March 16, 2007 4:22 AM PDT
2007 world's warmest winter on record
- Related Stories
-
Global warming could make faucets run dry, expert says
February 22, 2007 -
A sunny forecast for hot water
February 20, 2007 -
What rising sea levels could mean for coastal areas
February 6, 2007 -
Gore to Silicon Valley: You can save this civilization
February 2, 2007
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Thursday that the combined global land and ocean surface temperature from December through February was at its highest since records began in 1880.
A record-warm January was responsible for pushing up the combined winter temperature, according to the agency's Web site,
"Contributing factors were the long-term trend toward warmer temperatures as well as a moderate El Nino in the Pacific," Jay Lawrimore of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center said in a telephone interview from Asheville, N.C.
The next-warmest winter on record was in 2004, and the third warmest winter was in 1998, Lawrimore said.
The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1995.
"We don't say this winter is evidence of the influence of greenhouse gases," Lawrimore said.
However, he noted that his center's work is part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change process, which released a report on global warming last month that found climate change is occurring and that human activities quite likely play a role in the change.
"So we know as a part of that, the conclusions have been reached and the warming trend is due in part to rises in greenhouse gas emissions," Lawrimore said. "By looking at long-term trends and long-term changes, we are able to better understand natural and anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change."
The combined temperature for the December to February period was 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century mean, the agency said. Lawrimore did not give an absolute temperature for the three-month period, and said the deviation from the mean was what was important. He did not provide the 20th century mean temperature.
Temperatures were above average for these months in Europe, Asia, western Africa, southeastern Brazil and the northeast half of the United States, with cooler-than-average conditions in parts of Saudi Arabia and the central United States.
Global temperature on land surface during the Northern Hemisphere winter was also the warmest on record, while the ocean-surface temperature tied for second warmest after the winter of 1997-98.
Over the past century, global surface temperatures have increased by about 0.11 degree Fahrenheit per decade, but the rate of increase has been three times larger since 1976--around 0.32 degree Fahrenheit per decade, with some of the biggest temperature rises in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
Story Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
68 comments
Join the conversation! Add your comment (Log in or register)
Whether this is a technology or a science or technology website, is a different question.
By the way, global warming is wrong, but climate change is right. Anyone using the words "global warming" are full of hot air and are a politician.
Warmest winter in 100 years? Why? Because the NOAA says so. Who are the NOAA? Scientists? Nope, they are a part of the US Department of Commerce with ties to many environmental companies and organizations who make a fortune off of promoting the "global warming" scare to sell carbon credits, alternative energy, and own stock in oil companies of which they raise the profits of by scaring people into thinking there is an oil shortage with peak oil as well. Science has nothing to do with it, politics and profit have everything to do with global warming.
Tell the NOAA to come to my house and help me scrap off this six inches of "global warming" from my driveway. It is cold to the touch, but the NOAA is claiming we never had it so warm for a hundred years.
Climate change tells us that temps are in flux between warm and cold due to many factors. The sun giving off more radiation, volcanoes giving off gasses, aerosol causing a hole in the ozone layer, storm systems like el Nino, and human behavior as well. That the Earth has had ice ages and warm periods for the past millions of years or so and we might be moving to smaller ice ages and smaller warming periods. Human behavior is the only thing we can control, but it is not the only factor causing climate change and climate change has happened before humans learned how to pollute.
Just igmore it and move on to better news.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/science/earth/03climate.html?ex=1172379600" target="_newWindow">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/science/earth/03climate.html?ex=1172379600</a>
&en=40cadc790d174dc4&ei=5070
Science Panel Calls Global Warming ?Unequivocal?
PARIS, Feb. 2 ? In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the
planet, the leading international network of climate scientists has
concluded for the first time that global warming is ?unequivocal? and that
human activity is the main driver, ?very likely? causing most of the rise in
temperatures since 1950.
They said the world was in for centuries of climbing temperatures, rising
seas and shifting weather patterns ? unavoidable results of the buildup of
heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
But their report, released here on Friday by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, said warming and its harmful consequences could be
substantially blunted by prompt action.
While the report provided scant new evidence of a climate apocalypse now,
and while it expressly avoided recommending courses of action, officials
from the United Nations agencies that created the panel in 1988 said it
spoke of the urgent need to limit looming and momentous risks.
?In our daily lives we all respond urgently to dangers that are much less
likely than climate change to affect the future of our children,? said Achim
Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which
administers the panel along with the World Meteorological Organization.
?Feb. 2 will be remembered as the date when uncertainty was removed as to
whether humans had anything to do with climate change on this planet,? he
went on. ?The evidence is on the table.?
The report is the panel?s fourth assessment since 1990 on the causes and
consequences of climate change, but it is the first in which the group
asserts with near certainty ? more than 90 percent confidence ? that carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main
causes of warming in the past half century.
In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of scientists
and reviewers, said the confidence level for its projections was ?likely,?
or 66 to 90 percent. That level has now been raised to ?very likely,? better
than 90 percent. Both reports are online at www.ipcc.ch.
The Bush administration, which until recently avoided directly accepting
that humans were warming the planet in potentially harmful ways, embraced
the findings, which had been approved by representatives from the United
States and 112 other countries on Thursday night.
