Comments on the Draft of the Unified Synthesis Product “Global Climate Change in the United States”

Submission: Your comments must be submitted as an e-mail attachment to: USP-comments@climatescience.gov by 14 August 2008.

I. Background Information

Name:  Alan Cheetham
Mailing Address: [address] Seattle, WA
Phone: 206-528-8162
E-mail: gw@appinsys.com
Web site: www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming
Area of Expertise: Empirical science

II. Comments

General: The alarmist tone of the report is counter-productive to society. The empirical data do not support the hypothetical conjectures made in the report.

Chapter: Regional Impacts - Northwest, Page: 142, Line: Figure of Decreasing Habitat for Cold Water Fish:

Comment:

The following figure is shown:

This figure shows areas that are expected to warm by more than 10 degrees by the 2040s (“a modest warming scenario”). This hypothetical conjecture should be tempered by reality. According to the Hadley Climatic Research Unit data used by the IPCC, this area has warmed by about 0.5 (zero-point-five) degrees in the last 30 years. The following graphs show data from the gridded CRUTEM3 data for the 5x5 degree grids (data from: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/).

I recommend the wording be changed to: “The impact of warming of about 1 degree over the next century will likely have little impact.”

Alan Cheetham