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Earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis. Isn’t there enough natural disaster
without wasting human life in war?
The Seattle Times devoted its Sunday cover story to the global warming debate
and laid out a full page of color graphics. The executive editor wrote an
introductory piece highlighting the importance of climate change in the
scientific community, but noted their science writer steered clear of the
political ramifications. In brief, this was written for the public’s benefit, to address the question
of whether scientists disagreed about global climate change. They do not. The
consensus is that it is happening and that it is man-made. Earlier skeptics
have been converted, based on evidence that accumulates every year.
Industry-sponsored reports by scientists who disagree have been given equal
billing in the journalistic world dedicated to balance of opinions, even though
the scientific community is overwhelmingly united. “The consensus accumulated gradually over 50
years and has built on itself very carefully. A science historian is quoted as
saying that most scientists didn't originally believe global warming could
become a serious problem but were gradually convinced by the facts. Scientists live by attacking each
other's ideas and looking for the weaknesses and flaws, and the consensus about
global warming "has stood up to that scrutiny." It has gotten
stronger in recent years, as climate science has gotten more sophisticated and
there has been better sharing of global information. Much of the evidence for global warming is presented in a full page of
charts and graphs, linked here. A closer look: World of
Evidence graphics http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/nation-world/globalwarming/1.html There are links to questions for skeptics, posted below. As is my custom, below is a portion of
the article. I followed their formatting, the bold and italics are theirs but
color highlighted a few things and indented the critical point for emphasis. If you would like a reader-friendly copy of this article, including all
the links provided, please contact me.
- kwc The Truth about
Global Warming By Sandi Doughton, Science writer for the
Seattle Times, Sunday, October 09, 2005 Excerpt: 1995 was the hottest year on record until it was eclipsed
by 1997 — then 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. Melting ice has driven Alaska
Natives from seal-hunting areas used for generations. Glaciers around the globe
are shrinking so rapidly many could disappear before the middle of the century. As one study after
another has pointed to carbon dioxide and other man-made emissions as the most
plausible explanation, the cautious community of science has embraced an idea
initially dismissed as far-fetched. The result is a convergence of opinion
rarely seen in a profession where attacking each other's work is part of the
process. Every major scientific body to examine the evidence has come to the
same conclusion: The planet is getting hotter; man is to blame; and it's going
to get worse. "There's an
overwhelming consensus among scientists," said UW climate researcher David
Battisti, who also was dubious about early claims of greenhouse warming. Yet the message
doesn't seem to be getting through to the public and policy-makers. Most scientists don't know how to
communicate their complex results to the public. Others are scared off by the
shrill political debate over the issue. So their work goes on largely unseen,
and largely pointing toward a warmer future. The consensus: Researcher finds that 1,000 studies all point to the same conclusion Oreskes decided to quantify the extent of scientific agreement after a
conversation with her hairdresser, who said she doesn't worry about global
warming because scientists don't know what's going on. "That made me wonder why there's
this weird public perception of what's been happening in climate science,"
Oreskes said. She analyzed 1,000
research papers on climate change selected randomly from those published
between 1993 and 2003. The results were surprising: Not a single study
explicitly rejected the idea that people are warming the planet. That doesn't mean
there aren't any. But it does mean the number must be small, since none showed
up in a sample that represents about 10 percent of the body of research,
Oreskes said. The consensus is most
clearly embodied in the reports of the 100-nation Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), established by the United Nations in 1988. Every five to
six years, the panel evaluates the science and issues voluminous reports
reviewed by more than 2,000 scientists and every member government, including
the United States. The early reports reflected the squishy
state of the science, but by 2001, the conclusion was unequivocal: "There
is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50
years is attributable to human activities." Stunned by the strong
language, the Bush administration asked the prestigious National Academy of
Sciences to evaluate the international group's work. The UW's Wallace served on
the academy's panel, which assured the president the IPCC wasn't exaggerating. The next IPCC report is due in 2007. Among the new evidence it will include
are the deepest ice cores ever drilled, which show carbon-dioxide levels are
