of climate change (as a portion of this article has), and not semi-editorial comments based on inconsequential fragments that are intended to dishonestly skew the viewpoint of the reader.

Laura,

It is indeed refreshing to read your blog after the recent flap at TWC (can't even bring myself to say the name). I was a viewer and website user for many years and had grown very tired of the slant of the reporting on Global Climate Change. This last ordeal was the last straw.

I run a small family owned paint contracting company that specializes in painting water towers in the midwest, and our need for up to the minute radar images and forecasting is great, as you might imagine. All of our office and home computers are now set to get our weather info from AccuWeather. Thanks to you and AccuWeather.com for this site.

Martin Neumann

In response to Devon?s comments: I am sorry to inform you that there is considerable disagreement between credible scientists concerning global warming. The mainstream media likes to give the impression that all scientists agree. Here is an article from a ?credible? scientist about global warming. Unfortunately the issue has become so politically correct that many scientists with opposing views keep quiet because they fear a loss of federal grants if they question the ?consensus? on global warming.

Please take a few minutes to read this article. I would love to read your comments afterward

Don't Believe the Hype
Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.

BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:01 a.m.

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.
Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."
That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.
The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."
So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.
They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.

The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.
Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.
A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual science.
A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.
There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.
Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.
The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.
Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

Devon - this is a blog, not a news site. I link to scientific and media stories regarding global warming and also other things which are related and of interest to me, primarily alternative fuels and ways to cut greenhouse emissions. My comments are editorial, and will include opinion. That's what a blog is.

Devon, Actually the figures are pure nonsense. They can no better predict future climate change than they can predict earthquakes. The erroneous data put in the climate models is magnified into greater errors with each iteration of the model software. (I'm not talking about software versions, I'm referring to how models generate scenarios.)

The only predictions we ever hear about are of catastrophe. Have you ever thought that it might be just the opposite? So wat if we warm up another degree in the next century or even 50 years. Am I supposed to care that it will be 21 degrees outside instead of 20 degrees as it is now. Or that the average temperature here in July will be 72 instead of 71? Forgive me if I am under-whelmed.

Ask yourself why so many people move to the South after they retire or why most of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of the US border. They want warm weather, that's why. Warm is good, cold is hardship.

I'm all for warmer weather. Unfortunately, all 25 years of satellite data that we have shows a cooling trend.

Woody, if you want warmer weather, then move to Florida, instead of artificially warming the planet.

A global increase of a few degrees is NOT the same as a uniform increase of a few degrees, as woodNfish ignorantly points out. In other words, if the global average increases by two degrees, that temperature disparity may increase with latitude in the northern hemisphere. The north pole may be 10 degrees warmer than normal, while the equator may not change much.

Of course, dismissing the whole thing because, hey, "people love warm weather," reflects a myopic view of the world.