The truth is emerging - there is not a scrap of evidence that man-made carbon dioxide causes global warming. The IPCC has been devious and incompetent. Australia should boycott all further IPCC meetings and withhold future funding. A mere 20,000 years ago, massive ice sheets covered much of the earth. The sparse population led a cold hungry existence.

Then, just 12,000 years ago, and there was dramatic natural global warming - ice sheets melted, sea levels rose and the warming seas expelled carbon dioxide. The warmth and increased carbon dioxide plant food in the atmosphere encouraged the spread of grasslands, forests and animal and human populations over lands once covered by thick, barren sheets of ice. None of these dramatic changes were caused by emissions from the camp fires of the Cave Men.

Since then earth has experienced see-saw heating and cooling. The most recent warming phase started at the depth of the Little Ice Age about 300 years ago. There were no coal-burning steam engines, no oil-burning combustion engines and no cement plants, but still the planet warmed up. (see this report)

Climate fluctuations continue in recent times, but not in step with man’s carbon dioxide emissions. When industry declined in the Great Depression of the 1930s, CO2 emissions fell but temperatures rose to a peak. Then during the immediate post war boom in industry, emissions soared but temperatures fell and there were fears of a new ice age starting. Now, since the start of the new century, with emissions from China and India growing strongly, world temperatures are again steady or falling.

The message is there for those prepared to read - man’s production of carbon dioxide does not control world temperature.

In Australia, many long term temperature records show that for the last century rural temperatures were stable or falling, but temperatures recorded in the big cities show slight warming. There is ZERO global warming of the atmosphere, just a bit of urban heating near big cities. This heating is caused, not by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but by heat generated from increasing urban human activities - heaters, appliances, air-conditioners, cars, trains, planes, concrete and bitumen all pumping new heat into the air. And the temperature measuring spots that were once in bushy outer suburbs are now surrounded by cars, concrete and airports.

This urban heat causes hot air to rise, may generate a storm or two, and the heat is lost harmlessly to space. Here is a picture of “global warming” in Deniliquin January (average maximum).

For more records from rural Australia, and one for Sydney see this post. Also see Sydney urban contamination and false claims by CSIRO in this analysis by Warwick Hughes here.

For the non-warming evident in the longest continuous temperature record in the world, see the British record. See Warwick Hughes evidence of major Hadley/IPCC Africa temperature trends here. And this classic global expose by the late great John Daly here.

For the IPCC and its local lap-dog, the CSIRO, to continue promoting the man- made global warming scare in the face of clear contrary evidence is grossly improper and should be subject to independent review. Man-made global warming does not exist. Both the IPCC and the CSIRO should be challenged to justify their reckless and baseless climate scare-mongering.

See PDF here.

The official United Nation’s global warming agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a four-legged stool that is fast losing its legs. To carry the message of man-made global warming theory to the world, the IPCC has depended on 1) computer models, 2) data collection, 3) long-range temperature forecasting and 4) communication. None of these efforts are sitting on firm ground.

Over the past month, one of the IPCC’s top climate scientists, Mojib Latif, attempted to explain that even if global temperatures were to cool over the next 10 to 20 years, that would not mean that man-made global warming is no longer catastrophic. It was a tough case to make, and it is not clear Mr. Latif succeeded. In a presentation to a world climate conference in early September, Mr. Latif rambled somewhat and veered off into inscrutable language that is now embedded in a million blog posts attempting to prove one thing or another.

A sample: “It may well happen that you enter a decade, or maybe even two, you know, when the temperature cools, all right, relative to the present level...And then, you know, I know what’s going to happen. You know, I will get, you know, millions of phone calls, you know -’What’s going on?’ ‘So is global warming disappearing, you know?’ ‘Have you lied on us, you know?’ So, and, therefore, this is the reason why we need to address this decadal prediction issue.”

The decadal prediction issue appears to be a combination of computer model problems, the unpredictability of natural climate variation, and assorted uncertainties. Making all this clear to the average global citizen will not be easy and climate scientists need to be able to make it clear, said Mr. Latif. “We have to ask the nasty questions ourselves, all right, or some other people will do it.”

