US Scientist Stephen Schneider - World "Playing Russian Roulette" With Climate - Age

[hatrack]

The world is "playing Russian roulette" with its future by responding too slowly to climate change, a leading American scientist has warned ahead of the release of a major international report this week. But Professor Stephen Schneider told The Age that although Australian and US politics had been dominated for too long by "climate monkeys" who refused to take global warming seriously, he was more optimistic about the future because of the groundswell of community concern in both countries.

Scientists and government representatives from around the world will meet in Paris this week to finalise the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report before its release on Friday. A draft of the report, obtained by The Age, confirms that there is now overwhelming scientific evidence that humans are heating the planet unnaturally fast, mainly by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil.

There has been speculation that the IPCC report would downgrade earlier forecasts of how much the world will warm if we continue producing as much greenhouse gas as we do today. But the draft report shows projections for the average global temperature rise from 1990 to 2100 are set to expand slightly, with a new range of 1.0 to 6.3 degrees Celsius. The 2001 report's range was 1.4 to 5.8.

Professor Schneider, a key figure in the IPCC process for more than a decade, said he could not comment on the exact range until the report was released. But he said he was concerned that the increase was more likely to be three degrees or above, with a 10 per cent chance of an extreme six-degree rise by the end of the century. "Hell, we buy fire insurance based on a 1 per cent chance," he said.

EDIT

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/scientists-russian-roulette-climate-warning/2007/01/28/1169919213561.html

[phantom power]

1. Yeah. With 5 out of 6 chambers loaded.

[Dead_Parrot]

2. No shit...

(28 February 2000, Texas) A Houston man earned a succinct lesson in gun safety when he played Russian roulette with a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Rashaad, nineteen, was visiting friends when he announced his intention to play the deadly game. He apparently did not realize that a semiautomatic pistol, unlike a revolver, automatically inserts a cartridge into the firing chamber when the gun is cocked. His chance of winning a round of Russian roulette was zero, as he quickly discovered.

http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2000-04.html

That'd be us, then.

[Javaman]

3. The only really upshot to global warming that I can see is...

Washington DC will be covered in water. :)

[Nihil]

4. Do we get the chance to vote on this?

i.e., how deep to flood WDC?
:-)