Climate assessment yields disturbing forecast for Earth

It may be the most alarming report on climate change yet.

The third U.S. National Climate Assessment draft describes the Earth’s future: rising temperatures, melting glaciers, transformed coastlines, rising seas, extreme storms, frequent heat waves.

As fresh data pours in, the outlook gets “scarier,” said John Smol, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change at Queen’s University in Kingston.

“It feels we have been underestimating the kind and amount of problems we will face.”

Yet he and other climatologists fear even this daunting data won’t convince climatechange deniers.

“Some may change their minds a bit, but that’s about it,” Smol said.

Climate change deniers dismiss the scientific consensus on human-induced global warming and its significance. Some are contrarians; some are involved with think-tanks; some are even scientists.

Clive Hamilton, an Australian author who wrote Requiem for a Species, believes climate change denial dates back to the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Conservatives who had put their energy into opposing communism sought other outlets, he said.

Despite ever-mounting evidence of climate change, deniers have never let scientific information interfere with their line of thought, said Gordon McBean, director of research at Western University’s Centre for Environment and Sustainability.

“I doubt they will ever disappear,” he said.