All this is still swirling around the global climate issue today. But now along comes another problem. Canadian data buster Steve McIntyre has spend most of the last three years deconstructing the IPCC’s famous claim that the last couple of decades of the 20th century were the hottest in a thousand years. Using what was called The Hockey Stick graph, the IPCC claimed to have the smoking gun that showed a sharp run up in global temperatures through to 1997. The validity of the IPCC data began to crumble when Mr. McIntyre and Ross McKitrick of Guelph University found serious data problems that raised doubts about the graph and the claims of record high temperatures.

As Ross McKitrick explains in his op-ed, Steve McIntyre has uncovered another data distortion that further undermines the original graphic claim that the world has set temperature records in recent years. If world temperatures may have been just as hot in the past as they have been recently, and if the the next two decades could be cooler than they have been recently, the theory of climate change becomes an even tougher case to make.

The IPCC is now on wobbly legs at all four corners. Its models are inadequate and need overhaul, data integrity is at issue, the climate is not quite following the script, and the communication program for the whole campaign is a growing struggle.  See more of post here.

Opinion: Cooling Down the Cassandras
By George Will, Washington Post

“Plateau in Temperatures Adds Difficulty to Task Of Reaching a Solution” --New York Times, Sept. 23

In this headline on a New York Times story about the difficulties confronting people alarmed about global warming, note the word “plateau.” It dismisses the unpleasant—to some people—fact that global warming is maddeningly (to the same people) slow to vindicate their apocalyptic warnings about it.

The “difficulty”—the “intricate challenge,” the Times says—is “building momentum” for carbon reduction “when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.” That was in the Times’s first paragraph. In the fifth paragraph, a “few years” became “the next decade or so,” according to Mojib Latif, a German “prize-winning climate and ocean scientist” who campaigns constantly to promote policies combating global warming. Actually, Latif has said he anticipates “maybe even two” decades in which temperatures cool. But stay with the Times’s “decade or so.”

By asserting that the absence of significant warming since 1998 is a mere “plateau,” not warming’s apogee, the Times assures readers who are alarmed about climate change that the paper knows the future and that warming will continue: Do not despair, bad news will resume.

The Times reported that “scientists”—all of them?—say the 11 years of temperature stability has “no bearing,” none, on long-term warming. Some scientists say “cool stretches are inevitable.” Others say there may be growth of Arctic sea ice, but the growth will be “temporary.”

According to the Times, however, “scientists” say that “trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public—and to policymakers—can be frustrating.”

The Times says “a short-term trend gives ammunition to skeptics of climate change.” Actually, what makes skeptics skeptical is the accumulating evidence that theories predicting catastrophe from man-made bclimate change are impervious to evidence. The theories are unfalsifiable, at least in the “short run.” And the “short run” is defined as however many decades must pass until the evidence begins to fit the hypotheses.

The Post recently reported the theory of a University of Virginia professor emeritus who thinks that, many millennia ago, primitive agriculture—burning forests, creating methane-emitting rice paddies, etc.—produced enough greenhouse gases to warm the planet at least a degree. The theory is interesting. Even more interesting is the reaction to it by people such as the Columbia University professor who says it makes him “really upset” because it might encourage opponents of legislation combating global warming.

Warnings about cataclysmic warming increase in stridency as evidence of warming becomes more elusive. A recent report from the United Nations Environment Program predicts an enormous 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit increase by the end of the century even if nations fulfill their most ambitious pledges concerning reduction of carbon emissions. The U.S. goal is an 80 percent reduction by 2050. But Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute says that would require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the 1910 level. On a per capita basis, it would mean emissions approximately equal to those in 1875. That will not happen. So, we are doomed. So, why try?