Administration officials asserted Friday that the United States had played a
leading role in studying and combating climate change, in part by an
investment of an average of almost $5 billion a year for the past six years
in research and tax incentives for new technologies.
At the same time, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman rejected the idea of
unilateral limits on emissions. ?We are a small contributor to the overall,
when you look at the rest of the world, so it?s really got to be a global
solution,? he said.
The United States, with about 5 percent of the world?s population,
contributes about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other
country.
Democratic lawmakers quickly fired off a round of news releases using the
report to bolster a fresh flock of proposed bills aimed at cutting emissions
of greenhouse gases. Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who
has called the idea of dangerous human-driven warming a hoax, issued a news
release headed ?Corruption of Science? that rejected the report as ?a
political document.?
The new report says the global climate is likely to warm 3.5 to 8 degrees
Fahrenheit if carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reach twice
the levels of 1750, before the Industrial Revolution.
Many energy and environment experts see such a doubling, or worse, as a
foregone conclusion after 2050 unless there is a prompt and sustained shift
away from the 20th-century pattern of unfettered burning of coal and oil,
the main sources of carbon dioxide, and an aggressive expansion of
nonpolluting sources of energy.
And the report says there is a more than a 1-in-10 chance of much greater
warming, a risk that many experts say is far too high to ignore.
Even a level of warming that falls in the middle of the group?s range of
projections would be likely to cause significant stress to ecosystems,
according to many climate experts and biologists. And it would alter
longstanding climate patterns that shape water supplies and agricultural
production.
Moreover, the warming has set in motion a rise in global sea levels, the
report says. It forecasts a rise of 7 to 23 inches by 2100 and concludes
that seas will continue to rise for at least 1,000 years to come. By
comparison, seas rose about 6 to 9 inches in the 20th century.
John P. Holdren, an energy and climate expert at Harvard, said the report
?powerfully underscores the need for a massive effort to slow the pace of
global climatic disruption before intolerable consequences become
inevitable.?
?Since 2001, there has been a torrent of new scientific evidence on the
magnitude, human origins and growing impacts of the climatic changes that
are under way,? said Mr. Holdren, who is the president of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. ?In overwhelming proportions,
this evidence has been in the direction of showing faster change, more
danger and greater confidence about the dominant role of fossil-fuel burning
and tropical deforestation in causing the changes that are being observed.?
The conclusions came after a three-year review of hundreds of studies of
past climate shifts; observations of retreating ice, warming and rising
seas, and other changes around the planet; and a greatly expanded suite of
supercomputer simulations used to test how the earth will respond to a
growing blanket of gases that hold heat in the atmosphere.
The section released Friday was a 20-page summary for policymakers, which
was approved early in the morning by teams of officials from more than 100
countries after three days and nights of wrangling over wording with the
lead authors, all of whom are scientists.
It described far-flung ramifications for both humans and nature.
?It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation
events will continue to become more frequent,? said the summary.
Generally, the scientists said, more precipitation will fall at higher
latitudes, which are also likely to see lengthened growing seasons.
Semi-arid subtropical regions, already chronically plagued by drought, could
have a further 20 percent drop in rainfall under the panel?s midrange
outlook for increases in the greenhouse gases.
The summary added a new chemical consequence of the buildup of carbon
dioxide to the list of mainly climatic and biological effects foreseen in
its previous reports: a drop in the pH of seawater as oceans absorb billions
of tons of carbon dioxide, which forms carbonic acid when partly dissolved.
The ocean would stay alkaline, but marine biologists have said that a change
in the direction of acidity could imperil some kinds of corals and plankton.
The report essentially caps a half-century-long effort to discern whether
humans, through the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases released
mainly by burning fuels and forests, could influence the earth?s climate
system in potentially momentous ways.
The group operates under the aegis of the United Nations and was chartered
in 1988 ? a year of record heat, burning forests and the first big headlines
about global warming ? to provide regular reviews of climate science to
governments to inform policy choices.
Government officials are involved in shaping the summary of each report, but
the scientist-authors, who are unpaid, have the final say over the thousands
of pages in four underlying technical reports that will be completed and
published later this year.
Big questions remain about the speed and extent of some impending changes,
both because of uncertainty about future population and pollution trends and
the complex interrelationships of the greenhouse emissions, clouds, dusty
kinds of pollution, the oceans and earth?s veneer of life, which both emits
and soaks up carbon dioxide and other such gases.
But a broad array of scientists, including authors of the report and
independent experts, said the latest analysis was the most sobering view yet
of a century of transition ? after thousands of years of relatively stable
climate conditions ? to a new norm of continual change.
Should greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at even a
moderate pace, average temperatures by the end of the century could match
those last seen 125,000 years ago, in the previous warm spell between ice
ages, the report said.
At that time, the panel said, sea levels were 12 to 20 feet higher than they
are now. Much of that extra water is now trapped in the ice sheets of
Greenland and Antarctica, which are eroding in some places.
The panel said there was no solid scientific understanding of how rapidly
the vast stores of ice in polar regions will melt, so their estimates on new
sea levels were based mainly on how much the warmed oceans will expand, and
not on contributions from the melting of ice now on land.
