An authoritative voice on global warming

I've been led to believe that Sir David King is no slouch. And looking around the Web, I believe it. Maybe now, then, a few of the more reasonable skeptics on global warming will reconsider in light of his findings, produced as the United Kingdom's Chief Scientific Advisor to H. M. Government and Head of the Office of Science and Technology:

There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than for 55m years, enough to melt all the ice on the planet and submerge cities like London, New York and New Orleans, Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser has warned....

An ice core 3km deep from the Antarctic had a record of the climate for 800,000 years and showed the direct relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and warm and cold periods for the planet.

Critical in climate records is the quantity of ice at the poles and in glaciers. Records show that at the peak of the ice age 12,000 years ago, the sea was 150 metres below where it is now....

"Ice melting is a relatively slow process but is speeding up. When the Greenland ice cap goes, the sea level will rise six to seven metres, when Antarctica melts it will be another 110 metres," he said [N.B. 'when' not 'if' –Ed].

Records of the 3km deep Antarctic ice core showed that during ice ages the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 200 parts per million (ppm), and during warm periods reached around 270 ppm, before sinking back down again for another ice age. That pattern had been repeated many times in that period but had now been broken because of the intervention of man.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 360 ppm in the 1990s and now was up to 379 ppm and increasing at the rate of 3 ppm a year — reaching a level not seen for 55m years when there was no ice on the planet because the atmosphere was too warm.

"I am sure that climate change is the biggest problem that civilisation has had to face in 5,000 years," he concluded.

[via Dave Farber's IP list.]