America needs a national commission appointed to assess the evidence about climate change. Alarmists will fight this because the first casualty would be the carefully cultivated and media-reinforced myth of consensus—the bald assertion that no reputable scientist doubts the gravity of the crisis, doubts being conclusive evidence of disreputable motives or intellectual qualifications. The president, however, could support such a commission because he is sure “there’s finally widespread recognition of the urgency of the challenge before us.” So he announced last week at the U.N. climate change summit, where he said the threat is so “serious” and “urgent” that unless all nations act “boldly, swiftly and together”—“time . . . is running out”—we risk “irreversible catastrophe.” Prince Charles agrees. In March, seven months ago, he said humanity had 100 months—until July 2017—to prevent “catastrophic climate change and the unimaginable horrors that this would bring.”

Evidently humanity will prevent this. Charles Moore of the Spectator notes that in July, the prince said that by 2050 the planet will be imperiled by the existence of 9 billion people, a large portion of them consuming as much as Western people now do. Environmental Cassandras must be careful with their predictions lest they commit what climate alarmists consider the unpardonable faux pas of denying that the world is coming to an end. Read full post here.

As a long-time student of John P. Holdren’s gloomy visions of the future, like his warnings about global famines and resource shortages, I can’t resist passing along another one that has just been dug up. This one was made in 1971, long before Dr. Holdren came President Obama’s science adviser, in an essay just unearthed by zombietime (a blog that has been republishing excerpts of his past writings). In the 1971 essay, “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide,” Dr. Holdren and his co-author, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, warned of a coming ice age.

They certainly weren’t the only scientists in the 1970s to warn of a coming ice age, but I can’t think of any others who were so creative in their catastrophizing. Although they noted that the greenhouse effect from rising emissions of carbon dioxide emissions could cause future warming of the planet, they concluded from the mid-century cooling trend that the consequences of human activities (like industrial soot, dust from farms, jet exhaust, urbanization and deforestation) were more likely to first cause an ice age. Dr. Holdren and Dr. Ehrlich wrote:

The effects of a new ice age on agriculture and the supportability of large human populations scarcely need elaboration here. Even more dramatic results are possible, however; for instance, a sudden outward slumping in the Antarctic ice cap, induced by added weight, could generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.

But that would just be the beginning. Dr. Holdren and Dr. Ehrlich continued:

If man survives the comparatively short-term threat of making the planet too cold, there is every indication he is quite capable of making it too warm not long thereafter. For the remaining major means of interference with the global heat balance is the release of energy from fossil and nuclear fuels. As pointed out previously, all this energy is ultimately degraded to heat. What are today scattered local effects of its disposition will in time, with the continued growth of population and energy consumption, give way to global warming. . . . Again, the exact form such consequences might take is unknown; the melting of the icecaps with a concomitant 150-foot increase in sea level might be one of them.

I confess I don’t quite understand Dr. Holdren’s particular 1971 vision of global warming - why would nuclear fuels be contributing to it? - but let’s not get bogged down in details. What interests me are not the disaster specifics but rather Dr. Holdren’s tendency to foresee worst-case scenarios that require new public policies. (In the 1970s, he and Paul Ehrlich discussed controlling population by giving sweeping powers to a new “Planetary Regime.") I’ve previously written about criticism that a climate-change report from the White House and federal agencies exaggerates the threat of natural disasters. Does Dr. Holdren have a worst-case bias in his interpretation of data?

See post here.

One of the nation’s largest electric utilities, Chicago-based Exelon Corp., won’t renew its U.S. Chamber of Commerce membership in a dispute over the business group’s position on global warming, a company spokeswoman said today.

Exelon is the third utility to leave the chamber. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and New Mexico-based PNM Resources Inc. announced their departures last week. Exelon is the largest of the three utilities, distributing electricity to 5.4 million customers across Illinois and Pennsylvania and generating about $19 billion in annual revenues.

Exelon CEO John Rowe told a Chicago conference today sponsored by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy about his company’s decision and urged industry officials and regulators to push for legislation that will put a price on carbon.

“Inaction on climate is not an option,” Rowe said, according to excerpts provided by Exelon. “If Congress does not act, the EPA will, and the result will be more arbitrary, more expensive, and more uncertain for investors and the industry than a reasonable, market-based legislative solution.”

