"Oil firms fund climate change 'denial'
David Adam, science correspondent
Thursday January 27, 2005
The Guardian
Lobby groups funded by the US oil industry are targeting Britain in a bid to play down the threat of climate change and derail action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, leading scientists have warned.
Bob May, president of the Royal Society, says that "a lobby of professional sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change" is turning its attention to Britain because of its high profile in the debate.
Writing in the Life section of today's Guardian, Professor May says the government's decision to make global warming a focus of its G8 presidency has made it a target. So has the high profile of its chief scientific adviser, David King, who described climate change as a bigger threat than terrorism.
Prof May's warning coincides with a meeting of climate change sceptics today at the Royal Institution in London organised by a British group, the Scientific Alliance, which has links to US oil company ExxonMobil through a collaboration with a US institute.
Last month the Scientific Alliance published a joint report with the George C Marshall Institute in Washington that claimed to "undermine" climate change claims. The Marshall institute received £51,000 from ExxonMobil for its "global climate change programme" in 2003 and an undisclosed sum this month.
Prof May's warning comes as British scientists, in the journal Nature, show that emissions of carbon dioxide could have a more dramatic effect on climate than thought. They say the average temperature could rise 11C, even if atmospheric carbon dioxide were limited to the levels expected in 2050.
David Frame, who coordinated the climate prediction experiment, said: "If the real world response were anywhere near the upper end of our range, even today's levels of greenhouse gases could already be dangerously high."
Emission limits such as those in the Kyoto protocol would hit oil firms because the bulk of greenhouse gases come from burning fossil fuel products.
Prof May writes that during the 1990s, parts of the US oil industry funded sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change. A Scientific Alliance spokesman said today's meeting was sponsored but funders did not influence policies. ExxonMobil said it was not involved.
One adviser is Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Centre, who is linked to the Marshall Institute. In 1998 Dr Baliunas co-wrote an article that argued for the release of more carbon dioxide. It was mass-mailed to US scientists with a petition asking them to reject Kyoto.
· Tony Blair yesterday attempted to urge George Bush to sign a climate change accord. At the World Economic Forum he said climate change was "not universally accepted", but evidence of its danger had been "clearly and persuasively advocated" by a very large number of "independent voices". "
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1399585,00.html
All this as a result of this:
"Alarm at new climate warning
By Richard Black
BBC environment correspondent
Global temperature simulation climateprediction.net
The study used a programme that ran on PCs around the world
Temperatures around the world could rise by as much as 11C, according to one of the largest climate prediction projects ever run.
This figure is twice the level that previous studies have suggested.
Scientists behind the project, called climateprediction.net, say it shows that a "safe" upper limit for carbon dioxide is impossible to define.
The results of the study, which used PCs around the world to produce data, are published in the journal Nature.
Climateprediction.net is run from Oxford University, and is a distributed computing project; rather than using a supercomputer to run climate models, people can download software to their own PCs, which run the programs during downtime.
More than 95,000 people have registered, from more than 150 countries; their PCs have between them run more than 60,000 simulations of future climate.
Each PC runs a slightly different computer simulation examining what happens to the global climate if levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere double from pre-industrial levels - which may happen by the middle of the century.
What vary most between the simulations are the precise nature of physical processes like the extent of convection within tropical clouds - a process which drives the transport of heat around the world.
Lowest rise
So no two simulations will produce exactly the same results; overall, the project produces a picture of the possible range of outcomes given the present state of scientific knowledge.
The lowest rise which climateprediction.net finds possible is 2C, ranging up to 11C.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Society feels no remorse for ensuring the worlds youth are left to clean up our mess
Paul Girling, Toronto, Canada
Send us your comments
The timescale would depend on how quickly the doubling of CO2 was reached, but large rises would be on a scale of a century at least from now.
"I think these results suggest that our need to do something about climate change is perhaps even more urgent," the climateprediction.net chief scientist David Stainforth told BBC News.
"However, with our current state of knowledge, we can't yet define a safe level in the atmosphere."
On Monday, the International Climate Change Taskforce, co-chaired by the British MP Stephen Byers, claimed it had shown that a carbon dioxide concentration of over 400 ppm (parts per million) would be 'dangerous'.
The current concentration is around 378 ppm, rising at roughly 2ppm per year.
Dangerous warming
Next week the UK Meteorological Office hosts an international conference, Stabilisation 2005, announced by Tony Blair late last year.
Its aim is to discuss what the term "dangerous" global warming really means, and to look at ways to stabilise greenhouse gas levels.
Myles Allen, the principal investigator of climateprediction.net, said the focus on stabilisation might not be appropriate.
"Stabilisation as an exclusive target may not be adequate," he told BBC News.
"Stephen Byers claims to know that 400 ppm is the maximum 'safe' level; what we show is that it may be impossible to pin down a safe level, and therefore we should not focus exclusively on stabilisation."
Distributed computing has been used before, notably by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or Seti, where several million people have downloaded software enabling them to analyse data from observations of distant galaxies for signs of alien life.
The scientists behind climateprediction.net believe their project, because it is distributed to individual PCs, can help inform people about climate change - and that, in turn could bring political change.
"It's very difficult to get politicians to collaborate, not only across the globe but also over sustained lengths of time," Bob Spicer from the Earth Sciences Department at the Open University, told BBC News.
"The people who can hold politicians to account are the public; and with this project we are bringing cutting-edge science to the stakeholders, the public." "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4210629.stm
So???
