‘Independent’ and ‘Scientist’ Michael Mann Say It’s Worse Then We Thought!

The Independent, not to mention Michael Mann, long ago lost any credibility. Here’s a good example why:

Preventing global warming from becoming “dangerous” may have just got significantly harder after new research suggested climate scientists have been using the wrong baseline temperature.

The amount of global warming is often measured relative to the late 19th century even though this is about 100 years after the start of the industrial revolution, when humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels.

Now an international team of scientists has suggested that the Earth’s true “pre-industrial” temperature could be up to 0.2 degrees Celsius cooler.

That would mean that instead of about 1C of global warming, the planet’s average temperature may have risen by up to 1.2C.

According to the Paris Agreement on climate change, the world should try to limit global warming to as close to 1.5C as possible to avoid its worst effects, such as deadly heatwaves, sea level rise that threatens coastal cities and more violent storms.

One of the researchers, Professor Michael Mann, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had been using a definition of pre-industrial “that is likely underestimating the warming that has already taken place”.

“That means we have less carbon to burn than we previously thought, if we are to avert the most dangerous changes in climate,” he said.

“When the IPCC says that we’ve warmed 1C relative to pre-industrial, that’s probably incorrect. It’s likely as much as 1.2C.”

The study, described in a paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that anything from 0.02C to 0.21C of warming could already have taken place before the late 19th century.

The lower end of that range would mean the current use of the late 19th century is reasonably accurate, but the upper end would be a substantial change.

Professor Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, said that either the Paris targets “have to be revised” or the world could simply decide that they only wanted to restrict warming relative to the 19th century.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/climate-scientists-may-underestimating-global-150047680.html

Well pardon me for gatecrashing the alarmists’ “We’re all going to die party”

But the world’s climate is, without question, much more amenable since the Little Ice Age. If this is the case via 1.2C, rather than 1.0C, degree of warming, then surely that means that the consequences of another half a degree or so are hardly a case for panic!

In any event, we have not got a clue what the average temperature of the Earth is now, never mind what it was 200 years ago.

If proper engineers and scientists presented this sort of junk science to their superiors, they would quickly end up in the dole queue.

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