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The Climate Science Rapid Response Team's debut action earned a thumbs up.
The Climate Science Rapid Response Team sprang into action yesterday with their first press release (the who’s, what’s, and why’s), followed by their public debut as the experts behind Brad Johnson’s debunking of Bjorn Lomborg’s new movie Cool It. Johnson gave the Rapid Response Team a thumbs up, and Lomborg’s movie a thumbs down:
After we submitted questions about Lomborg’s claims to the team, we received comprehensive answers from three top climate scientists within 48 hours, even though we made our inquiries before the official launch.
In separate e-mail interviews (the scientists also offered to conduct phone interviews), the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology’s Ken Caldeira, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Josh Willis, and Rutgers University’s Alan Robock independently confirmed that Bjorn Lomborg had misrepresented the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report.
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Bjorn Lomborgs interpretation of sea level rise science got a thumbs down.
In particular, all three scientists debunked Lomborg’s assertion that “the best research we have – from the United Nations climate panel – says that global sea levels are not likely to rise more than about 20 inches by 2100” saying instead that the 2007 report from the UN’s Internation Panel on Climate Change
- only considered sea level rise due to thermal expansion (water, like air, expands as it gets warmer)
- “was very clear that the 20 inch projection was probably too low because it did not account for the kinds of dynamic changes in the glaciers and ice sheets that we see today. In fact, the IPCC report was careful to say that they could not place any upper bound on the amount of sea level rise that is likely over the next century.”
- represented the best science we had five years ago, not the best available today … “including better observations of the rate of melting from Greenland and Antarctica and better models.” (see Justin Gillis’ NY Times piece for more on that)