A Countdown To Global Catastrophe?

An anonymous reader writes "From The Independent: The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow - and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already. For the full story, see this article."

Comments

Already Flipped

[SerpentMage]

I was reading National Geographic and they were talking about climate change. One of their opinions was that climate change is already underway. Essentially the switch was flipped some fifty or so years ago.

They also said that climate change happens and that's a fact of life. For example the downfall of the Egyptian empire was partially due to a massive warm spell that caused crops to fail and deserts to form. Ironically the article pointed out that there were no cars at that time.

Glad to see it is an EXPERT task force

[Anonymous Coward]

"The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world."

Obviously being a politician or business leader qualifies you for all sorts of fear mongering.

Technically, we're still in an Ice Age

[optimus2861]

The relatively warm period (compared to a full glacial period, anyway) we've experienced over the past 10-15,000 years is only an interglacial period of the current Ice Age.

Pick your link (Umm, except that one about the Genesis flood...)

Re:Venkman said it best:

[Lars T.]

From The Discovery of Global Warming :

In January 1961, on a snowy and unusually cold day in New York City, J. Murray Mitchell, Jr. of the U.S. Weather Bureau's Office of Climatology told a meeting of meteorologists that the world's temperature was falling.

[...]Around 1980 two groups undertook to work through the numbers in all their grubby details, rejecting sets of uncertain data and tidying up the rest. One group was in New York, funded by NASA and led by James Hansen. They understood that the work by Mitchell and others mainly described the Northern Hemisphere, since that was where the great majority of reliable observations lay. Sorting through the more limited temperature observations from the other half of the world, they got reasonable averages by applying the same mathematical methods that they had used to get average numbers in their computer models of climate. (After all, Hansen remarked, when he studied other planets he might judge the entire planet by the single station where a probe had landed.) In 1981, the group reported that "the common misconception that the world is cooling is based on Northern Hemisphere experience to 1970." Just around the time that meteorologists had noticed the cooling trend, such as it was, it had apparently reversed. From a low point in the mid 1960s, by 1980 the world had warmed some 0.2C.

Hansen's group looked into the causes of the fluctuations, and they got a rather good match for the temperature record using volcanic eruptions plus solar variations. Greenhouse warming by CO2 had not been a major factor (at least, not yet). More sophisticated analyses in the 1990s would eventually confirm these findings. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, the Northern Hemisphere had indeed cooled while temperatures had held roughly steady in the south. This was largely because of normal variations in natural forces, although industrial aerosol pollution had helped. Then the warming had resumed in both hemispheres.

The temporary northern cooling had been bad luck for climate science. By feeding skepticism about the greenhouse effect, while provoking some scientists and many journalists to speculate publicly about the coming of a new ice age, the cool spell gave the field a reputation for fecklessness that it would not soon live down.

Any greenhouse warming had been masked by chance fluctuations in solar activity, by pulses of volcanic aerosols, and by increased haze from pollution. Furthermore, as a few scientists pointed out, the upper layer of the oceans must have been absorbing heat. These effects could only delay atmospheric warming by a few decades. Hansen's group boldly predicted that considering how fast CO2 was accumulating, by the end of the 20th century "carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climatic variability." Around the same time, a few other scientists using different calculations came to the same conclusion -- the warming would show itself clearly sometime around 2000.

In January 1961, on a snowy and unusually cold day in New York City, J. Murray Mitchell, Jr. of the U.S. Weather Bureau's Office of Climatology told a meeting of meteorologists that the world's temperature was falling.

Re:Key point: it's not the planet, it's us

[MacDork]

Err, no? Heh, look at the area around chernobyl

Why not look a little closer to home? 2000 nuclear weapons were detonated over a period of about 40 years by the United States government. About 500 were above ground tests. That averages one test every two weeks with one above ground every two months for a period of four decades.