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Bleak U.S. “report card” finds warming Arctic
Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters
A bleak “report card” on global warming’s Arctic impact released on Wednesday found less ice, hotter air and dying wildlife, and stressed that what happens around the North Pole affects the entire planet.
The report, issued by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also found that weird winds blowing warm air toward the North Pole and unusually persistent sunshine added to the warming trend.
(17 October 2007)
Also at Common Dreams
How can you predict global warming if you can’t predict rain?
Peter N. Spotts, The Christian Science Monitor
Some say climate change is part of a complex natural cycle – so complex, in fact, that it can’t be forecast. Are current climate models reliable?
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Princeton, N.J. – To those of us who are not climate scientists, it may come down to this: How can we be so certain what the climate will be like a century from now if you can’t get a decent weather forecast more than two weeks ahead? In the end, isn’t climate change just too complex?
True, weather forecasters are fallible, and there is no planet out there similar to Earth so we can truly gauge the effect human activity is having on our climate. But climate researchers are increasingly confident of their models and simulations. Besides, some argue, predicting the weather is tougher than predicting the climate, and scientists have been working on perfecting climate models for more than a century.
In a chilled, windowless room here at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), a supercomputer is furiously crunching numbers in an attempt to mimic Earth’s climate system.
It’s a tool Svante Arrhenius could only dream about. In 1896, the mustachioed Swede gave the first detailed description of carbon dioxide’s warming effect on climate. He had to solve some 10,000 equations to do it. Armed with his crude climate model, he reckoned that if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doubled, global average temperatures might rise by up to 9 degrees F. Today’s modelers say his estimate is high – but not by much.
Today’s climate models try to simulate more than one feature – more than Arrhenius’s CO2 – of the climate system and in greater detail. They’re still far from perfect and miss important processes.
It’s complicated, modelers say. And there will always be uncertainties. But modeling is the only way to tackle some of the questions they and their colleagues are asking about the climate, they add.
(18 October 2007)
Idaho water director sending early warning about next summer
Todd Dvorak, Associated Press
The state’s top water official is sending an early message to thousands of southern Idaho groundwater users that their pumps may be shut down next summer if the state logs another winter of low mountain snowpack.
David Tuthill, director of Idaho’s Department of Water Resources, said letters will be mailed later this week to more than 2,700 farmers, ranchers, cities, schools and other businesses spread across a broad swath of southern Idaho that draws water from the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer.
The letters provide advance warning that, barring a wet spring and an above-average snowpack in Idaho’s mountain ranges, cutting off water supplies to some of those users may be the only option heading into the 2008 growing season.
(17 October 2007)