Rowe, who has served as Exelon’s chairman for 26 years, has also been among the industry’s most outspoken advocates for action on climate change.

The Chamber of Commerce is not only the best-funded lobbying entity in Washington but arguably the most influential of the groups attacking the push for cap-and-trade legislation.

But its advocacy has come under fire in recent months not only from environmentalists and other critics, but also from its own members.

In a strongly worded letter last week, PG&E Chairman and CEO Peter Darbee accused the chamber of “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of the challenges associated with climate change (E&ENews PM, Sept. 22).

Nike Inc. has also been publicly critical of the chamber’s activities, though it has declined to specify whether it would leave the company.

Many criticisms have been pointed at a petition that the chamber filed with U.S. EPA asking the agency to approve an on-the-record proceeding with an independent arbitrator who would allow EPA and environmental and business groups to engage in a “credible weighing” of the scientific evidence that global warming endangers human health.

Today’s OnPoint: PG&E’s Darbee explains company’s decision to leave U.S. Chamber

Last week, PG&E Corp. announced it would leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, citing concerns over the group’s “extreme” views on climate change legislation. Just days later, another utility, PNM Resources Inc., announced it would leave the chamber. During today’s OnPoint, Peter Darbee, president and CEO of PG&E Corp., explains his company’s decision. He discusses the chamber’s stance on climate policy and explains how other member companies have reacted to PG&E’s move. Darbee also gives his views on the congressional climate debate.

Icecap Note: Both PG&E and Exelon stabd to make billions off cap-n-tax. Exelon is the largest operator of nukes in the nation. The only green motivation is the paper green with Presidents on it.

The Arctic ice “is melting far faster than had been previously supposed,” we heard this week from the UN’s Environment Program, in releasing its 2009 Climate Change Science Compendium.

This same week, National Geographic reported that the Arctic ice is probably melting far slower than previously supposed. After ramping up the rhetoric - two years ago National Geographic told us that “the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions,” and last year that “Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer” - National Geographic now advises that “the Arctic probably won’t experience ice-free summers until 2030 or 2040.”

If you’re confused by stats on Arctic melting, you have lots of company. Arctic stats are easy to misunderstand because the Arctic environment is unlike our own - the Arctic magnifies the changes we experience in the temperate regions. In summer, our days get longer and theirs get really, really long, just as in winter, when our days gets shorter, theirs all but disappear. By analogy, the Arctic also magnifies temperature variations, and resulting changes to its physical environment.

See larger imager here.

In the Arctic, the ice has indeed been contracting, as the global warming doomsayers have been telling us. But it has also been expanding. The riddle of how the Arctic ice can both be contracting and expanding is easily explained. After you read the next two paragraphs, you’ll be able to describe it easily to your friends to set them straight.

Each winter, the Arctic ice pack rapidly expands and each summer it rapidly contracts, as you can see thanks to photos from a Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency satellite that tracks the changes in the ice pack. On its website, you can also get data showing the area of sea ice for every month going back to 2002.

Compare March of this year to previous Marches, for example, and you’ll see that the Arctic ice has been expanding of late - a story rarely told. But compare August of this year to previous Augusts and you’ll see that the August ice over the years has tended to contract - this is the basis of the scary stories that we hear about the Arctic ice disappearing. A snapshot of the Arctic ice, without knowledge of the bigger picture, can lead to scary conclusions.

To give your friends an even bigger picture, inform them that during the Little Ice Age, in the 1600s, much of the continent was frozen over. New Yorkers in winter could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Ever since, the ice has been contracting, spurring attempts by fabled explorers such as Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin to seek a Northwest Passage through Canada’s Arctic. By the early 1900s, as we continued to come out of the Little Ice Age, the ice had receded enough to allow Roald Amundsen to traverse the Northwest Passage in fits and starts, his ship needing three years to navigate through the ice. Not until 1944 did the ice recede enough to allow a schooner to cross the Northwest Passage in a single season. The Northwest Passage remains too risky to allow commercial shipping to thrive, and although some have confidently predicted the advent of commercial shipping, the insurance premium required to navigate through the perilous ice floes effectively rules it out for the foreseeable future. If a new Little Ice Age soon sets in, as many scientists consider likely, commercial shipping will not happen in our lifetimes.

