More news from the climate summit in Copenhagen. On the last day of the meeting, Hans Joachim Schnellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said that if the buildup of greenhouse gases and its consequences pushed global temperatures 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today — well below the upper temperature range that scientists project could occur from global warming — Earth’s population would be devastated.

But Dr Schellnhuber is happy about one thing - finally, we have been able to estimate the carrying capacity of our planet, namely below 1 billion people.

Dr. Schellnhuber also said that at certain “tipping points,” higher temperatures could cause areas of the ocean to become deoxygenated, resulting in what he calls “oxygen holes” between 600 and 2,400 feet deep. Unabated warming would also lead to “disruption of the monsoon, collapse of the Amazon rain forest and the Greenland ice sheet will meltdown”.

Now who is this guy? Is he a lunatic, one may wonder? No, on the contrary. He has been climate advisor to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a visiting professor at Oxford.

Lord Nicholas Stern, the author of the Stern Review, told a meeting of climate change scientists in Copenhagen that the effects of global warming would be worse than he predicted in his report on the economics of the problem. He said policy-makers needed to think more about the likely impact of severe temperature rises of 6C or more.

“Looking back, the Stern review underestimated the risks and underestimated the damage from inaction”, Lord Stern said.

The Copenhagen meeting was obviously all about alarmism. The sea level rise was said to accelerate. Amazon rainforest risks almost total extinction. Increases in ocean acidity would severely disrupt marine ecosystems and fisheries.

An increase of more than 5C — equivalent to the amount of warming that occurred between the last ice age and today — is, according to the Stern report, “likely to lead to major disruption and large-scale movement of population”. It said the effects would be “catastrophic” and “far outside human experience”.

What is it with these people? Are the cataclysmic prognoses a way of trying to convince themselves that global warming indeed has not stopped? Recent news told us about a cold spell that might put a brake on anthropogenic global warming for another 20 to 30 years. High school kids will almost be retiring by the time the warming returns. The AGW-movement looks more and more like a religious one. Now we are supposed to believe that the mighty global warming will come back. Have faith. The world will come to an end and we humans will be judged for our misgivings.

Science Daily reports about the proceedings at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen this week. According to research presented at this congress, we are in deep trouble. The upper range of sea level rise by 2100 could be around one meter, or possibly more. In the lower end of the spectrum it looks increasingly unlikely that sea level rise will be much less than 50 cm by 2100.

“The oceans are continuing to warm and expand, the melting of mountain glacier has increased and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are also contributing to sea level rise”, says Dr John Church of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research and the lead speaker in the sea level session.

“The ice loss in Greenland has accelerated over the last decade. The upper range of sea level rise by 2100 might be above 1m or more on a global average”, says Konrad Steffen, Director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado, Boulder and co-chair of the congress session on sea level rise.

And John Church again: “Unless we undertake urgent and significant mitigation actions, the climate could cross a threshold during the 21st century committing the world to a sea level rise of metres.”

Global sea level? What’s that? A computed average just like the global temperature? As if the sea level was exactly the same all over the world. And affected by the very same factors. Are the alarmist getting desperate in their attempts to curb our use of fossil fuels? First, it was the temperature, then the acidification of the ocean, now we are going to drown. What’s next?

According to a just released poll from the Gallup Organization, 41 percent of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated. That is the highest percentage of “skeptics” since 1998. The exaggerated statistic has been steadily rising since 2005 after a drop from 2004 to 2005.

At the conference in New York, almost everybody was a skeptic. It felt bizarre to hear that the claims of global warming are grossly exaggerated, while at the same time, media frolic on future catastrophes.

The Swedish government has just issued a climate proposition to reduce Sweden’s CO2-emissions by 40 percent. The already high CO2-tax will be raised even further. In 2030, all cars in Sweden are supposed to run on other than gasoline or diesel. Worth knowing is that Sweden’s CO2-emissions make up for 0.2 percent of total global carbon dioxide emissions. Yet, the Swedish government is out there to save the world.

Parallelly with the Heartland conference, there was a big AGW-meeting in Copenhagen. AGW-people signalize that we are facing an even greater disaster than previously anticipated. Greenland is melting fast. The CO2 will stay in the atmosphere forever. The world as we know it is about to end. At the same time, the sun remains quiet, and the temperatures refuse to rise. And no matter how hard I try, I still cannot see the emperor being other than stark naked.