Other scientists have recently reported evidence that the glaciers and ice
sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic could flow seaward far more quickly than
estimated in the past, and they have proposed that the risks to coastal
areas could be much more imminent. But the climate change panel is forbidden
by its charter to enter into speculation, and so could not include such
possible instabilities in its assessment.
Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the United Nations World
Meteorological Organization, said the lack of clarity should offer no one
comfort. ?The speed with which melting ice sheets are raising sea levels is
uncertain, but the report makes clear that sea levels will rise inexorably
over the coming centuries,? he said. ?It is a question of when and how much,
and not if.?
The warming and other climate changes will be highly variable around the
world, with the Arctic in particular seeing much higher temperatures, said
Susan Solomon, the co-leader of the team writing the summary and the section
of the panel?s report on basic science. She is an atmospheric scientist for
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The kinds of vulnerabilities are very much dependent on where you are, Dr.
Solomon said in a telephone interview. ?If you?re living in parts of the
tropics and they?re getting drier and you?re a farmer, there are some very
acute issues associated with even small changes in rainfall ? changes we?re
already seeing are significant,? she said. ?If you are an Inuit and you?re
seeing your sea ice retreating already, that?s affecting your life style and
culture.?
The 20-page summary is a sketch of the findings that are most germane to the
public and world leaders.
The full report, thousands of pages of technical background, will be
released in four sections through the year ? the first on basic science,
then sections on impacts and options for limiting emissions and limiting
inevitable harms, and finally a synthesis of all of the findings near year?s
end.
In a news conference in Paris, Dr. Solomon declined to provide her own views
on how society should respond to the momentous changes projected in the
study.
?I honestly believe that it would be a much better service for me to keep
my personal opinions separate than what I can actually offer the world as a
scientist,? she said. ?My stepson, who is 29, has an utterly different view
of risks than I do. People are going to have to make their own judgments.?
Some authors of the report said that no one could honestly point to any
remaining uncertainties as justification for further delay.
?Policy makers paid us to do good science, and now we have very high
scientific confidence in this work ? this is real, this is real, this is
real,? said Richard B. Alley, one of the lead authors and a professor at
Pennsylvania State University. ?So now act, the ball?s back in your court.?
anything to help stop/slow down global warming... What about the
president of the "United States"?... Maybe he will help stop/slow
down Global Warming?... Yah Right... He doesnt give a $hit!
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831" target="_newWindow">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831</a>
&en=40cadc790d174dc4&ei=5070
Science Panel Calls Global Warming ?Unequivocal?
PARIS, Feb. 2 ? In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the
planet, the leading international network of climate scientists has
concluded for the first time that global warming is ?unequivocal? and that
human activity is the main driver, ?very likely? causing most of the rise in
temperatures since 1950.
They said the world was in for centuries of climbing temperatures, rising
seas and shifting weather patterns ? unavoidable results of the buildup of
heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
But their report, released here on Friday by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, said warming and its harmful consequences could be
substantially blunted by prompt action.
While the report provided scant new evidence of a climate apocalypse now,
and while it expressly avoided recommending courses of action, officials
from the United Nations agencies that created the panel in 1988 said it
spoke of the urgent need to limit looming and momentous risks.
?In our daily lives we all respond urgently to dangers that are much less
likely than climate change to affect the future of our children,? said Achim
Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which
administers the panel along with the World Meteorological Organization.
?Feb. 2 will be remembered as the date when uncertainty was removed as to
whether humans had anything to do with climate change on this planet,? he
went on. ?The evidence is on the table.?
The report is the panel?s fourth assessment since 1990 on the causes and
consequences of climate change, but it is the first in which the group
asserts with near certainty ? more than 90 percent confidence ? that carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main
causes of warming in the past half century.
In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of scientists
and reviewers, said the confidence level for its projections was ?likely,?
or 66 to 90 percent. That level has now been raised to ?very likely,? better
than 90 percent. Both reports are online at www.ipcc.ch.
The Bush administration, which until recently avoided directly accepting
that humans were warming the planet in potentially harmful ways, embraced
the findings, which had been approved by representatives from the United
States and 112 other countries on Thursday night.
Administration officials asserted Friday that the United States had played a
leading role in studying and combating climate change, in part by an
investment of an average of almost $5 billion a year for the past six years
in research and tax incentives for new technologies.
At the same time, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman rejected the idea of
unilateral limits on emissions. ?We are a small contributor to the overall,
when you look at the rest of the world, so it?s really got to be a global
solution,? he said.
The United States, with about 5 percent of the world?s population,
contributes about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other
country.
Democratic lawmakers quickly fired off a round of news releases using the
report to bolster a fresh flock of proposed bills aimed at cutting emissions
of greenhouse gases. Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who
has called the idea of dangerous human-driven warming a hoax, issued a news
release headed ?Corruption of Science? that rejected the report as ?a
political document.?
The new report says the global climate is likely to warm 3.5 to 8 degrees
Fahrenheit if carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reach twice
the levels of 1750, before the Industrial Revolution.
