The Prospects for a Sustainable Energy Policy in Alberta. Policies and Technologies for Greenhouse Gas Mitigation

Consider the map below. It is a projection of our future temperature changes by the middle of this century. Some places are warming hugely but other places hardly at all.276 Why is this? Has some climate model gone haywire? This map is not an oddball, but just one of a family of nine related maps released by the latest IPCC Assessment.277 They all show irregular geographic patterns and appear together on the following page in a three-by-three grid. From left to right they plot out a three-stage timeline for our century, with average, smoothed-out temperature changes apparent by 2011-2030, by 2046-2065, and by. Like the single map on page 126, each one is actually produced from not one but many climate modelsБЂ”much like a stock indexБЂ”thus capturing where the models robustly agree rather than the quirks of any particular climate model over another. Each of the three rows corresponds to a different concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. That, in turn, rests on all sorts of things, from political leadership to energy technology to gross domestic product ...»