Hard Not to Think the Alarmists Are Right

I have some intelligent and thoughtful acquaintances who believe the whole global warming thing is bunk. Personally, I'm a bit more agnostic about it. While I believe some climate change charlatans and opportunists have hijacked the debate for their own selfish ends, I find it hard to look around at all the noxious substances being pumped and dumped into the air, sea, and ground and not think it is having a negative impact on our entire ecosystem, including the atmosphere. My sense that the environmental alarmists may be right is also heightened when I read reports like the following, entitled "Studies of the Arctic Suggest a Dire Situation," in the latest issue of Time magazine:

Icebergs that have broken away from the Jacobshavn glacier in Greenland.

Ashley Cooper / Corbis

Climate change is happening everywhere, but nowhere faster than in the Arctic, where annual temperatures in the far North are warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Sea ice on the polar cap is shrinking and permafrost is melting, putting animals like the polar bear — and the Arctic people who depend on them — in increasing danger.

While there's no doubt that the Arctic is warming — year after year, it becomes more clearly visible — it is actually a new phenomenon. In a new study published in the Sept. 4 Science, researchers led by Darrell Kaufman at Northern Arizona University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research constructed a climate record of the Arctic over the past 2,000 years, and found that the region had been cooling for almost all of that time period. Summer temperatures in the Arctic cooled by an average of 0.2 degrees C each thousand years, thanks chiefly to wobbles in the Earth's orbit around the sun that gradually reduced the amount of sunlight hitting the Arctic. Left unchecked, the Arctic would have continued that slow cooling for thousands of more years, until the Earth's orbit wobbled again.

But then something else happened — us. The Science researchers found that during the 20th century, as human beings began pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the Arctic stopped cooling and started warming. Even though the Arctic is still gradually getting less sunlight, it's still getting hotter — summer temperatures in the Arctic are 1.4 degrees C higher than they would have been if the cooling had continued unabated, according to the study. The most recent decade recorded — from 1999 to 2008 — was the warmest of the past 2,000 years. The recent warming trend has been so strong that researchers say it might have even kept the Earth from slipping into a new Ice Age — although now, of course, the world needs to deal with the opposite problem.

Another study released this week by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) examines that problem and its potential future effects — and it's not pretty. The WWF researchers found that Arctic sea ice is melting at a faster rate than expected, and that the massive land sheets in Greenland and parts of Antarctic are vulnerable. The report predicts that global sea level will rise more than 3 ft. by 2100, significantly higher than scientists had previously believed. "What we're finding is truly sobering," says Martin Sommerkorn, the senior adviser for the WWF's Arctic Program.

The study also found that the methane locked in Arctic permafrost is increasingly at risk of being released if warming continues — a positive feedback cycle that would accelerate climate change. But the impacts of a hotter Arctic go beyond that. The WWF study found that as the Arctic warms, it could alter weather patterns beyond its borders, affecting temperature and rain patterns in Europe and North America. "The Arctic is the global refrigerator for the climate system," says Sommerkorn. "Change it, and you might see even more dry summers in the Southwest and wetter winters in the Mediterranean." It's another reminder that in this season of climate change politics, we're running out of time to make a difference.

Comments

[roger]

the sahara is getting greener

National Geographic:

[roger]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html

[michael]

I think the global warming theory has a likelyhood being correct of 50%. In other words nobody really knows. Every schoolchild can make a prediction with such probabilities.

Some years ago I read that no scientist was disagreeing with IPCC anymore. Sounded impressive, but science without opposing theories is not science anymore. They just had muzzled the dissenters.
Trying to predict the next 100 years in temperature, but unable to explain the "little ice age" or Maunder minimum! The sunspot counters seem to have a better theory than the IPCC.

Enjoy the nice summers before the next cooling phase sets in!

[Mark Stevens]

This news just in on data about arctic ice thickness shows just how fast things are changing
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090901143321.htm
A quote:
Analysis of the new record shows that since a peak in 1980, sea ice thickness has declined 53 percent. "It's an astonishing number," Kwok said. The study, published online August 6 in Geophysical Research Letters, shows that the current thinning of Arctic sea ice has actually been going on for quite some time.
Don't tell me it isn't real. I love how people with no scientific training at all, never mind in climatology, feel they
can just reject the results of decades worth of research because it somehow offends their view of the world.

[roger]

A world in flux.
People are born in a world not of their making & that world
seems static, the younger you are the more likely this seems
to be,born in 25 and haven lived on 4 continents that change is
for me ,HIGHLY VISIBLE, and also very negative.