Many energy and environment experts see such a doubling, or worse, as a
foregone conclusion after 2050 unless there is a prompt and sustained shift
away from the 20th-century pattern of unfettered burning of coal and oil,
the main sources of carbon dioxide, and an aggressive expansion of
nonpolluting sources of energy.
And the report says there is a more than a 1-in-10 chance of much greater
warming, a risk that many experts say is far too high to ignore.
Even a level of warming that falls in the middle of the group?s range of
projections would be likely to cause significant stress to ecosystems,
according to many climate experts and biologists. And it would alter
longstanding climate patterns that shape water supplies and agricultural
production.
Moreover, the warming has set in motion a rise in global sea levels, the
report says. It forecasts a rise of 7 to 23 inches by 2100 and concludes
that seas will continue to rise for at least 1,000 years to come. By
comparison, seas rose about 6 to 9 inches in the 20th century.
John P. Holdren, an energy and climate expert at Harvard, said the report
?powerfully underscores the need for a massive effort to slow the pace of
global climatic disruption before intolerable consequences become
inevitable.?
?Since 2001, there has been a torrent of new scientific evidence on the
magnitude, human origins and growing impacts of the climatic changes that
are under way,? said Mr. Holdren, who is the president of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. ?In overwhelming proportions,
this evidence has been in the direction of showing faster change, more
danger and greater confidence about the dominant role of fossil-fuel burning
and tropical deforestation in causing the changes that are being observed.?
The conclusions came after a three-year review of hundreds of studies of
past climate shifts; observations of retreating ice, warming and rising
seas, and other changes around the planet; and a greatly expanded suite of
supercomputer simulations used to test how the earth will respond to a
growing blanket of gases that hold heat in the atmosphere.
The section released Friday was a 20-page summary for policymakers, which
was approved early in the morning by teams of officials from more than 100
countries after three days and nights of wrangling over wording with the
lead authors, all of whom are scientists.
It described far-flung ramifications for both humans and nature.
?It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation
events will continue to become more frequent,? said the summary.
Generally, the scientists said, more precipitation will fall at higher
latitudes, which are also likely to see lengthened growing seasons.
Semi-arid subtropical regions, already chronically plagued by drought, could
have a further 20 percent drop in rainfall under the panel?s midrange
outlook for increases in the greenhouse gases.
The summary added a new chemical consequence of the buildup of carbon
dioxide to the list of mainly climatic and biological effects foreseen in
its previous reports: a drop in the pH of seawater as oceans absorb billions
of tons of carbon dioxide, which forms carbonic acid when partly dissolved.
The ocean would stay alkaline, but marine biologists have said that a change
in the direction of acidity could imperil some kinds of corals and plankton.
The report essentially caps a half-century-long effort to discern whether
humans, through the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases released
mainly by burning fuels and forests, could influence the earth?s climate
system in potentially momentous ways.
The group operates under the aegis of the United Nations and was chartered
in 1988 ? a year of record heat, burning forests and the first big headlines
about global warming ? to provide regular reviews of climate science to
governments to inform policy choices.
Government officials are involved in shaping the summary of each report, but
the scientist-authors, who are unpaid, have the final say over the thousands
of pages in four underlying technical reports that will be completed and
published later this year.
Big questions remain about the speed and extent of some impending changes,
both because of uncertainty about future population and pollution trends and
the complex interrelationships of the greenhouse emissions, clouds, dusty
kinds of pollution, the oceans and earth?s veneer of life, which both emits
and soaks up carbon dioxide and other such gases.
But a broad array of scientists, including authors of the report and
independent experts, said the latest analysis was the most sobering view yet
of a century of transition ? after thousands of years of relatively stable
climate conditions ? to a new norm of continual change.
Should greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at even a
moderate pace, average temperatures by the end of the century could match
those last seen 125,000 years ago, in the previous warm spell between ice
ages, the report said.
At that time, the panel said, sea levels were 12 to 20 feet higher than they
are now. Much of that extra water is now trapped in the ice sheets of
Greenland and Antarctica, which are eroding in some places.
The panel said there was no solid scientific understanding of how rapidly
the vast stores of ice in polar regions will melt, so their estimates on new
sea levels were based mainly on how much the warmed oceans will expand, and
not on contributions from the melting of ice now on land.
Other scientists have recently reported evidence that the glaciers and ice
sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic could flow seaward far more quickly than
estimated in the past, and they have proposed that the risks to coastal
areas could be much more imminent. But the climate change panel is forbidden
by its charter to enter into speculation, and so could not include such
possible instabilities in its assessment.
Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the United Nations World
Meteorological Organization, said the lack of clarity should offer no one
comfort. ?The speed with which melting ice sheets are raising sea levels is
uncertain, but the report makes clear that sea levels will rise inexorably
over the coming centuries,? he said. ?It is a question of when and how much,
and not if.?
The warming and other climate changes will be highly variable around the
world, with the Arctic in particular seeing much higher temperatures, said
Susan Solomon, the co-leader of the team writing the summary and the section
of the panel?s report on basic science. She is an atmospheric scientist for
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The kinds of vulnerabilities are very much dependent on where you are, Dr.