David Adam, science correspondent
Thursday January 27, 2005
The Guardian
Lobby groups funded by the US oil industry are targeting Britain in a bid to play down the threat of climate change and derail action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, leading scientists have warned.
Bob May, president of the Royal Society, says that "a lobby of professional sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change" is turning its attention to Britain because of its high profile in the debate.
Writing in the Life section of today's Guardian, Professor May says the government's decision to make global warming a focus of its G8 presidency has made it a target. So has the high profile of its chief scientific adviser, David King, who described climate change as a bigger threat than terrorism.
Prof May's warning coincides with a meeting of climate change sceptics today at the Royal Institution in London organised by a British group, the Scientific Alliance, which has links to US oil company ExxonMobil through a collaboration with a US institute.
Last month the Scientific Alliance published a joint report with the George C Marshall Institute in Washington that claimed to "undermine" climate change claims. The Marshall institute received £51,000 from ExxonMobil for its "global climate change programme" in 2003 and an undisclosed sum this month.
Prof May's warning comes as British scientists, in the journal Nature, show that emissions of carbon dioxide could have a more dramatic effect on climate than thought. They say the average temperature could rise 11C, even if atmospheric carbon dioxide were limited to the levels expected in 2050.
David Frame, who coordinated the climate prediction experiment, said: "If the real world response were anywhere near the upper end of our range, even today's levels of greenhouse gases could already be dangerously high."
Emission limits such as those in the Kyoto protocol would hit oil firms because the bulk of greenhouse gases come from burning fossil fuel products.
Prof May writes that during the 1990s, parts of the US oil industry funded sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change. A Scientific Alliance spokesman said today's meeting was sponsored but funders did not influence policies. ExxonMobil said it was not involved.
One adviser is Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Centre, who is linked to the Marshall Institute. In 1998 Dr Baliunas co-wrote an article that argued for the release of more carbon dioxide. It was mass-mailed to US scientists with a petition asking them to reject Kyoto.
· Tony Blair yesterday attempted to urge George Bush to sign a climate change accord. At the World Economic Forum he said climate change was "not universally accepted", but evidence of its danger had been "clearly and persuasively advocated" by a very large number of "independent voices". "
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1399585,00.html
All this as a result of this:
"Alarm at new climate warning
By Richard Black
BBC environment correspondent
Global temperature simulation climateprediction.net
The study used a programme that ran on PCs around the world
Temperatures around the world could rise by as much as 11C, according to one of the largest climate prediction projects ever run.
This figure is twice the level that previous studies have suggested.
Scientists behind the project, called climateprediction.net, say it shows that a "safe" upper limit for carbon dioxide is impossible to define.
The results of the study, which used PCs around the world to produce data, are published in the journal Nature.
Climateprediction.net is run from Oxford University, and is a distributed computing project; rather than using a supercomputer to run climate models, people can download software to their own PCs, which run the programs during downtime.
More than 95,000 people have registered, from more than 150 countries; their PCs have between them run more than 60,000 simulations of future climate.
Each PC runs a slightly different computer simulation examining what happens to the global climate if levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere double from pre-industrial levels - which may happen by the middle of the century.
What vary most between the simulations are the precise nature of physical processes like the extent of convection within tropical clouds - a process which drives the transport of heat around the world.
Lowest rise
So no two simulations will produce exactly the same results; overall, the project produces a picture of the possible range of outcomes given the present state of scientific knowledge.
The lowest rise which climateprediction.net finds possible is 2C, ranging up to 11C.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Society feels no remorse for ensuring the worlds youth are left to clean up our mess
Paul Girling, Toronto, Canada
Send us your comments
The timescale would depend on how quickly the doubling of CO2 was reached, but large rises would be on a scale of a century at least from now.
"I think these results suggest that our need to do something about climate change is perhaps even more urgent," the climateprediction.net chief scientist David Stainforth told BBC News.
"However, with our current state of knowledge, we can't yet define a safe level in the atmosphere."
On Monday, the International Climate Change Taskforce, co-chaired by the British MP Stephen Byers, claimed it had shown that a carbon dioxide concentration of over 400 ppm (parts per million) would be 'dangerous'.
The current concentration is around 378 ppm, rising at roughly 2ppm per year.
Dangerous warming
Next week the UK Meteorological Office hosts an international conference, Stabilisation 2005, announced by Tony Blair late last year.
Its aim is to discuss what the term "dangerous" global warming really means, and to look at ways to stabilise greenhouse gas levels.
Myles Allen, the principal investigator of climateprediction.net, said the focus on stabilisation might not be appropriate.
"Stabilisation as an exclusive target may not be adequate," he told BBC News.
"Stephen Byers claims to know that 400 ppm is the maximum 'safe' level; what we show is that it may be impossible to pin down a safe level, and therefore we should not focus exclusively on stabilisation."
Distributed computing has been used before, notably by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or Seti, where several million people have downloaded software enabling them to analyse data from observations of distant galaxies for signs of alien life.
The scientists behind climateprediction.net believe their project, because it is distributed to individual PCs, can help inform people about climate change - and that, in turn could bring political change.
"It's very difficult to get politicians to collaborate, not only across the globe but also over sustained lengths of time," Bob Spicer from the Earth Sciences Department at the Open University, told BBC News.
"The people who can hold politicians to account are the public; and with this project we are bringing cutting-edge science to the stakeholders, the public." "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4210629.stm
So???