At times it does seem as though we, as in mankind, are truly beyond help!

If you detect a note of frustration in the title of today’s Post and the sub-heading above, then you are not mistaken.  It comes from a series of communications that have impinged upon my consciousness over the last twelve hours or so.

This morning Rob I., from here in Payson, emailed me a scan of an article in today’s (Monday) The Arizona Republic newspaper, written by Doyle Rice.  It was entitled Study: Global temps may jump 5 degrees by 2050

I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing it in full.

As the U.S. simmers through its hottest March on record — with more than 6,000 record-high temperatures already set this month — a new study released Sunday shows that average global temperatures could climb 2.5 to 5.4 degrees by 2050 if greenhouse-gas emissions continue unabated.

The study findings are based on the results of 10,000 computer model simulations of future weather overseen by researchers at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

“These are the first results to suggest that the higher warming scenario could be plausible,” said study lead author Dan Rowlands of Oxford.

It is a faster rate of warming than most other models predict.

Most scientists say that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal are causing the planet to warm to levels that cannot be explained by natural variability.

The study was published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience and backs up similar predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

The climate models used in the study accurately reproduced actual, observed temperature changes over the last 50 years. Assuming that models that simulate past warming realistically are the best candidates for future warming predictions, the authors conclude in the study that a warming of 2.5 to 5.4 degrees by 2050, compared with the 1960-90 average, is in the “likely range” of climate warming.

The Earth’s average temperature during the decade of 2000-10 was almost a full degree higher than the average from 1960-90, Rowlands said.

I don’t feel too bad at ‘borrowing’ the story above because I also subscribe to the UK’s Met Office News Blog and, guess what, in my ‘in-box’ this morning were two news stories from the Met Office.  Let me take them in this order.

The first one I want to refer to here is this Citizen science looks at future warming uncertainty  and includes the link to the Nature Geoscience magazine article that prompted the story in The Arizona Republic.

This is how it develops,

A project running almost 10,000 climate simulations on volunteers’ home computers has found that a global warming of 3 degrees Celsius by 2050 is ‘equally plausible’ as a rise of 1.4 degrees.

The study addresses some of the uncertainties that previous forecasts, using simpler models or only a few dozen simulations, may have over-looked.

Importantly, the forecast range is derived from using a complex Met Office model that accurately reproduces observed temperature changes over the last 50 years.

The results suggest that the world is very likely to cross the ’2 degrees barrier’ at some point this century if emissions continue unabated.

It also suggests that those planning for the impacts of climate change need to consider the possibility of warming of up to 3 degrees (above the 1961-1990 average) by 2050, even on a mid-range emission scenario. This is a faster rate of warming than most other models predict.

Just go and read that last paragraph again: “This is a faster rate of warming than most other models predict.”

Then the next item from the Met Office blog was this,  Why is it so warm?  It’s referring to the specific weather conditions in the UK at present:

The last few days have been unseasonably warm but why is this happening so early in the year? The answer lies largely in the air flow directly above the United Kingdom but more importantly where that air has come from.

Just a few paragraphs down we read, “we have seen a new record high for Scotland in March as the temperature reached 22.8 °C  [73.04 °F] at Fyvie Castle in Aberdeenshire on Sunday 25 March.”  So another temperature record!

I had a quick call with Martin Lack about an hour before starting this Post and he pointed me to the Australian website of CSIRO.  There we find the latest State of the Climate report, from which we read,

The previous State of the Climate, released in March 2010 highlighted a multi-decadal warming trend over Australia’s land and oceans, an increase in record hot days and decrease in record cold days across the country, a decrease in rainfall in southwest and southeast Australia, an increase in global sea level, and increases in global greenhouse gas concentrations.

Do read the full report starting here.  Or if you want a video to watch, then here it is:

Dr Karl Braganza from the Climate Monitoring Section of the Bureau of Meteorology discusses the State of the Climate in 2012.

Also on the CSIRO website is a small piece saying,

Planet Under Pressure 2012

Scientists from around the globe are meeting in London in March to discuss ‘solutions, at all scales, to move societies on to a sustainable pathway’. Planet Under Pressure 2012 is designed to bring together senior policymakers, industry leaders, NGOs, young scientists, the media, health specialists, and academics from many disciplines.
25 March 2012

Meeting to discuss ‘solutions, at all scales, to move societies on to a sustainable pathway’.  Any rational thinking person on this planet if given a chance to reflect on the science knows we have to change our ways.  And the means to do it are clear; we are not talking rocket-science here.

So when Martin Lack catches my attention with a recent piece entitled The seven woes of the Tea Party and I am linked to this article by Rick Santorum, I feel as though it must be me!  This is what Mr. Santorum writes:

The Elephant in the Room: Challenging science dogma

As with evolution, the ‘consensus’ on climate change has become an ideology.

Questioning the scientific consensus in pursuit of the truth is an important part of how science has advanced through the centuries. But what happens when the scientific consensus becomes an ideology that trumps the pursuit of truth? Answer: Those making legitimate inquiries are ostracized, the careers of dissenters are destroyed, and debate is stifled.

Unfortunately, I am referring not only to the current proponents of the theory of man-made global warming.

With the penultimate paragraph reading thus,

Why? Well, maybe because Americans don’t like being told what to believe. Maybe because we have learned to be skeptical of “scientific” claims, particularly those at war with our common sense – like the Darwinists’ telling us for decades that we are just a slightly higher form of life than a bacterium that is here purely by chance, or the Environmental Protection Agency’s informing us last week that man-made carbon dioxide – a gas that humans exhale and plants need to live, a gas that represents less than 0.1 percent of the atmosphere – is a dangerous pollutant threatening to overheat the world.

Frankly, I am lost for words and probably best that I am!  Lost because irrespective of political ‘left’ or ‘right’ the science of where this so-called intelligent species we call homo sapiens is heading, is beyond question.  I use the phrase ‘beyond question’ not as a statement of fact but as a statement of truth.  For science, as this non-scientist understands it, is about distinguishing the truth from ‘non-truth’.

Our beautiful companions for thousands of years truly do know better.  That’s the truth you see in those eyes below.