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Is the Earth hotting up faster than anticipated?

If people keep emitting fossil fuels in the way we expect, with no price on carbon or no future policy initiatives, we expect a range of 1.4 to 3 degrees by 2050,”

Impact of climate change may be underestimated, ABC News, The World Today By David Mark,  March 26, 2012  A new study suggests climate scientists may have underestimated the effect of greenhouse gases, with global temperatures now predicted to rise by between 1.4 and 3 degrees Celsius by 2050.

The study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience by a team of
international scientists who ran 10,000 computer simulations of
climate models in an attempt to explore the range of global warming
predictions made by climate scientists.

The researchers found that while their results matched the predictions
made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the
lower end, they were higher than earlier predictions at the higher
end.

One of the certainties about predicting climate change is uncertainty,
which is why climate change professor David Frame and 26 of his
colleagues from around the world have tried to narrow things
down……
“If people keep emitting fossil fuels in the way we expect, with no price on carbon or no future policy initiatives, we expect a range of 1.4 to 3 degrees by 2050,” he said.

Those numbers are based on average temperatures between 1960 and 1990.

At the bottom end it is similar to the last prediction made by the
IPCC, but it exceeds that group’s prediction at the higher end……
He says the world is most probably somewhere in the middle range
rather than at the extremes.

“But it makes me think that people who are thinking about real-world
problems, farmers, wine growers in Australia, people managing river
catchments for instance, might want to have a look at some of these
models to think about what … might plausibly happen, what sorts of
changes they might plausibly have to manage for,” he said.

“So one of the real purposes of this is to give planners a chance to
… think about scenarios for the future that are physically
plausible, are internally consistent, which is an important property
and potentially quite practical.”

The paper comes just three days after the World Meteorological
Organisation published its latest Status of the Global Climate Report,
which found that 2011 was a year of climate extremes and the 11th
warmest year on record.

The journal has also published a paper which states that extreme
weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very
likely” caused by man-made global warming.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-26/scientists-may-have-underestimated-climate-change/3913288

March 27, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change