There is a better solution.  We need to restructure our tax system.  Tax waste and pollution, not work and production.

Al Gore said we should reduce payroll taxes and make up the difference with taxes on carbon.  With this pollution revenue we could also set up Environmental Trust Funds (like in Alaska) that would provide an environmental citizen's dividend paid into personal social security retirement, health, education and conservation accounts.  This would help soften the blow of rising fuel costs to the middle class and low-income folks.

GeoArk

The Working Group Forth Assessment concluded that most of the observed increase in the globally averaged temperature since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.

No footnotes, no supporting documents other than their own conjectures!

Eventually they'll be the 26th report that will reference the 25th, which will reference...

Texeme.Construct(Participant)

An "IPCC Report" is not a scientific paper...tell me that the IPCC says this or that is like telling I should read something in your sister's blog.

I analyzed the two primary papers from the "Journal Of Climate" that were offered to me by Gristies and found they were very far from being the basis of the kind of suppositions the IPCC is putting out.

BTW:
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/03/05/an-error-in-the ...

The 2007  IPCC Statement for Policymakers has a significant error that I have yet to see discussed.

The SPM reports on a “Total Net Anthropogenic” global average radiative forcing for 2005 of +1.6 [0.6 to 2.4] Watts per meter squared. When one converts the units, this means that the Earth’s climate system should be accumulating Joules at a rate of 2.61*10*22 Joules per year [0.98*10*22 Joules to 3.91*10*22 Joules per year] in 2005.

The data, however, show quite a different accumulation of Joules in recent years, and in 2005 in particular.

For example, with regard to the link that you provided, Pielke Sr is trying to say that the figures apply to the energy imbalance for the year 2005 and the WG1 SPM is therefore wrong.  That is not what it is talking about and the text makes this abundantly clear.  Specifically, it says, "The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment Report (TAR), leading to very high confidence7 that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W m-2. (see Figure SPM-2)."  That is a direct quote from page 5.  Pielke Sr is playing dumb by asserting that "in 2005" from the caption of figure SPM-2 means the energy inbalance for 2005 only. That's not what it means.  In 2005 (the cutoff for contributions to AR4), the total anthropogenic forcing anthropogenic forcing since 1750 was (about) +1.6 W m-2.

Try again.

If you want to analyze the footnotes and source papers, you will have your chance in November.

I propose that we completely ignore what he has to say. Hopefully he'll get the hint and go somewhere else to spread his bullshit around.

Whiskerfish

PS IPCC reports are written by scientists, incredibly thoroughly peer-reviewed, and bear no resemblance to my sister's blog.

Birds warn of a warming world

Ellie M. Cohen

Friday, April 6, 2007

I recently had the honor of speaking to 80 San Francisco middle-school students about climate change and the role of conserving nature in securing our future. When I asked if they could name any greenhouse gases, from across the room students shouted "carbon dioxide."

But when asked what nature provides that we humans rely on every day, the room was silent until one daring girl called out "water."

These bright youngsters did not readily make the link between global warming and "ecosystem services" -- nature's provisioning of freshwater, food, timber, fisheries, recreation, pest control, pollination, climate regulation, flood control and more. These services are a focus of the newest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report due out today.

Global warming is projected to produce dire consequences for hundreds of millions of people and wildlife due to sea-level rise, more extreme weather and severe water shortages.

The grim predictions are that by 2050, as many as one-third of all animal and plant species on Earth will become extinct.

Like the canaries in the coal mines in decades past, birds today are warning us of threats to our very way of life. Biologists at PRBO Conservation Science are already witnessing major changes from Alaska to Antarctica -- and especially here in California.

During the past two years, our scientists at the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge, 27 miles west of San Francisco, found that Cassin's auklets -- small seabirds related to puffins -- abandoned their nests en masse, an unprecedented breeding failure. Essentially, no chicks survived. At the height of the breeding season, parents couldn't find enough of a typically plentiful food source -- shrimp-like krill -- which also sustain whales, salmon and other marine wildlife. Wind patterns and ocean currents that drive the typically rich ocean food web off of our coast are changing in unpredictable and potentially devastating ways.

In Central California, migratory songbirds are arriving earlier in the spring to breed and later in the fall to over-winter, disrupting the long-evolved timing between birds and their plant or insect food sources and threatening some birds with extinction.

Our Sonoran Desert study areas experienced the most severe drought conditions on record in 2006, causing dramatically reduced breeding success, and in some cases, no breeding attempts of native songbirds.

To mitigate global warming impacts and help ensure the survival of human communities as well as the natural communities we rely on, we must redouble society's investments in ecosystem conservation.

Investing in riverside corridor expansion and restoration to manage and store water will provide flood control, recreation and critical habitat for birds and fish. Riparian conservation can mitigate predicted water shortages as less water is stored in the Sierra snowpack and more is released in intense rain storms.

Protecting tidal habitats -- and adjacent uplands to which tidal habitats can move as sea levels rise -- can reduce the destructiveness of extreme storms, slow impacts of rising seas and increase carbon removal from the atmosphere while continuing to nurture fisheries and birds.

Establishing marine reserves to protect ever-changing ocean food webs is essential to preserving our coastal economy and communities as well as whales, seals, sea lions, sea turtles and seabirds.

Thankfully, politicians are beginning to respond to the growing public outcry to kick our fossil-fuel addiction entirely, but legislation to simultaneously expand conservation efforts is conspicuously lacking.

When talking to those 11-to-14-year-olds last month, I couldn't help thinking how much the world has changed. When I was their age, the landing of a man on the Moon captured the world's imagination, fueling dreams of a future filled with peace and plenty. We must collectively dream again, but this time of neighbors, communities, states and nations working together to stop greenhouse-gas pollution and to conserve ecosystems. Our future depends on it.

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Lobby for nature

To ask your state legislators and U.S. representatives to kick the fossil-fuel habit entirely by 2020, as Sweden is committed to, and to make ecosystem conservation an equally high priority, go to:

www.legislature.ca.gov/www.congress.org

Ellie M. Cohen is executive director of PRBO Conservation Science, www.prbo.org.

This article appeared on page B - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle