Energy

Scientist: Global Warming Won’t Be Dangerous

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Andrew Follett Energy and Science Reporter
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Global warming won’t raise global temperatures enough to be dangerous, according to an analysis of satellite data released over the weekend by University of Alabama scientists.

The analysis of satellite data stretches back 37 years and estimates that the temperature increase will be only 1.15° Celsius over the century. Keeping global warming below 2° Celsius by 2100 is the widely accepted goal promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations COP 21 Paris summit. Such a low rate of temperature increase would prevent what global warming alarmists say are the most hazardous impacts of global warming.

“The average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere has warmed just over four tenths of a degree Celsius (almost three fourths of a degree Fahrenheit) during the past 37 years, with the greatest warming over the Arctic Ocean and Australia,” Dr. John Christy, director of the University of Alabama’s Earth System Science Center who preformed the analysis, told the global warming blog Watts Up With That. “That would put the average global temperature change over 100 years well under the 2.0 C (3.6 degrees F) goal set recently at the climate change summit in Paris.”

Christy is best known for being the first person to successfully develop a satellite temperature record.

Slower warming than predicted gives both humanity and the planet more time to adapt. The “lukewarm” option has “been boosted by recent climate research, and if it is right, current policies may do more harm than good,” according to Scientific American.

The idea of extremely dangerous global warming isn’t based just on warming attributed to carbon dioxide, but on various feedback loops. The idea of feedback loops is so common that the most recent IPCC report even included a table debunking concerns about “tipping points” triggering extreme warming.

Scientific American claims that “[t]hese feedback effects have been poorly estimated, and almost certainly overestimated, in the [climate] models.” There has already been a major divergence between climate modeling and observed temperatures.

During the run up to the Paris summit, environmentalists and left-wing media outlets claimed that keeping global warming below below 2° Celsius by 2100 is the only way to “save the world.”

Left-wing media outlets are already starting to back away from the previous 2° consensus now that it seems to be achievable, though even New Republic acknowledges that “the risks of climate change can be significantly reduced if warming is limited to well below 2 degrees Celsius.”

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