By taking a snapshot in time, and by ignoring the history and the ecology of the Arctic, global warming alarmists can make a grim case for a disappearing Arctic, and even fool themselves. In May of this year, a six-country effort involving 20 scientists an aircraft outfitted with precision equipment to Canada’s Arctic in an expedition designed to prove that the Arctic ice was thinning. The expedition found the opposite - newly formed ice was up to four-metres thick, twice what was as expected. Around the same time, three other explorers, on behalf of the Catlin Arctic Survey in London, set off on skis on a trek to the North Pole to measure the thickness of the melting spring ice. Unprepared for blizzard winds of 40 knots and Arctic temperatures of 40 degrees below zero, the expedition made little headway, ran out of food, suffered from frost-bite, and finally had to be airlifted to safety - at their slow-going rate of progress, they couldn’t have survived the 82 days required to travel the remaining 542 kilometers. See full post here.

Icecap Note: See Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace’s comments to Dr. Benny Peiser on the UNEP and other alarmist projections about the Himalayan glaciers here.

Why are today’s media directors and reporters so incapable of making accurate critical judgements on environmental issues?  It is a commonplace that the mainstream media distort the public debate on environmental issues of the day. A case in point is the continuing uncritical alarmism about allegedly human-caused global warming, at a time when the globe has been cooling for ten years and human causation remains chimerical. The Fairfax press, together with public broadcasters ABC and SBS, furnish egregious examples of this on a regular basis as they dutifully promulgate - without a trace of critical analysis - the unrestrained, apocalyptic imaginings of the many scientific, environmental and business lobby groups who are now poised to benefit from a carbon dioxide taxation system (aka emissions trading scheme; ETS).

Daily, Australians are confronted on the radio and TV news with politically opportune opinions on “urgent” environmental matters by scientifically ignorant spokespersons for unelected, unaccountable and inexpert lobby groups: Greenpeace, ACF , WWF and the Climate Institute, to name but a few. By what authority does the ABC allow these ecoevangelists to grandstand their relentless and extreme views at public expense - effectively providing their organisations with continuous free advertising at the taxpayers’ expense?

Unbalanced misreporting on global warming and other environmental issues is, of course, deplorable, but it is not in the least surprising. For as we are constantly told, alarmism rather than good news is what the punters and therefore the advertisers demand. As Julian Cribb, one of Australia’s most experienced science editors, has related:

The publication of “bad news” is not a journalistic vice. It’s a clear instruction from the market. It’s what consumers, on average, demand.  As a newspaper editor I knew, as most editors know, that if you print a lot of good news, people stop buying your paper. Conversely, if you publish the correct mix of doom, gloom and disaster, your circulation swells. I have done the experiment.

A recent case history demonstrates well the severity of the misinformation campaign about global warming that our media outlets have now waged with increasing intensity for many years. On September 7, ABC’s Four Corners programme screened a documentary film entitled “The Coal Nightmare”.

The first sentence of the script intoned by presenter Liz Jackson - “We all know that coal is polluting the planet” - being utterly untrue, the quality of the film as a documentary was doomed from that moment on. Presumably the programme was intended to be a serious contribution to public discussion about global warming, but as with so many other previous ABC efforts on the same topic it turned out instead to be a parody.

One was reminded irresistibly of the famous, scientifically illiterate first sentence of Climate Minister Wong’s Green Paper on emissions trading last year, which contained no fewer than seven basic errors. As Ian Plimer sagely observed, an error rate of almost one mistake for every two words is surely deserving of an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. One guesses that Ms Jackson’s producer and Minister Wong share the belief, honed in Europe during the 1930s, that if you tell a big enough lie up front, and relentlessly repeat it often enough thereafter, then public opinion will follow right along behind.

