Copenhagen Hangover

I've just been reading a Spiegel Online article Kopenhagen-Kater trübt Bonner Klimakonferenz but it's more than a bad headache we'll get if action isn't taken to keep the global average temperature to no more than 2 degrees. The reductions agreed may lead to increases of up to 4 degrees.

Umweltschützer kritisierten, dies reiche bei weitem nicht für das Zwei-Grad-Ziel. Nach Schätzung des scheidenden Chefs des Uno-Klimasekretariats, Yvo de Boer, laufen die angekündigten Minderungen auf einen Temperaturanstieg von 3,5 bis 4 Grad Celsius hinaus.

There have been attempts to discredit the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but this really is a reliable and self correcting scientific resource which has involved many hundreds of scientists. There are some strong sceptical voices which tend to present the IPCC evidence as political propaganda but that suggests ignorance of the IPCC process and the IPCC reports and the evidence they contain. Occasionally a mistake can be found in their reporting - Himalayan glaciers and how far parts of the Netherlands are below sea level - but such errors are few in a report of 3000 pages and readily corrected. Science always has to be open to correction and these do not affect the core conclusions that human activities, particularly burning fossil fuels, are warming the planet.


Weather events at the beginning of this year had many people confusing local weather with global climate. Regional data has more variability than global averages and so it is not hard to find places where temperatures have not risen (continental USA) and a few glaciers (New Zealand) which are growing not receding. It is also possible to select data over limited periods that appear not to agree with that for much longer periods. A decade is too short a period to establish a long term trend. The IPCC has rigorously analysed data over long time scales and on continental and global space scales to identify the significant trends and their likely causes.

There may be some attitude problems to overcome if the public are to accept the science. People sometimes don’t want to believe predictions that challenge consumption levels and lifestyles that are now regarded as normal in the developed world.
 
If you have opinions on climate change then please express them by leaving a comment or contribute to the Forum on Spiegel Online Umwelt - ist die Angst vor der globalen Erwärmung übertrieben?
 
For balanced briefings on climate change in English, take a look at Sir John Houghton's contributions available from the John Ray Initiative. I cannot give a recommendation for a German language source because I don't know whose views would carry the same weight as Sir John's.

Denisova man

I suppose it's not unreasonable to have to wait until now to hear about a discovery made in 2008 when we're talking about a tiny piece of bone from the finger of a previously unknown type of early human that had been lying in a cave in Denisova in Siberia. The report I read was in Focus under the heading Wissenschaftler entdecken bislang unbekannte Menschenform  Because it is so cold in Siberia the DNA had been preserved and scientists were able to compare it with DNA from homo sapiens sapiens and homo sapiens neandertalis

Test your understanding
Warum müssen die Wissenschaftler das Textbuch korrigieren?
Was ist wie ein Kühlschrank?
Wer waren überrascht von der Entdeckung?

Further reports on this theme:
Neue Menschenform entdeckt
Forscher entdecken neue Menschenform

Mammoth undertaking

Is it possible to bring extinct species back to life? I've just listened to a fascinating podcast on the subject - Schöpfung, zweiter Versuch - Das Mammut kehrt zurück.

Sie streiften in riesigen Herden über die Steppen der Nordhalbkugel, bis sie vor 10.000 Jahren, am Ende der Eiszeit, plötzlich verschwanden. Für immer, so glaubte man. Doch was, wenn es Wege gäbe, sie wiederauferstehen zu lassen?

What I heard was the second of two podcasts from the Deutschlandfunk series, Wissenschaft im Brennpunkt. I regularly download these from the RSS feed for the series but each is about 30 minutes long so quite demanding to listen to and I tend to be a couple of months behind with my listening fitting it in when I’m doing something else, like ironing my shirts. I quite enjoy listening to reports like this as they make scientific subjects reasonably accessible. What I had not previously realised was that if you click on the title above the blurb from the RSS feed you get the text for the whole programme. That does make it much easier to check out parts that were of particular interest and also to do some vocabulary work. The links for the two programmes are here Teil 1 - Teil 2 Instead of subscribing to the RSS feed you could look at the  recent programmes listing.

While I'm fascinated by the research being done, and this report includes something of the work of George Church, I'm not certain about the desirability of bringing extinct species back to life. Sind Sie für oder gegen?