Yesterday's report increased its assessment of the likelihood that humanity is warning the planet from 90 to 95 per cent. Yet it, too, errs on the side of caution on Arctic ice, and takes little account of what scientists say is one of the most alarming developments: the release of methane from melting permafrost to reinforce the gases already warming the planet. Its conclusions are nevertheless alarming. Atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases are "unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years". The Antarctic ice sheet is melting five times – and the Greenland one six times – faster than just a decade ago. And whatever changes take place will only be reversible over many hundreds, even thousands, of years.
What it does not conclude, despite widely publicised sceptic assertions, is that the world is warming at about half the rate it previously estimated. Its actual reduction is by just one hundredth of a degree centigrade, from 0.13 to 0.12 degrees per decade.
The IPCC did, however, address a much more substantial sceptical point, that the temperature increase at the Earth's surface has slowed down since 1998 to about 40 per cent of its average rate since 1951 – something it accepts it didn't predict. One reason is that 1998, the year invariably chosen by sceptics, was one of the warmest ever: if 1995 or 1996 is chosen as the starting point, the rate actually exceeds the long-term average. But, even then, the warming has been much slower than in the previous decade.
That seems partially due to rather less heat reaching the Earth from the Sun, since it is going through a cooler phase in its regular cycle and dust from volcanoes is providing some screening. Even so, enough is getting though to warm the planet somehow: to deny that it is doing so is to challenge not global warming but the laws of physics themselves.
It has almost certainly ended up in the oceans, like more than 90 per cent of all the solar heat we receive, and there are some indications that it has penetrated deep down where our monitoring is poor. If that is so, it could provide temporary, if illusory, relief. The process could just as well reverse when conditions change, seriously accelerating warming. Such slow-downs have happened before, only for rapid heating to resume. Despite the IPCC's work, however, there is so far little sign that governments will do enough to avert dangerous climate change. Looking back at its report, it seems, future generations are more likely to scream than to dance.
Environmentalist Justine is quick to put Ed in his place
Time was when leaders' children made them greener. Chelsea Clinton was a more effective environmental influence on Bill than Al Gore, while Tony Blair, whose children also nagged him, confessed they were delighted that his first top-level meeting was a follow-up to the Rio Earth Summit.
Such filial forthrightness has not, of course, always been forthcoming. If Mark Thatcher caused his mother's championing of action against global warming, it somehow escaped me, and I somewhat doubt if George W influenced the elder Bush's short-lived self-styling as "the environment president".
Pressure from Sasha and Malia helped Barack Obama's decision last winter to bring climate change smartly up his second-term agenda. But, by and large, today's leaders are too young to have green campaigners for children – so their wives have to do the job instead.
Sometime Greenpeace supporter Samantha Cameron was central to her husband's early embrace of environmentalism (where is she now?).
And did you catch Justine Miliband's catechism at the Labour Party conference: "I'm a lawyer, I'm a mum, I'm an environmentalist, I'm a wife, I'm a school governor" – leaving poor old Ed, you'll have noticed, rather a long way down the list. I rest my case.
The love and longing that's enough to make a wolf howl
It's one of nature's most chilling sounds. But could the howling of wolves actually prove that they are warm and sociable – if somewhat snobbish – souls?
Researchers at Austria's Wolf Science Centre – which prides itself on its "close and meaningful relationship" with the carnivores – seem to think so. They keep two packs at their establishment near Vienna, and handlers take the animals out for exercise on the leash, one at a time, only to find that, on each occasion, all the others howl.
The scientists discovered that those left behind made more noise when they had a particularly close relationship with the one departing on wolfy walkies, or when it ranked high in the pack. And they report in the journal Current Biology that the increased howling was not accompanied by rises in the stress hormone cortisol, suggesting that it is not caused by separation anxiety, but is a way of keeping in contact.
Thus, says Dr Friederike Range of Vienna's University of Veterinary Medicine, "the social relationship can explain more of the variation than the emotional state of the wolf".
So there you have it: Red Riding Hood's mistake was she fell victim to a social howler.
via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEP5t0m49L7FLVA79_nhePAO2bdVA&url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10339557/IPCC-Global-warming-is-getting-deeper.html
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