Momentum on Climate Pact Elusive (NYT, Sept 23 2009) unfortunately repeats a
fundamental error, that the slow down in surface temperature rise is not what is
expected from the rise in GHGs. This is really not the case, the fundamental
radiation imbalance caused by rising GHGs is steadily and inescapably storing
more and more heat in the earth climate system. What is happening is that this
is mixing down into the deep sea, so we are not seeing it build up at the
surface. Until the deep sea warms up, we will not feel the full effect of
warming at the surface. This mixing tends not to be constant, it tends to show
jumps whenever an upwelling or downwelling site or major currents change: the
long term sea surface temperature tends to show jumps upward when a circulation
pattern reorganizes itself, then a period of comparable stasis when this excess
heat is redistributed deeper. The next lurch upwards is inevitable, and will
come as a shock, likely killing most of the remaining coral reefs. The argument
that global warming is not happening is not only false, it amounts to a fool's
paradise which will have devastating consequences if it is believed.
The world leaders who
met at the
United Nations to discuss
climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building
momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures
have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few
years.
The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that
the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that
it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb
carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
Scientists say the pattern of the last decade — after a precipitous rise in
average global temperatures in the 1990s — is a result of cyclical variations in
ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of
greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.
But trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public — and to
policy makers — can be frustrating, they say.
Mojib Latif, a prize-winning climate and ocean scientist from the Leibniz
Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel, in Germany, wrote a
paper last year positing that
cyclical shifts in the oceans were aligning in a way that could keep
temperatures over the next decade or so relatively stable, even as the
heat-trapping gases linked to global warming continued to increase.
But Dr. Latif, who gives about 200 talks to the public, business leaders and
officials each year, said he had been met with confusion and even anger when he
tried to describe this normal variation in climate while at the same time
conveying the long-term threat of global warming.
“People understand what I’m saying, but then basically wind up saying, ‘We
don’t believe anything,’ ” he said in a telephone interview.
Other climate researchers
dispute Dr. Latif’s forecast, saying that climate cannot be reliably
predicted on such a short time scale, though even they agree that sooner or
later, cool stretches are inevitable.
Underscoring just how little clarity there is on short-term temperature
fluctuations, researchers from Britain’s climate change office, in a paper
published in August, projected “an end to this period of relative stability,”
with half the years between now and 2015 exceeding the record-setting global
temperatures of 1998.
Whatever the next decade may hold, critics of global warming have lost no
time in using the current temperature plateau to build their case.
“I think it supports the arguments of those who’ve said, ‘What’s the rush for
policy on this issue?’ ” said
Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist affiliated with George Mason University
and the
Cato Institute, a group opposing most regulatory solutions to environmental
problems.
The recent stability of global temperatures makes regular appearances in blog
postings disputing the reality of global warming and is frequently invoked by
pundits who oppose the climate bill that passed the House this year and is
pending in the Senate.
Advocates of such regulatory measures are equally vehement.
In a post last week on his blog,
Climate Progress, Joseph Romm, a physicist and energy expert affiliated with
the liberal Center for American Progress, wrote that statements by climate
skeptics about planetary cooling were “nonsense.”
“We need all the unmuffled warnings we can get given that humans are not like
slowly boiling frogs, we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs,” he wrote.
The recent spate of years with stable temperatures is particularly noticeable
because it followed a seesawing from unusually cool temperatures to unusually
hot ones in the 1990s, said Vicky Pope of
Britain’s climate agency, called the Met Office.
The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines had a cooling
influence, as the volcano threw off veil-like emissions. Then, in 1998, an El
Niño episode in the Pacific Ocean set off a record-setting hot spell.
The global average temperature is now only 0.13 degree Fahrenheit higher than
it was in 1999, according to the British meteorology office.
A series of unremarkable storm seasons followed the string of destructive
storms in 2004 and 2005 that included
Hurricane Katrina. And in the Arctic, an extraordinary summer retreat of sea
ice in 2007 has been followed by
less substantial losses and projections by some researchers of a possible,
if temporary, recovery.
Most climate scientists stand firm in their projections of centuries of
rising seas and other disruptive effects of a warming planet if humans take no
steps to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases.
In an address to world leaders at the climate summit meeting on Tuesday,
Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has advised the world’s
nations on climate issues for 20 years, described the mounting risk and said,
“Science leaves us no space for inaction now.”
A clearer view of whether the recent temperature plateau undermines arguments
for dangerous climate change in the long run should come in a few years, as the
predictions made by the British climate researchers are tested.
Their paper appeared in a supplement to an August issue of The Bulletin of
the American Meteorological Society.
While the authors concluded that there was a 1 in 8 chance of having a
decade-long pause in warming like the current plateau, even with rising
concentrations of greenhouse gases, the odds of a 15-year pause, they wrote, are
only 5 in 100. As a result, the next few years of observations could tip the
balance toward further concern or greater optimism.
Meanwhile, social scientists who study the way people understand and respond
to environmental problems say it is not surprising that the current temperature
stability has created confusion and apathy.
Getting people to care about a climate threat that is decades away is hard
enough, they say, without adding in the vagaries of natural climate cycles.
At best, said Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University,
global warming remains an abstraction for many people.
“It does not have the direct visual or emotive impact of seeing seabirds
covered in oil from the
Exxon Valdez oil spill,” he said.