Via.GREENIE WATCH 3nd April 2014 Buried in UN Report: $100 Billion More Needed to Adapt to ‘Global Warming’ The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest report estimates it will cost developed nations an additional $100 billion each year to help poorer countries adapt to the devastating effects of “unequivocal” global warming, including food shortages, infrastructure breakdown, and civil violence. But that figure was deleted from the report’s executive summary after industrialized nations, including the United States, objected to the high price tag. (See IPCC Summary.pdf) “The $100 billion figure, though included in the 2,500-page main report, was removed from a 48-page executive summary to be read by the world’s top political leaders,” the New York Times reported. “It was among the most significant changes made as the summary underwent final review during a dayslong editing session in Yokohama [Japan]” where it was released Monday. The final figure is likely to be much higher, according to Chapter 17 (“Economics of Adaptation”) of the full IPCC report, entitled Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, which notes that “there is strong evidence of important omissions and shortcomings in data and methods rendering these estimates highly preliminary.” The report goes on to say that the cost of adapting to global warming will most likely be far greater than the $1 billion a day spent to prevent it in 2012 by government and private entities worldwide. “Comparison of the global cost estimates with the current level of adaptation funding shows the projected global needs to be orders of magnitude greater than the current investment levels, particularly in developing countries,” the IPCC report stated. Noting that there are “biophysical limits to adaptation” to climate change, including “the inability to restore outdoor comfort under high temperatures,” the report adds that “the desirability of adaptation options will vary with time and climate change realization.” But the adverse affects of global warming will be felt by everyone, the UN panel claims. “Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said at a press conference Monday in Yokohama, where the panel’s latest report was released. “Without reductions in emissions,” he warned, the impacts of global warming “could get out of control.” “With high levels of warming that result from continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions, risks will be challenging to manage, and even serious, sustained investments in adaptation will face limits,” said Chris Field, co-chair of the panel’s Working Group II, which predicted that “by 2100 for the high-emission scenario, the combination of high temperature and humidity in some areas for parts of the year is projected to compromise normal human activities, including growing food or working outdoors.” Global warming will also “indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks,” the report maintains. However, the IPCC’s ability to correctly predict future climactic conditions based on computer modeling is coming under increasing fire by scientists because of its inability to do so in the past. For example, the panel’s widely-cited 2007 report, which was edited by Pachauri, predicted that Himalayan glaciers were in danger of disappearing by 2035 due to global warming. Pachauris panel shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore that year, but he was forced to walk back the prediction in 2010, referring to the blunder as a “human error.” And despite the panel’s insistence that the Earth is getting hotter, five different datasets show that there’s been no observable warming for 17 ½ years even as carbon dioxide levels have risen 12 percent, notes Christopher Monckton, who says “the discrepancy between prediction and observation continues to grow.” On Monday, the same day the IPCC report was released, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), whose membership includes 31,000 American scientists, released a paper that sharply contradicted the IPCC report and pointed out that a warmer Earth would actually be a good thing. The report concluded: “Atmospheric carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; The ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth; There is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels; Terrestrial ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result of warming temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2; Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels do not pose a significant threat to aquatic life; and A modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperature-related events.” On Feb. 25th, former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore also testified before the Senate Environmental and Public Works Subcommittee on Oversight, telling members of Congress that contrary to the IPCC’s findings,“it is ‘extremely likely’ that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one.” “Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species.” Moore testified. On the contrary, he added, “there is ample reason to believe that a sharp cooling of the climate would bring disastrous results for human civilization. SOURCE: cnsnews/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/buried-un-report-100-billion-more-needed-adapt-global-warming
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 18:30:06 +0000
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