{"id":33116,"date":"2018-04-04T08:47:07","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T13:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33116"},"modified":"2018-04-04T08:47:28","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T13:47:28","slug":"climate-sciences-official-text-is-outdated-heres-what-its-missing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33116","title":{"rendered":"Climate science\u2019s official text is outdated. Here\u2019s what it\u2019s missing."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Climate science\u2019s official text is outdated. Here\u2019s what it\u2019s missing.<\/a><\/span><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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The first-ever courtroom tutorial of climate science this week went about as you\u2019d expect<\/a>. The scientists representing Oakland and San Francisco had Powerpoint problems<\/a>, and the oil industry\u2019s lawyer\u00a0cherry-picked his facts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For all their differences, both sides drew from a common source: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the gold-standard<\/a> for mainstream climate science. Problem is, the last IPCC report came out way back in 2013. As it turns out, we\u2019ve learned a lot about our climate since then, and most of that new information paints an increasingly urgent picture of the need to slash fossil-fuel emissions as soon as possible.<\/p>\n

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Loud beep goes off. \u201cCoastal flood alert\u201d alsup deadpans<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2714<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Chevron attorney now up – “from Chevron’s perspective there’s no debate about climate science”\u00a0going to be quoting chapter and verse from IPCC reports. It’s an “amazing resource”<\/p>\n

It\u2019s convenient that Chevron\u2019s attorney relied on\u00a0that aging five-year-old report<\/a>. The next IPCC report isn\u2019t planned for public release until the fall of 2019. Gathering consensus takes time, and the result is that IPCC reports are out of date before they\u2019re published and necessarily conservative<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The climate models used in these reports grow old in a hurry. Since the 1970s, they\u2019ve routinely underestimated the rate of global warming<\/a>. Some of the most recent comprehensive assessments of climate science, including last year\u2019s congressionally-mandated, White House-approved, Climate Science Special Report<\/a>, include scary new sections on \u201cclimate surprises<\/a>\u201d like simultaneous droughts and hurricanes, that have wide-reaching consequences. The scientists representing the two cities knew this, and didn\u2019t limit their talking points to the IPCC.<\/p>\n

\u201cPositive feedbacks (self-reinforcing cycles) within the climate system have the potential to accelerate human-induced climate change,\u201d says a section from that Climate Science Special report<\/a>, \u201cand even shift the Earth\u2019s climate system, in part or in whole, into new states that are very different from those experienced in the recent past.\u201d<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Climate science\u2019s official text is outdated. Here\u2019s what it\u2019s missing. The first-ever courtroom tutorial of climate science this week went about as you\u2019d expect. The scientists representing Oakland and San Francisco had Powerpoint problems, and the oil industry\u2019s lawyer\u00a0cherry-picked his facts. For all their differences, both sides drew from a common source: The Intergovernmental Panel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[141,2956,15758,15759],"class_list":["post-33116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-science","tag-eric-holthaus","tag-grist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33116"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33118,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33116\/revisions\/33118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}