just in case you don’t know who Richard Black is. He’s the BBC’s environmental correspondent who keeps banging on about how we’re all doomed if we don’t bow down to the great God, “Climate change”.
Maybe, just a slight niggle that something might not be true in the climate change scenario. Here he opines.
Grand statements about climate change impacts are all very well for scientists - a global average temperature rise of so many degrees Celsius, a global change in precipitation of such-and-such percent.
His closing remarks are quite illuminating.
The Met Office team explained that the impacts of melting glaciers were not included in their modelling - and that's set to be a serious issue not only in Peru but the much more populous nations around the Himalayas.
When quizzed about these figures, one of the Met Office scientists said that many other projections were based on single computer models.
Putting the range of uncertainty in the public domain from this large suite of models was, she said, "intellectually honest".
Fair enough. But the exercise also surely gives you an insight into the limits of current modelling when the various models, each of them supposed to be "state-of-the-art", reach such divergent conclusions.
As a policymaker, as a business leader, as a citizen, would you make decisions on the basis of these models? (My embolden).
The start of a damascene conversion?
