Environmental Defense (ED) has released a new "study" on "uncontrolled global warming" (for ED, is there any other kind?) that can only be explained by one of two possibilities: either the study's authors are abjectly misinformed or engaging in a deliberate effort to frighten the people of North Carolina about global warming.
Let's rule out the former, if only to simplify things.
The latter seems downright compelling, considering release of the report was timed just 3 weeks before the vote on the Lieberman-McCain global warming bill. ED, in fact, makes specific reference to the bill in its press release: "The Climate Stewardship Act invites every Senator and citizen to ratchet up the debate on climate change."
The study (or more accurately, the fundraising pitch), titled, "Understanding Climate Change for North Carolina," concludes thus: "Potential climate impacts in North Carolina include an array of health threats, sea-level rise and increased coastal erosion, more extreme summer heat, water limits for our growing cities, rainfall variability impacting agriculture, and loss of species in forests, wetlands and other ecosystems."
FACT: Environmental Defense's claims amount to nothing more than scare tactics with no scientific basis whatsoever.
According to the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, "significant uncertainty exists as to how much climate will change overall and how it will change in specific regions."
There's more: "These limitations in knowledge introduce major uncertainties in climate predictions, climate change projections, and estimates of the limits of climate predictability, especially for regional climate."
Scientists with the U.K.'s Hadley Centre agree: "In areas where coasts and mountains have significant effect on weather [and this will be true for most parts of the world], scenarios based on global models will fail to capture the regional detail needed for vulnerability assessments at a national level."
