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Warning on Warming
Bill McKibben, NY Review of Books via Gristmill
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report in early February, it was greeted with shock: “World Wakes to Climate Catastrophe,” reported an Australian paper. But global warming is by now a scientific field with a fairly extensive history, and that history helps set the new findings in context — a context that makes the new report no less terrifying but much more telling for its unstated political implications.
…More important findings were ignored in accounts of the report and in some cases were obscured by the document’s very poor prose, which is much more opaque than its predecessors. Those findings include:
- The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is now increasing at a faster rate even than before.
- Temperature increases would be considerably higher than they have been so far were it not for the blanket of soot and other pollution that is temporarily helping to cool the planet.
- Alternative explanations for some of the warming (for example, sunspot activity and the “urban heat island effect,” the raising of temperatures in cities caused by high building densities and the use of heat-retaining materials such as concrete and asphalt) are now known to be relatively negligible.
- Almost everything frozen on earth is melting. Heavy rainfalls are becoming more common since the air is warmer and therefore holds more water than cold air, and “cold days, cold nights and frost have become less frequent, while hot days, hot nights, and heat waves have become more frequent.”
These facts serve as the prelude to the most important part of the new document, its predictions for what is to come. …if we don’t take the most aggressive possible measures to curb fossil fuel emissions immediately, then we will see temperature increases of — at the best estimate — roughly five degrees Fahrenheit during this century. Technically speaking, that’s enormous, enough to produce what James Hansen has called a “totally different planet,” one much warmer than that known by any of our human ancestors.
…the “shocking” conclusions of the new report in fact lag behind the most recent findings of climate science by several years.
That’s most obvious here in the discussion of the rise in sea level. …During the last eighteen months, however, new research has indicated that a far more rapid rise in sea level may be possible, because the great ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic appear to have begun moving more quickly toward the sea.
…Translated into English, this [passage] means, to put it simply, that if world leaders had heeded the early warnings of the first IPCC report, and by 2000 had done the very hard work to keep greenhouse gas emissions from growing any higher, the expected temperature increase would be half as much as is expected now. In the words of the experts at realclimate.org, where the most useful analyses of the new assessment can be found, climate change is a problem with a very high “procrastination penalty”: a penalty that just grows and grows with each passing year of inaction.
Bill McKibben is a frequent contributor to The New York Review and is scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.
(19 Feb 2007; article appears in the March 15, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books)
Global warming scientist is encouraged
Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO – A top scientist in the study of climate change says she is optimistic about public understanding of the dangers of global warming.
“I’m incredibly encouraged,” Susan Solomon beamed after speaking to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Solomon, a scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was instrumental in developing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released earlier this month in Paris.
That report reaffirmed ongoing global warming, said it is 90 percent likely to have been caused by human activity and added changes in rain and snowfall to the hotter climate expected with continuing change.
“Evidence of climate change is now unequivocal,” she said.
Changes already under way will require adaptation in the short term, Solomon said, while efforts to reduce or reverse change will only occur on a long term.
(20 Feb 2007)
Aim for low world warming despite hardship-scientist
Jeremy Lovell, Reuters via Alertnet
The world must aim to limit the temperature rise due to global warming to just two degrees Celsius (4 F) despite the near impossibility of achieving it, World Bank Chief Scientist Robert Watson said on Monday.
Scientists say that at atmospheric concentrations of 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide — the main greenhouse gas from burning fossil fuels — temperatures will rise by two degrees Celsius. At 550 ppm it will be three degrees or more.
Current levels are already over 400 ppm and rising at around two ppm per year.
“We should aim at the 450 ppm target. Whether we can get to it is another question,” Watson told a climate change investment conference in London’s financial district. “In practice I don’t think we can stabilise at two degrees.”
“It is going to take a major change in the way we generate and use electricity to even stabilise between two and three degrees,” he added. “The time for action is now.”
(19 Feb 2007)
Note that the scientist quoted here is from the World Bank, whose actions determine the direction of many development projects. -BA
