NASA Finds Statistical Evidence Of Global Warming Effects

Climatic changes induced by humans have affected the flora and fauna, along with the physical environment of the world at a much faster pace than previously thought, scientists have said.

A new NASA-led study, noting changes in the physical system, such as glaciers shrinking, permafrost melting and lakes and rivers warming, has linked physical and biological impacts since 1970 with increase in temperatures during that period.

The scientists also noticed changes in biological systems such as leaves unfolding and flowers blooming at a faster pace, birds migrating earlier and plant and animal species moving towards the Earth's poles and higher altitudes.

In addition to global effects, the study also linked climate changes caused by humans with effects on individual continents, particularly North America, Europe and Asia.

The study was based on a database of more than 29,000 data series coming from about 80 studies, with at least 20 years of records between 1970 and 2004.

The team conducted statistical tests and found that patterns of observed impacts correspond with temperature changes around the globe, allowing them to conclude that global impacts are very likely due to human-caused warming.

"This is the first study to link global temperature data sets, climate model results and observed changes in a broad range of physical and biological systems to show the link between humans, climate and impacts," Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science in New York told the media.

Continents including Africa, South America and Australia don't have as much observed changes despite warming trends. The authors attributed this to the lack of data and published studies on these continents.

Global Warming: What Can We Do?

Writing about global warming has changed a lot in the past few years. This is not because the science itself has changed – but because political reaction to it has. It seems that we have, at long last, moved beyond denial and inertia. The time for books that explain what global warming is and why it matters has come and gone. The need now is for answers to the one question that really mattered all along: What do we do about it? Two current books examine the evidence and come up with a series of similar proposals. Each is coauthored by a prominent scientist and an accomplished science journalist and both make worthy additions to global-warming literature. But they go about it in very different ways.

Some environmental activists may be tempted to stop and savor for a moment the fact that the Bush administration and its climate obstructionists will soon be gone. But make it a brief moment, warn Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King, authors of The Hot Topic: What We Can Do About Global Warming. The long moment we've already taken between the first realization that burning fossil fuels would cause dangerous warming and our present state of modest concern have cost us.

Thanks to political foot-dragging and ever-increasing carbon emissions, they say, the best we can hope for now is to avert worst-case scenarios.

Sir David, a chemist at Cambridge University and chief science adviser to the British government, is famous for his 2004 statement that climate change is "the most severe problem we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism." So perhaps it's not surprising that this book conveys a sense of urgency. The authors' tone is chummy, but their focus is clearly on facts, analysis, and implications.


STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE
They start with a capsule review of climate-change science. Their primary focus, however, is on technological and political strategies for controlling emissions and adapting to inevitable change. The proposed solutions are numerous and not terribly new. But they are pragmatic, well described, and convincing.

If "Hot Topic" is a concise guide to the world of climate change, then Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat – And How to Counter It is a slow and gentle travelogue. Written by journalist Robert Kunzig and renowned Columbia University climate scientist Wallace Broecker, "Fixing Climate" is as much Broecker's scientific memoir as it is a call to action. (The biographical material isn't necessary to understanding global warming, but it's a wonderful look at a life in science nonetheless.)

The authors wend their way through a good deal of the history of climate-science research – a fair amount of it over the past five decades conducted by Broecker or his close associates – in a measured, graceful manner. But in step with the intensification of global warming itself, the pace and urgency of "Fixing Climate" increases significantly toward the end.

In a chapter provocatively entitled "Green Is Not Enough," Broecker and Kunzig make a convincing case that all the energy efficiency and conservation in the world, all the biofuels and carbon trading and climate treaties we can come up with, are not going to be enough to avoid very serious climate-change impacts.

"If we are to avoid dangerously warming the planet," Broecker and Kunzig write, "we need to figure out how to build the equivalent of a sewage system for carbon dioxide."

Kunzig and Broecker spend their last several chapters discussing carbon sequestration – technology for removing CO2 from smokestacks, and from the atmosphere itself, and storing it out of harm's way, underground or in the deep sea. No retreat from responsibility.

However, "the most fundamental lesson to be drawn from the whole [global warming] episode, write Broecker and Kunzig, "is that we can no longer expect Mother Earth to take care of us – the planet is ours to run, and we can't retreat from our responsibility to run it wisely."

The precise mix of approaches used might differ somewhat between the two writing teams. But taken together, these two books move us from the debate as to whether we should take real action on global warming to a clear blueprint for doing so.

A Cool Idea To Warm To

ABOUT the beginning of 2007, maintaining a sceptical stance on human-induced global warming became a lonely, uphill battle in Australia.
The notion that the science was settled had gathered broad popular support and was making inroads in unexpected quarters.

Industrialists and financiers with no science qualifications to speak of began to pose as prophets. Otherwise quite rational people decided there were so many true believers that somehow they must be right. Even Paddy McGuinness conceded, in a Quadrant editorial, that on balance the anthropogenic greenhouse gas hypothesis seemed likelier than not.

What a difference the intervening 15 months has made. In recent weeks, articles by NASA's Roy Spencer and Bjorn Lomborg and an interview with the Institute of Public Affairs' Jennifer Marohasy have undermined that confident Anglosphere consensus. On Amazon.com's bestseller list this week, the three top books on climate are by sceptics: Spencer, Lomborg and Fred Singer.

Archbishop of Sydney George Pell, a shrewd cleric who knows a dodgy millennial cult when he sees one, has persisted in his long-held critique despite the climate change alarmism of his brother bishops.

Even Don Aitkin, former vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra, whom I'd previously been tempted to write off as a slave to political correctness, outed himself the other day as a thoroughgoing sceptic.

The latest countercultural contribution came in The Australian on Wednesday. Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut. He makes the standard argument that the average temperature on earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, with a new twist.

