The 9’s aren’t a rhetorical flourish at all.
A study with researchers in multiple countries assessed three satellite data sets and this year published their results showing that the third showed the unmistakable signs of human causation as well. The first two showed clearly those signs years earlier.
This is consilience in action, and it increases substantially the scientific confidence in something. This is no rhetorical flourish on my part. It’s the gold standard of evidence.
Regarding your 90%, the more closely scientists are to the actual subject matter of climate change, the higher the consensus becomes.
Once again, there have been at least seven studies on scientific consensus on climate change and human causation using multiple approaches and data sets. Consilience is extraordinarily high. Climate scientists approach 100% consensus that climate change is real, serious and caused by us. Asserting less than that is not accurate, and is in fact rhetoric.
Regarding carbon capture, the media has to be very leery of representations on this subject. I’ve published probably 20 pieces including a full case study report on one approach, and found that they are a rounding error in terms of the actual scale of the problem, and almost entirely used for enhanced oil recovery and fossil fuel PR. In other words, they are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution, and promoted heavily by the organizations perpetuating the problem. Meanwhile, biological capture approaches tend to get a lot less press and funding.
The money spent on mechanical carbon capture would have been much better spent on wind and solar.
And so it is the media’s requirement to be skeptical of claims to the contrary and dubious about the experts that they are presented with.
It’s certainly reasonable to present the different pathways, but also that they are going to look worse in the upcoming UN IPCC 6 report, specifically around sea level rise. Papers excluded from IPCC 5 related to Greenland melt due to lack of explanatory mechanisms will be included, so all median sea level rise in every scenario will be higher. RCP 8.5, for example, is likely to be a meter, not 0.63 m.
And coastal regions globally are much more at risk than previously understood. A major machine learning study from this year found that outside of rich and urban areas, the coastal digital elevation data sets overestimated elevation by 1.9 meters on average globally. This is due to the 2000 NASA satellite radar data set keying on rooftops and dense vegetation. This understandably has major implications in combination with increased sea level rise expectations, and 2050 will see rise in many places that was understood to be a 2100 concern. The Florida Everglades, for example, are going to be seeing very regular salt water flooding by 2050, threatening the Biscayne Aquifer’s supply of fresh water.
The UN IPCC 1.5 degree reports make it very clear that we only have until 2030 to reduce global emissions by 55% or we are locked into 2 degrees of warming, and that warming has much more severe implications than just half a degree less.
It isn’t alarmism or hyperbole to make it clear that our 40 years of delay in dealing with this issue means that it’s coming to a head and has turned into a crisis.
