http://truth-out.org/news/item/20751-climate-change-2013-where-we-are-now-not-what-you-think
[Long. Multiple links, interesting graphics and sidebars in on-line
article.]
Climate Change 2013: Where We Are Now - Not What You Think
Thursday, 26 December 2013 11:31
By Bruce Melton, Truthout | News Analysis
We are in the midst of an era of frightening contradictions, when it
comes to public understandings of climate change. While climate changes
are occurring more quickly than scientists have ever predicted, most
people’s knowledge of these realities remains hazy and clouded by
political overtones. Because of both the counter-intuitive nature of
climate change and the massive misinformation campaigns created by the
fossil fuel industry, the general population is 20 years behind most
climate scientists when it comes to the straightforward fact of
believing in climate change. This is an ominous statistic: Now that
scientists are predicting that even worse impacts than previously
understood will happen significantly sooner, a rapid global response
will be necessary for any attempt to stave them off. We are likely
closer to irreversible dangerous climate change - if it has not begun
already - and to take action, there must be a basic public consensus.
There is, however, some hopeful news on the technological front if
action is taken soon.
In 1976, Wallace Broeker was one of the first to suggest climate change
could alter our planet harmfully within our lifetimes. Even though a few
scientists said in the '70s we could be headed for an ice age, Broeker
had already made the connection, and those few climate scientists have
not talked about a coming ice age in nearly 40 years. Broeker is
arguably the grandfather of climate science: He's been at it for 55 years.
One of his first jobs was under Willard Libby, who was awarded the Nobel
Prize in 1949 for discovering carbon-14 dating. This rare but
predictable form of carbon is radioactive, and it completely decays in
about 55,000 years. It is because of carbon-14 dating that we know for
absolutely certain that the extra carbon dioxide in our atmosphere came
from burning fossil fuels.
There are many other ways that we know for sure. The physics of the
greenhouse effect are easily demonstrated in the lab, and even the
simplest models from the early 1980s prove their effect. Surprisingly,
the complicated high resolution climate models of today yield results
that are quite similar to those of the simplest models of the early 1980s.
But how are we supposed to trust the models when weather people can't
even get the seven-day forecast correct? Weather models predict what you
need to wear to work or school this week. They are built out of the most
recent weather data, and by the time they run off five or six days into
the future, they are often wrong.
One can load a climate model up with any old weather data; this week's,
last month's or last year's. It doesn't matter where the models start in
time. Climate scientists create scores and hundreds of model runs and
then average all of those wrong forecasts together to get average
weather. Average weather is climate. Climate is not the seven-day
forecast. The chaos that makes weather models wrong so quickly is
actually what makes climate modeling work so well.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2013
Climate measurements continue to become both more precise and more
reliable - and thus, more terrifying. A new report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which combines the
work of 2,000 scientists from 154 countries, drawing from millions of
observations from more than 9,000 scientific publications, confirms and
strengthens previous predictions and adds one new and very important
observation. Even 100 percent emissions reductions will no longer keep
our climate from changing dangerously.
These volunteer scientists also did something they normally don't do
this time. They debunked a climate myth. This is the temperature
flattening myth that is so present in this perceived debate and that
has become so prevalent in our society. Their story goes that earth's
temperature stopped warming in 1998, therefore climate change is not
real. In 1998, we had the largest El Nino ever recorded. This massive
warming of surface waters in the southern Pacific raised the temperature
of Earth in that one year by about 0.15 degrees, or as much as it rose
because of global warming in the previous decade.
The IPCC 2013 prominently sinks this myth as the fifth statement of fact
in their Summary for Policy Makers (SPM): Trends based on short records
are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general
reflect long-term climate trends. (SPM, Page 3) The mythmakers chose
1998 as the beginning of their myth. This is plain and simple cherry
picking. If one looks at the trend beginning in 1997, the temperature
rise is anything but flat.