higher now than any time in the past 650,000 years. In the history of
science, no subject has been as meticulously reviewed and debated as global
warming, said science historian Spencer Weart, author of "The Discovery of
Global Warming" and director of the Center for History of Physics. "The most important thing to
realize is that most scientists didn't originally believe in global
warming," he said. "They were dragged — reluctant step by step — by
the facts." A reluctant convert: Thawing Russian deer carcasses trigger scientific inquiry Few were more reluctant converts than Wallace. A self-described weather
nut who built a backyard meteorology station as a kid, he has spent his career
trying to understand how the atmosphere behaves on a grand scale. By analyzing
a decade of global climate records, Wallace was among the first to recognize El
Niño's effects in the Pacific Northwest. He was recruited to
the UW's fledgling meteorology program in 1966 and has helped build it into one
of the world's top centers for atmospheric and ocean research. His first foray into climate change
came in the early 1990s after Russian friends told him deer carcasses stored in
their "Siberian freezer" — the porch — were thawing out. Some scientists blamed
global warming. Wallace examined the meteorological records and concluded
natural wind shifts were blowing milder ocean air across the land. He briefly thought he had debunked
global warming. Then he realized
winds could account for only a small fraction of the warming in the planet's
northernmost reaches, where average temperatures have now risen between 5 and 8
degrees in the past 50 years. "It was an
evolution in my thinking," said Wallace, 64. "Like it or not, I could
see global warming was going to become quite a big issue." That's pretty much how
the science of global warming has progressed. Researchers skeptical of the idea have suggested alternative
causes for rising temperatures and carbon-dioxide levels. They've theorized
about natural forces that might mitigate the effects of greenhouse gases. But
no one has been able to explain it away. "You would need
to develop a Rube Goldberg-type of argument to say climate is not changing
because of increasing carbon dioxide," said Battisti, 49, who directs the
UW's Earth Initiative to apply science to environmental problems. Global average air
temperatures have risen about 1.2 degrees over the past century. The warming is
also apparent in the oceans, in boreholes sunk deep in the ground, in thawing
tundra and vanishing glaciers. Earth's
climate has swung from steamy to icy many times in the past, but scientists
believe they know what triggered many of those fluctuations. Erupting volcanoes
and slow ocean upwelling release carbon dioxide, which leads to warming.
Mountain uplifting and continental drift expose new rock, which absorbs carbon
dioxide and causes cooling. Periodic wobbles in the planet's orbit reduce
sunlight and set off a feedback loop that results in ice ages. All
of those shifts happened over tens of thousands of years — and science shows
none of them is happening now. Instead, atmospheric levels of carbon
dioxide are increasing at a rate that precisely tracks man's automotive and
industrial emissions. "The
process is 1,000 times faster than nature can do it," Battisti said. Climate reconstructions show that average global temperatures for the
past 2 million years have never been more than 2 to 4 degrees higher than now.
That means if greenhouse emissions continued unchecked, temperatures would
likely be higher by the end of the century than any time since the human
species evolved. Models have improved
greatly in the past 30 years but still can't anticipate all the ways the
atmosphere will respond as greenhouse gases climb. The dozen models in use
today predict average temperature increases of 3 to 11 degrees by the end of
the century. Though the numbers
sound modest, it took only a 10-degree drop to encase much of North America in
mile-deep glaciers during the ice age that ended about 12,000 years ago. Skeptics point to
uncertainties in the models and conclude the actual temperature changes will be
lower than the predictions. Battisti points to the Eocene and warns that
unknown factors could just as easily make things worse. Could the skeptics be
right, and the majority of the world's experts wrong? The history of science
shows consensus doesn't guarantee success. The collective wisdom of the early
1900s declared continental drift bunk. Some Nobel laureates attacked Einstein's
theory of relativity. Those blunders
occurred when science was less sophisticated and connected than it is now, said
Weart, the historian. With the unprecedented study devoted to climate change,
the odds that this consensus is wrong are slim, he added. "The fact that so many scientists
think it's likely a truck is heading for us means that the last thing we want
to do is close our eyes and lie down in the road."
Related
sites
Real
Climate - scientists' blog IPCC:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change World
Glacier Monitoring Service American Geophysical Union position on global
warming The Discovery of Global Warming National Academy of Science Report Stephen Schneider, leading climate scientist Skeptics Competitive
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