Solomon said in a telephone interview. ?If you?re living in parts of the
tropics and they?re getting drier and you?re a farmer, there are some very
acute issues associated with even small changes in rainfall ? changes we?re
already seeing are significant,? she said. ?If you are an Inuit and you?re
seeing your sea ice retreating already, that?s affecting your life style and
culture.?
The 20-page summary is a sketch of the findings that are most germane to the
public and world leaders.
The full report, thousands of pages of technical background, will be
released in four sections through the year ? the first on basic science,
then sections on impacts and options for limiting emissions and limiting
inevitable harms, and finally a synthesis of all of the findings near year?s
end.
In a news conference in Paris, Dr. Solomon declined to provide her own views
on how society should respond to the momentous changes projected in the
study.
?I honestly believe that it would be a much better service for me to keep
my personal opinions separate than what I can actually offer the world as a
scientist,? she said. ?My stepson, who is 29, has an utterly different view
of risks than I do. People are going to have to make their own judgments.?
Some authors of the report said that no one could honestly point to any
remaining uncertainties as justification for further delay.
?Policy makers paid us to do good science, and now we have very high
scientific confidence in this work ? this is real, this is real, this is
real,? said Richard B. Alley, one of the lead authors and a professor at
Pennsylvania State University. ?So now act, the ball?s back in your court.?
Here's a clue: Barring a direct asteroidal impact or the Sun imploding, global-sized changes take time - time enough at least to actually study the issue, and not fall prey to hysterical propaganda.
Enough of this wolf-crying hysteria already.
/P
"global warming" in direct proportion to what the Earth has noticed.
Only the most politically correct of today's extremists can deny
science and embrace the religion of the Left Wingers, and say that,
even though we've had dozens of "warmth/freeze" cycles over 4
billion years of Earth's history", that somehow, everything today is
Bush's fault.
It's those damn SUV driving "Martian Soccer Moms" causing all that
global warming on Mars!
Get your facts straight! . . . (^o~)
&en=40cadc790d174dc4&ei=5070
Science Panel Calls Global Warming ?Unequivocal?
PARIS, Feb. 2 ? In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the
planet, the leading international network of climate scientists has
concluded for the first time that global warming is ?unequivocal? and that
human activity is the main driver, ?very likely? causing most of the rise in
temperatures since 1950.
They said the world was in for centuries of climbing temperatures, rising
seas and shifting weather patterns ? unavoidable results of the buildup of
heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
But their report, released here on Friday by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, said warming and its harmful consequences could be
substantially blunted by prompt action.
While the report provided scant new evidence of a climate apocalypse now,
and while it expressly avoided recommending courses of action, officials
from the United Nations agencies that created the panel in 1988 said it
spoke of the urgent need to limit looming and momentous risks.
?In our daily lives we all respond urgently to dangers that are much less
likely than climate change to affect the future of our children,? said Achim
Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which
administers the panel along with the World Meteorological Organization.
?Feb. 2 will be remembered as the date when uncertainty was removed as to
whether humans had anything to do with climate change on this planet,? he
went on. ?The evidence is on the table.?
The report is the panel?s fourth assessment since 1990 on the causes and
consequences of climate change, but it is the first in which the group
asserts with near certainty ? more than 90 percent confidence ? that carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main
causes of warming in the past half century.
In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of scientists
and reviewers, said the confidence level for its projections was ?likely,?
or 66 to 90 percent. That level has now been raised to ?very likely,? better
than 90 percent. Both reports are online at www.ipcc.ch.
The Bush administration, which until recently avoided directly accepting
that humans were warming the planet in potentially harmful ways, embraced
the findings, which had been approved by representatives from the United
States and 112 other countries on Thursday night.
Administration officials asserted Friday that the United States had played a
leading role in studying and combating climate change, in part by an
investment of an average of almost $5 billion a year for the past six years
in research and tax incentives for new technologies.
At the same time, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman rejected the idea of
unilateral limits on emissions. ?We are a small contributor to the overall,
when you look at the rest of the world, so it?s really got to be a global
solution,? he said.
The United States, with about 5 percent of the world?s population,
contributes about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other
country.
Democratic lawmakers quickly fired off a round of news releases using the
report to bolster a fresh flock of proposed bills aimed at cutting emissions
of greenhouse gases. Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who
has called the idea of dangerous human-driven warming a hoax, issued a news
release headed ?Corruption of Science? that rejected the report as ?a
political document.?
The new report says the global climate is likely to warm 3.5 to 8 degrees
Fahrenheit if carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reach twice
the levels of 1750, before the Industrial Revolution.
Many energy and environment experts see such a doubling, or worse, as a
foregone conclusion after 2050 unless there is a prompt and sustained shift
away from the 20th-century pattern of unfettered burning of coal and oil,
the main sources of carbon dioxide, and an aggressive expansion of
nonpolluting sources of energy.
And the report says there is a more than a 1-in-10 chance of much greater
warming, a risk that many experts say is far too high to ignore.
Even a level of warming that falls in the middle of the group?s range of
projections would be likely to cause significant stress to ecosystems,
according to many climate experts and biologists. And it would alter
longstanding climate patterns that shape water supplies and agricultural
production.
