Our faith based Federal Executive has been reluctant to admit to, let alone address, the fact that global warming resulting from release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere is a real phenomenon. It is a little surprising that today, NOAA came out with a press release that virtually admits that global warming is a real phenomenon (but stops short of discussing the cause).
The scientific community is generally united in recognizing the reality of this problem, but there are still holdouts. However, considering that so much of the funding related to this research still comes from industrial sources (as does much of the fossil carbon), that there are holdouts is not surprising.
This is a parable that may be insightful or even inspiring to some. First, a look at the “Yes, it’s real” position. One of the first mainstream institutions to embrace the idea was the Union of Concerned Scientists. This is an excerpt from their web site:
Earth’s surface has undergone unprecedented warming over the last century, particularly over the last two decades. Astonishingly, every single year since 1992 is in the current list of the 20 warmest years on record.[1,2] The natural patterns of climate have been altered. Like detectives, science sleuths seek the answer to “Whodunnit?” — are humans part of the cause? To answer this question, patterns observed by meteorologists and oceanographers are compared with patterns developed using sophisticated models of Earth’s atmosphere and ocean. By matching the observed and modeled patterns, scientists can now positively identify the “human fingerprints” associated with the changes. The fingerprints that humans have left on Earth’s climate are turning up in a diverse range of records and can be seen in the ocean, in the atmosphere, and at the surface
In 1999, James Hansen of NASA wrote an editorial for Goddard (GISS) that showed this graph:
Fig. 1: Climate model calculations reported in Hansen et al. (1988).
And provided this commentary:
The figure that we published is reproduced here as Fig. 1. It shows the simulated global mean temperature for three climate forcing scenarios. Scenario A has a fast growth rate for greenhouse gases. Scenarios B and C have a moderate growth rate for greenhouse gases until year 2000, after which greenhouse gases stop increasing in Scenario C. Scenarios B and C also included occasional large volcanic eruptions, while scenario A did not. The objective was to illustrate the broad range of possibilities in the ignorance of how forcings would actually develop. The extreme scenarios (A with fast growth and no volcanos, and C with terminated growth of greenhouse gases) were meant to bracket plausible rates of change. All of the maps of simulated climate change that I showed in my 1988 testimony were for the intermediate scenario B, because it seemed the most likely of the three scenarios.
But when Pat Michaels testified to congress in 1998 and showed our 1988 predictions (Fig. 1) he erased the curves for scenarios B and C, and showed the result only for scenario A. He then argued that, since the real world temperature had not increased as fast as this model calculation, the climate model was faulty and there was no basis for concern about climate change, specifically concluding that the Kyoto Protocol was “a useless appendage to an irrelevant treaty”.
emphasis added
Remember, this was written in 1998. Hansen’s editorial is really about how science works in relation to how the politics of a debate like the one over global warming works, and he nicely illustrates the abuse of data by entrenched sides. But warning against entrenchment does not mean that all positions are entrenched, and therefore suspect. The fact that there are still voices arguing on both sides of this issue does not mean that the truth lay somewhere in between. (That would be the Fallacy of the Middle Ground.)
NOAA’s press release says:
U.S. and global annual temperatures are now approximately 1.0 degrees F warmer than at the start of the 20th century, and the rate of warming has accelerated over the past 30 years, increasing globally since the mid-1970s at a rate approximately three times faster than the century-scale trend. The past nine years have all been among the 25 warmest years on record for the contiguous U.S., a streak which is unprecedented in the historical record.
And with it, this graph:
(Click on the thumbnail to see a larger image)
The two figures I reproduce here are a little hard to compare. It does appear (and this can be confirmed by reference to other data as well) that the actual temperature change has been in the higher range of the predictions made in 1988. The 1988 graph predicts the worst case scenario to be a 0.7 degree C rise,while the least severe scenario predicts less than a half a degree rise. The current (2006) data shows a value very close to 0.7.
This makes Pat Michaels a bit of an lying ass, doesn’t it? Pat Michaels, a fellow at the right wing/libertarian Cato Institute, is one of the entrenched. You may have seen him on Fox News talking about how there is nothing to global warming at all…
Also note that the 1988 graph shows the range (estimated, and this is a little tricky) of the last interglacial (considered to be a relatively warm one) and the “Altithermal,” a relatively warm period during the Holocene. Here is a key point: We are, over the last few years and at present, touching the ceiling or even going a bit above it. We are experiencing a warm phase that is as warm as it ever gets in “modern” times.
By “modern” times I mean since the evolution of Homo sapiens.
And all the evidence we have suggests that the warming will continue. We are looking, right now, today, at a decade of unprecedented conditions. It will be very interesting to see how this all works out…
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