Alarmist MIT climate modeller speaks

ccemag.com - Canadian Consulting Engineer - 11/4/2008

...Certainly he caught the attention of 150-or so engineers and engineering students in attendance and seemed to win their agreement - there were no hecklers or naysayers to be heard.
Dr. Prinn is the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Masachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has a team of 40 people researching and modelling climate change and its economic effects. He is a member of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and he has testified twice to the U.S. Congress about climate change and its implications for policy. (At the end of his talk, he suggested "things are changing in the U.S." with regard to efforts to deal with the issue and said that both U.S. Presidential candidates take climate change seriously.)
Prinn said there are lots of uncertainties in predicting the effects of the build-up of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but by working with "large ensembles" of computer models they can make reasonable predictions. Insofar as predicting the effects on particular geographic regions, he said the computer models are converging at the continental and sub-continental scale, but at a local level it's more difficult. He also said that the biggest areas of scientific uncertainty are in the effects on "clouds; ocean mixing, and aerosol 'forcing.'"
At present we are warming the earth by 1.6 watts per square metre, Prinn said, which translates to 816 TW worldwide, which is equivalent to 52 times the current global energy consumption. He showed evidence from ice core samples from the polar ice fields that showed a correlation over four glacial cycles between rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and earth's surface warming. He said sea ice is currently shrinking at record levels, and nature is speeding the process up in a series of feedback loops.