Moreover, the warming has set in motion a rise in global sea levels, the
report says. It forecasts a rise of 7 to 23 inches by 2100 and concludes
that seas will continue to rise for at least 1,000 years to come. By
comparison, seas rose about 6 to 9 inches in the 20th century.
John P. Holdren, an energy and climate expert at Harvard, said the report
?powerfully underscores the need for a massive effort to slow the pace of
global climatic disruption before intolerable consequences become
inevitable.?
?Since 2001, there has been a torrent of new scientific evidence on the
magnitude, human origins and growing impacts of the climatic changes that
are under way,? said Mr. Holdren, who is the president of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. ?In overwhelming proportions,
this evidence has been in the direction of showing faster change, more
danger and greater confidence about the dominant role of fossil-fuel burning
and tropical deforestation in causing the changes that are being observed.?
The conclusions came after a three-year review of hundreds of studies of
past climate shifts; observations of retreating ice, warming and rising
seas, and other changes around the planet; and a greatly expanded suite of
supercomputer simulations used to test how the earth will respond to a
growing blanket of gases that hold heat in the atmosphere.
The section released Friday was a 20-page summary for policymakers, which
was approved early in the morning by teams of officials from more than 100
countries after three days and nights of wrangling over wording with the
lead authors, all of whom are scientists.
It described far-flung ramifications for both humans and nature.
?It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation
events will continue to become more frequent,? said the summary.
Generally, the scientists said, more precipitation will fall at higher
latitudes, which are also likely to see lengthened growing seasons.
Semi-arid subtropical regions, already chronically plagued by drought, could
have a further 20 percent drop in rainfall under the panel?s midrange
outlook for increases in the greenhouse gases.
The summary added a new chemical consequence of the buildup of carbon
dioxide to the list of mainly climatic and biological effects foreseen in
its previous reports: a drop in the pH of seawater as oceans absorb billions
of tons of carbon dioxide, which forms carbonic acid when partly dissolved.
The ocean would stay alkaline, but marine biologists have said that a change
in the direction of acidity could imperil some kinds of corals and plankton.
The report essentially caps a half-century-long effort to discern whether
humans, through the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases released
mainly by burning fuels and forests, could influence the earth?s climate
system in potentially momentous ways.
The group operates under the aegis of the United Nations and was chartered
in 1988 ? a year of record heat, burning forests and the first big headlines
about global warming ? to provide regular reviews of climate science to
governments to inform policy choices.
Government officials are involved in shaping the summary of each report, but
the scientist-authors, who are unpaid, have the final say over the thousands
of pages in four underlying technical reports that will be completed and
published later this year.
Big questions remain about the speed and extent of some impending changes,
both because of uncertainty about future population and pollution trends and
the complex interrelationships of the greenhouse emissions, clouds, dusty
kinds of pollution, the oceans and earth?s veneer of life, which both emits
and soaks up carbon dioxide and other such gases.
But a broad array of scientists, including authors of the report and
independent experts, said the latest analysis was the most sobering view yet
of a century of transition ? after thousands of years of relatively stable
climate conditions ? to a new norm of continual change.
Should greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at even a
moderate pace, average temperatures by the end of the century could match
those last seen 125,000 years ago, in the previous warm spell between ice
ages, the report said.
At that time, the panel said, sea levels were 12 to 20 feet higher than they
are now. Much of that extra water is now trapped in the ice sheets of
Greenland and Antarctica, which are eroding in some places.
The panel said there was no solid scientific understanding of how rapidly
the vast stores of ice in polar regions will melt, so their estimates on new
sea levels were based mainly on how much the warmed oceans will expand, and
not on contributions from the melting of ice now on land.
Other scientists have recently reported evidence that the glaciers and ice
sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic could flow seaward far more quickly than
estimated in the past, and they have proposed that the risks to coastal
areas could be much more imminent. But the climate change panel is forbidden
by its charter to enter into speculation, and so could not include such
possible instabilities in its assessment.
Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the United Nations World
Meteorological Organization, said the lack of clarity should offer no one
comfort. ?The speed with which melting ice sheets are raising sea levels is
uncertain, but the report makes clear that sea levels will rise inexorably
over the coming centuries,? he said. ?It is a question of when and how much,
and not if.?
The warming and other climate changes will be highly variable around the
world, with the Arctic in particular seeing much higher temperatures, said
Susan Solomon, the co-leader of the team writing the summary and the section
of the panel?s report on basic science. She is an atmospheric scientist for
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The kinds of vulnerabilities are very much dependent on where you are, Dr.
Solomon said in a telephone interview. ?If you?re living in parts of the
tropics and they?re getting drier and you?re a farmer, there are some very
acute issues associated with even small changes in rainfall ? changes we?re
already seeing are significant,? she said. ?If you are an Inuit and you?re
seeing your sea ice retreating already, that?s affecting your life style and
culture.?
The 20-page summary is a sketch of the findings that are most germane to the
public and world leaders.
The full report, thousands of pages of technical background, will be
released in four sections through the year ? the first on basic science,
then sections on impacts and options for limiting emissions and limiting
inevitable harms, and finally a synthesis of all of the findings near year?s
end.