In fact, the reality is precisely the opposite of the conventional wisdom that our ABC so doggedly pursues in this film and elsewhere, and it is that carbon dioxide emissions are an environmental benefice. First, because at current and near-future levels the emissions do not cause dangerous warming (though they may yet prove to confer a just measurable mild warming that would help offset the current planetary cooling trend). And, second, carbon dioxide being effectively an aerial fertilizer for plants, because rising levels in the atmosphere during our modern geological time of carbon dioxide starvation provide a significant boost for plant productivity, and hence food supply. For example, during the second half of the 20th century world population increased 2.2 times, accompanied by a 2.7 times increase in food supply. This, the so called Green Revolution, had as one of its causations enhanced plant productivity driven by increasing carbon dioxide levels. Read much more here.

U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, today responded to remarks made by Senator John Kerry (D-MA), who said, “‘I don’t know what ‘cap and trade’ means. I don’t think the average American does,’ adding, ‘This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it’s a pollution reduction bill.’” Senator Kerry’s remarks come as Senator Kerry and Senator Boxer (D-CA) intend to introduce their cap-and-trade bill on Wednesday, September 30.

“I think the best way to help Sen. Kerry define cap-and-trade is to turn to Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), who said that cap-and-trade “is a tax, and a great big one,’” Sen. Inhofe said.  “No matter the semantic games employed, or the extent to which Democrats wish to hide the truth from the American people, cap-and-trade will mean more job losses, more pain at the pump, and higher food and electricity prices for consumers.

“Despite the post-modern denial of ‘the truth’, in which words can mean whatever one chooses, the legislation on display next week will be cap-and-trade, pure and simple.  And if the House Waxman-Markey bill is any guide, it will showcase a massive expansion of government mandates, spending, taxes, and energy rationing, all with meaningless affect on climate change.

“I hope we have an open, transparent, civil debate about cap-and-trade and energy security.  It’s critical that we get this right, for in order to get American moving again, we need an abundant, reliable domestic energy supply that creates jobs and keeps energy prices affordable for businesses, consumers, and families.”

Background:

Democrats efforts to reframe the climate bill have been well documented over the past year, as we noted in the Inhofe EPW Press blog post The President’s New “Clean Energy Economy” Talking Points:

Don’t say “climate change” or “global warming,” or even worse, “cap-and-trade,” anymore; use “clean energy economy.” As the New York Times and LA Times have recently reported, the White House, concerned by the lack of support for their “cap-and-trade” initiatives, is using poll-tested talking points to help push one of the President’s biggest priorities:

“The problem with global warming, some environmentalists believe, is ‘global warming.’ The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes, according to extensive polling and focus group sessions conducted by ecoAmerica, a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm in Washington.” - New York Times, May 2, 2009

“Scratch ‘cap and trade’ and ‘global warming,’ Democratic pollsters tell Obama. They’re ineffective. Control the language, politicians know, and you stand a better chance of controlling the debate. So the Obama administration, in its push to enact sweeping energy and healthcare policies, has begun refining the phrases it uses in an effort to shape public opinion. Words that have been vetted in focus groups and polls are seeping into the White House lexicon, while others considered too scary or confounding are falling away.” - LA Times, May 11, 2009

See press release here. Learn more about Cap-and Tax here.

Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world’s leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.  (even brought back the hockey stick out of the hall of shame)

The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP report’s scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.
“We don’t want to go there,” said Corell, who collaborated with climate researchers at the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute, Massachusetts-based Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do the analysis. The team has revised its estimates since the U.N. report went to press and has posted the most recent figures at ClimateInteractive.org.

The group took the upper-range targets of nearly 200 nations’ climate policies—including U.S. cuts that would reduce domestic emissions 73 percent from 2005 levels by 2050, along with the European Union’s pledge to reduce its emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 --and found that even under that optimistic scenario, the average global temperature is likely to warm by 6.3 degrees.

World leaders at the July Group of 20 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, pledged in a joint statement that they would adopt policies to prevent global temperature from climbing more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit: “We recognize the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed two degrees C.”

Corell, who has shared these findings with the Obama administration as well as climate policymakers in China, noted that global carbon emissions are still rising. “It’s accelerating,” he said. “We’re not going in the right direction.”