State of Folly - How Michael Crichton was Wrong

I finally got around to reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton. Interestingly, my son was assigned this book as a summer reading assignment (I'll follow up on that shortly). So I read it, too.

There have been many people who have reviewed and criticized the book. This is the first of a series of posts that look at particular claims and issues raised in the book as I see them. Enjoy.

Crichton adds an "Author's Message" at the end, in which he clarifies his personal views on the climate science. One of his bullet points reads:

Monday What's on the Web: Feeling the Heat

Every Monday I highlight other bloggers or web contributors who are making important or interesting contributions to climate, sustainability, transportation or market transformation. Check back each week for another installment.
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The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the international treaty that was established at the Rio Convention in 1992. It spawned the International Panel on Climate Change, which is charged with synthesizing the established science of climate change and report regularly to the Framework. Boring stuff.

However, the UNFCCC maintains a section of its website called Feeling the Heat, which is nicely written summary of climate science, its causes and effects. It is somewhat out of date--not having been updated recently (see Climate Progress for quick reactions to the latest science), but covers the topic clearly, comprehensively and intelligently. More recent climate science indicates that the likely effects of climate change are more severe than what is written in Feeling the Heat. Nonetheless, the basic concepts are there, from a source that is supported by the majority of nations on the planet.

The UNFCCC website is public domain, so if you find language there that you think is well turned, you may use it.

Climate Decade in Review Post 9: CO2 Concentrations up to 387 ppm

Decade as a whole - CO2 concentrations rise from368 parts per million (ppm) in 1999 to 387 ppm in 2009, an increase of 19 ppm: 5.2%.

During the last ten years, the annual increase in CO2 concentrations has accelerated. Every single year of the '00's, the annual increase in concentrations has exceeded 1.5 ppm. In the preceding 40 years since records on Mauna Loa have been kept, that had only happened nine times total.

CO2 concentrations are now higher than they have been for millions of years, and they continue to increase unabated. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that concentrations above 450 are likely to result in average global temperature increases of 2C or more--a level at which dangerous tipping points in climate may be unstoppable.

Many experts believe that slowing emissions of greenhouse gases enough to stop concentrations from rising above 450 ppm is already verging on the politically, socially and technologically impossible. Yet some scientists--most notably James Hansen of NASA--have called for reducing CO2 concentrations to no more than 350 ppm.

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This is one in the series of "Climate Decade in Review" posts on this blog that began in January 2010. These posts present climate-change-related events that occurred during the 00's, the warmest decade in recorded history.