As of last year, the global temperature is falling precipitously. All four of the agencies that track global temperatures (Hadley, NASA Goddard, the Christy group and Remote Sensing Systems) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007.

Chapman comments: "This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over. It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850."

A little ice age would be "much more harmful than anything warming may do", but still benign by comparison with the severe glaciation that for the past several million years has almost always blighted theplanet.

The Holocene, the warm interglacial period we've been enjoying through the past 11,000 years, has lasted longer than normal and is due to come to an end. When it does, glaciation can occur quite quickly. For most of Europe and North America to be buried under a layer of ice, eventually growing to a thickness of about 1.5km, the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in as little as 20 years.

Chapman says: "The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027. By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining. Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees."

Chapman canvases strategies that may just conceivably prevent or at least delay the transition to severe glaciation. One involves a vast bulldozing program to dirty and darken the snowfields in Canada and Siberia, "in the hope of reducing reflectance so as to absorb more warmth from the sun. We may also be able to release enormous floods of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from the hydrates under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, perhaps using nuclear weapons to destabilise the deposits".

He concludes: "All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead. It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilisation may be at stake."

The 10-year plateau in global temperatures since 1998 has already sunk the hypothesis that anthropogenic greenhouse gas will lead to catastrophic global warming. To minds open to the evidence, it has been a collapsing paradigm for quite some time.

But Chapman's argument about last year's 0.7C fall being "the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record" ups the stakes considerably.

It replaces an irrational panic in the public imagination with a countervailing and more plausible cause for concern. It also raises, more pointedly than before, a fascinating question: since there are painful truths with profound implications for public policy to be confronted, how will the political class manage the necessary climb-down?

In Australia, Rudd Labor's political legitimacy is inextricably linked to its stance on climate change. If the Prime Minister wants a second term, he'll probably have to start "nuancing his position", as the spin doctors say, and soon.

A variation on J.M. Keynes's line - "when the facts change, I change my mind" - admitting that the science is far from settled and awaiting further advice, would buy him time without necessarily damaging his credibility.

Taking an early stand in enlightening public opinion would be a more impressive act of leadership. While obviously not without risk and downside, it would make a virtue out of impending necessity and establish him, in Charles de Gaulle's phrase, as a serious man.

I don't think he's got it in him. But we can at least expect that some of the more ruinously expensive policies related to global warming will be notionally deferred and quietly shelved. Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr will be allowed to invest in high-profile nonsense such as funding "the green car".

But the coal industry is unlikely to be closed down or put into a holding pattern. Nor are new local coal-fired power stations going to be prohibited until the technology is developed to capture and sequester carbon.

Since the greater part of the funds for the research underpinning that technology is expected to come from the private sector - and there's a limit to what government can exact by administrative fiat - as the debate becomes calmer and more evidence-based, business will be increasingly reluctant to outlay money on a phantom problem.

Budgetary constraints and rampant inflation provide governments with plenty of excuses for doing as little as possible until a new and better informed consensus emerges on climate.

Ross Garnaut could doubtless be asked to extend his carbon trading inquiry for the life of the parliament and to make an interim report in 12 months on the state the science. In doing so, he could fulfil the educative functions of a royal commission and at the same time give himself and the Government a dignified way out of an impasse.

Whatever happens in the realm of domestic spin doctoring, economic realities in the developing world were always going to defeat the global warming zealots.

Before the election, Kevin Rudd had to concede that we would not adopt climate policies that were contrary to Australian interests unless India and China, emitters on a vastly larger scale, followed suit.

However, it has long been obvious that neither country was prepared to consign vast parts of their population to protracted poverty and to embrace low-growth policies on the basis of tendentious science and alarmist computer projections. Even if their governments were convinced that global warming was a problem - and they clearly aren't - it's doubtful they could sell the self-denying ordinances we're asking from them to their own people.

A likelier scenario would be full-page ads in our broadsheets and catchy local television campaigns paid for by the Indian and Chinese coal, steel and energy industries that buy our raw materials. Their theme would surely be that if many of the West's leading scientific authorities no longer subscribed to catastrophic global warming, why on earth should anyone else.

SHAME ON THIS : USA

Global warming and global climate change are now something we must get used to as there looks to be no real efforts to at least slow down this dangerous trend caused mainly by CO2 emissions as the result of dominant fossil fuels use. And major blame for this giant ecological problem goes to the United States.

In United States CO2 emission per capita is six times the global average citizen and more than 30 times that of a citizen in a developing country which is more than worrying information as the world's leading country is mainly responsible for global warming problem and leads in CO2 emission.

US contributes to almost 25 % of greenhouse gas emissions which is definitely too much considering US covers only 9 % of the world population. And though US citizens are becoming more aware of global warming problem, US government isn't doing all the right moves and still very much favors traditional fossil fuels which makes this difficult situation even worse.

And do you know where does the great irony lie? In the fact that people mostly affected with this global warming problem are the least responsible for its creation. This especially refers to the "black continent" where temperatures have become almost unbearable making already hard conditions even harder.

But soon this problem won't be somewhere else and will be making its big entrance to US once rising temperatures, sea levels and high hydrological extremes result in contaminated water supplies, newly evolving illnesses, extreme temperatures and flooding.


United States as world's leading country should have moral responsibility and put serious efforts in order to solve this problem and not making it even more difficult. But America is used to its traditional style that includes lots of cars, heavy industries and dominant fossil fuels use, and by the current looks of it, this situation won't change significantly in the upcoming years.

Our planet suffers and US has great moral responsibility to do something about it, and something fast. Economy this time shouldn't be before ecology because unless something is done with ecology there soon won't be economy. The time has come and we need to remove the almighty dollar from the throne and give our planet a decent chance to survive. It's our moral responsibility, but is there any moral still left in us?