In a news conference in Paris, Dr. Solomon declined to provide her own views
on how society should respond to the momentous changes projected in the
study.
?I honestly believe that it would be a much better service for me to keep
my personal opinions separate than what I can actually offer the world as a
scientist,? she said. ?My stepson, who is 29, has an utterly different view
of risks than I do. People are going to have to make their own judgments.?
Some authors of the report said that no one could honestly point to any
remaining uncertainties as justification for further delay.
?Policy makers paid us to do good science, and now we have very high
scientific confidence in this work ? this is real, this is real, this is
real,? said Richard B. Alley, one of the lead authors and a professor at
Pennsylvania State University. ?So now act, the ball?s back in your court.?
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/11/ngreen211.xml" target="_newWindow">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/11/ngreen211.xml</a>
mention of CO2.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831" target="_newWindow">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831</a>
Go ahead, ask for data from a third party, non-biased scientific lab that does not profit from promoting global warming or being skeptical of global warming and follows the scientific method. You won't find such a lab, because they are all biased in one way or the other. Due to lack of non-biased evidence, there is no credible evidence to show that the globe is warming or cooling or staying the same.
They ignore data like flights being delayed due to massive amounts of ice. They ignore cities getting hit with six inches of ice. They ignore record cold spells. They just reject all of that data, and then fudge the results to say well we had the warmest winter in one hundred years. I mean sure, if you throw out all of the record cold temperatures, take all of the high temperatures and reject all of the temperatures in the middle, and then show data based on the high temperatures, it can look like the warmest winter in one hundred years then. That is exactly what they did, ignore all data that disproves their theory.
go to weather.com and review february averages vs this year, most nights it's about 20 degrees below the average and the daytime highs are too.
just because the first half of january was very warm and boosted the average, it doesn't mean it was a warm winter. we've been FREEZING for 2 months since.
Low: 7°F
Clear and bitterly cold
tomorrow night's average:
Nml Low: 24°F
oh yeah, i'm feeling that warmest winter ever. let me grab my shorts and t-shirt...
First off, "...on record" doesn't mean as much as most people think. It wasn't until the mid-20th century that anyone could even hope to maintain records accurate enough to be called scientific, as earlier instruments and recording methods were crude at best. Ice cores and etc. aren't perfectly reliable either, as they rely on a lot of assumptions, and all contributing factors are definitely not knowm.
Does this mean I'm discounting it all entirely? No. I believe it does need a closer look - one w/o all the politicization and ideology involved.
Science is hampered enough by panicked cries and dire predictions. It's time to throttle that back and get some facts. Not propaganda disguised as fact, but real, honest facts.
Some may scream in response "there's no time! Look at what is at stake!" Well, question is - what exactly is at stake? Flooding? Current measurements of all the world's ice shows that at most, if all ice on Planet Earth melted, sea levels would rise by a whopping 30 feet (Sorry Kevin Costner, but your 'Waterworld' scenario ain't happening). Since this wouldn't happen all at once, I suspect that we would have more than enough time to move people and their stuff to higher ground.
So maybe the fear is the dreaded 'Desertification'? Well, not so fast... more atmospheric heat means more moisture, which in turn means that perhaps instead of desertification, you would have a greater chance of getting less desert out of the deal as rains move in to areas where it's never rained before. Some would call that a good thing, methinks (and proof of this occurring is already showing in Africa, incidentally...)
Coupled with the fact (yes, fact) that the Earth was far, far warmer in the distant past (as well as far, far colder)? I don't think we need to panic just yet. We still have plenty of time to actually do some research into this, and not just jump whenever some politician or enviro-extremist group tells us we should.
We should also not ignore it all either. Let's really look at it, and look for benefits as well as pitfalls, because odds are good that there's not much, if anything, that we can do about it, assuming that global climate is indeed on the upswing.
Finally, enough of the hype. Televised propaganda showing a child about to be hit by a moving train (an allegory based on incomplete assumptions at best) serves no one. Global-sized changes take a long time, and I sincerely doubt that we're going to kill our descendants by taking the time to study things right. Truth is, we might put them in greater jeopardy by panicking towards something we may not yet know the full story on.
/P
devastating, right?
As for panicing... No we don't need to panic. Panic is bad an
produces some of the inane comments we've seen here. We do
need to be cautious though. We also have to understand that
even if this is 'natural' variation its still a monumental challenge
and one that needs to be taken very seriously.
Too many people seem to be saying "oh its natural, nothing we
can do, might was well watch American Idol". Fires, floods,
earthquakes, disease, tornadoes are natural as well. I don't think
any of these people would say that we don't have to be
concerned about these things.
warmest winter on record. I was freaking freezing!"
Which is completely idiotic. Measures of the 'warmth' of a winter
are determined by averaging weather over *large* areas and over
long periods of time. Its not just about how cold this past month
was in Duluth but the temperature over many months over large
areas of the world. In fact, the article states that US temps were
around average but the global temp was .7C above the global
mean for the past 100 years.
