Sentences with phrase «parts of a degree per decade»

For CAGW to be «catastrophic» or largely irrelevant, the questions of parts of a degree per decade count.

Not exact matches

But, given the failure of decades of pledges and agreements aimed at curbing emissions, I suggested it was time to move away from a longstanding focus on numerical goals — such as 350 (parts per million of CO2), 80 percent (in emissions cuts) by 2050, a 2 - degree limit on warming — and toward the goal of maximizing the suite of traits I described in those eight words.

Christy and McNider found the rate of warming has been 0.096 degrees Celsius per decade after «the removal of volcanic cooling in the early part of the record,» which «is essentially the same value we determined in 1994... using only 15 years of data.»

The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called «scientific reticence» in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn't even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear.

A doubling of the pre-industrial levels of atmospheric CO2 of roughly 280 parts per million, which could occur within decades unless people curb greenhouse - gas emissions, could eventually boost global average temperatures by around 9 degrees C.»