Oh and to the person who said this must be a conspiracy. You
do understand that NOAA is a federal agency right? Its part of
the US Chamber of Commerce and hardly an agnecy that would
be banging the global warming drum (the term doesn't even
appear in the report). In fact, if you read the article you might
have found this out.
that make this any less dangerous? Does it make CO2 any less of
a greenhouse gas or potential contributor to the problem?
Look at it this way. Floods are natural and part of the weather
cycle. However, people can make floods more devastating by
denuding landscapes of vegetation which help retain soil which
helps retain excess water. Does this mean stripping out
vegetation *causes* floods? Not always but it definitely,
inarguably, makes them worse. As such, only an idiot would
build their house at the bottom of a hill they stripped all the
plant life from. Since we have control over the plant life on this
hill we can help mitgate the effects of rains and flooding so it
becomes a nusiance instead of a tragedy.
Likewise, higher CO2 levels won't necessarily cause global
warming but it will exacerbate any existing trends towards it. We
have control over how much CO2 we pump into the atmosphere.
We can work to make global warming a nusiance or we can keep
on doing what we have been doing and let it become a tragedy.
Some of the replies I saw (briefly) are absolutely CORRECT: Weather FLUCTUATES [b]. PERIOD[/b] No rocket science needed to know that ;)
Suppose we should condemn the trilobites next...
map global temperatures for hundreds of thousands of years in
the past. They don't need written records that began in the
1800s - it's all perfectly preserved for anyone who cares to look
for it in the ice cores.
Since ice traps tiny amounts of air in frozen bubbles, it is easy to
measure how much CO2 gas was present during the past dozen
Ice/Warm ages. None of them show levels of CO2 as high as
what is present today. And that IS something to worry about
because CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
Those alive today have little to fear from global warming. We will
all die out before significant damage comes to fruition. But if
you care about your children and their families you should care
about reducing how much CO2 you release into the
environment.
you think they are.
Read some of their output and you'll see they're not as dumb (or
wealthy, from grants?!) as many of you think they are.
Currently, it's in vogue in the US for techno-wannabes to
proclaim the truth they find on some websites.
Why not try forming your opinion based on actual referreed
results?
The rest is just political speculation.
/P
Cures? Remove the CO2 (Give me energy and I'll do it, lots of big CO2 fire extinguishers or polar cap sized CO2 dry ice storage areas)
OR Reflect the short wave radiation prior to it being changed to long wave radiation, mirrors on all houses, large reflectors in unpopulated areas, no more blacktop, or lots of clouds in the day and clear skies at night.
precedents and information regarding climatology, is a stretch at best.
While we -- as a species -- should be aware of the "footprint" we're leaving on this planet, the universe is alot bigger and older than we are. That said, there's reason to believe that whatever climatological "doomsday" scenario might come true, may simply be as a result of Mother Nature's own doing.
Of course, the above assertion doesn't fit the profile of the politics involved.
Simple thing , am in central NY the cloud cover has increased here fact !
Keep adding to the waste air and land and fresh water !
Simple math add, and add more what happens the numbers change , throw in the politics, and the news hype , bs all the way !
Anyway usally don't read much of this column here , i like the post !!!
And given the scientific community has semi-reliable climatological data that's what, only just over a century old? I think I'll maintain skepticism and I surely know enough not to obtain any reliable climatology information from usenet posters.
P.S. I love the warm weather.
For years my son has been telling (teaching?!) me that his bathroom & bedroom are not filthy/polluted and that they are not that way because of ignorance & laziness, but they are that way because of "Living" -- they are the result of people who "Live".
Denial: Don't Even kNow I Am Lying -- first to myself and thus, to others.
All truth goes through three stages.
First it is ridiculed.
Then it is violently opposed.
Finally, it is accepted as self-evident. -Schoepenhouer
For many (most?), it appears this topic finds them in either the first or second stage -- one of the 'Inconvenient' stages of Truth.
And to those in the 1st or 2nd stage who have been 'rationally' but not 'Reasonably' educated in the discipline of Science, I do have Hope for you all! :)
The Mathematician's and Scientist's purpose is the pursuit of Beauty and Truth -- not "falsification"!
The discipline leads to a proof or substantiation of an experience that IT IS -- NOT that it is not!!
Anyone steeped in Logic will tell you that the 'not' condition can be impossible to prove.
From a Truth, only a Truth can result.
From a falsehood, either a falsehood or a Truth can result.
I have an understanding why the Inconvenient Truther's feel so passionate.
I have no understanding why their counterparts feel so passionate -- or is that impassionate, as inflammable means flammable?!
We can comprehend/understand an individual altering their next door neighbor's backyard/environment -- but, we find it extremely difficult (inconvenient?) to comprehend/undestand how our society can alter our next state's/country's environment, and beyond not to mention Globally.
DISCLOSURE: I have a BA in Mathematics and a BS (ha, ha, ha) in Life Science with emphasis in Systems Ecology. I was studying the most recent scientific studies at the same time VP Gore mentions of his school experience in the movie. I can still hear to this day one of my Prof's providing his account of his 'Lemmings' experience -- how the Lemmings were manipluated by a **** Sapiens Sapiens individual to behave in the 'commonly' expected manner :(
Denial -- deny, deny, deny!!!