Liberals believe in Global Warming, conservatives don't---thats the stereotype.
But Global Warming isn't a religion that people either believe in or don't---its a collection of scientific data organized into a scientific hypothesis. The acceptance or rejection of the ideas that human activities are causing climate change and Global Warming shouldn't be a matter or belief or faith---it should depend 100% on the data. It should be non-partisan.
Recently Ronald Bailey, the science correspondent for a "conservative" magazine named "Reason" recently wrote a very interesting review of the data that he believes provides incontrovertible evidence for Global Warming:
1. Atmospheric CO2 has increased from 280 parts per million in the late 18th century to around 400 ppm today.
2. All of the global temperature datasets from both weather stations and satellites show the Earth has warmed. Just since the 1950s instrumental records suggest that surface temperatures have increased by about +0.9 C° (1.6 F°). Satellite data shows that over the past 35 years global temperatures have increased by about 0.5° C (0.9°F).
3. Global Climate Models (GCMs) predict man-made warming due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will reduce differences between daytime and nighttime temperatures. The data show this is happening in the United States, China, Spain, and other regions.
4. GCMs predict global warming will result in more heatwaves, and indeed heat waves have become more common since the 1950s.
5. GCMs predict the warm temperatures of spring will arrive sooner and the cool temperatures of fall will begin later, and the data shows that spring in Europe arrives about 3 days earlier and average date for the entire Northern Hemisphere is about 4 days earlier. The fall is also starting later, resulting in a longer growing season.
6. Over the last 40 years there has been a 7 - 11% decrease in spring snow cover, consistent with with climate model predictions.
7. GCMs predict that Global Warming will be greater in Arctic regions then at lower latitudes, and Arctic summer melt season has lengthened at a rate of 5 days per decade over the last 35 years. Arctic temperatures are rising at 0.6° C per decade, about 4 times the global average.
8. Warming Arctic temperatures are predicted to cause massive glacier melt, and the Greenland ice sheet has been losing mass at a rate of 34 gigatons per year over the last 35 years, with the rate of ice loss jumping up sevenfold since 2002 to an estimated 215 gigatons per year.
9. GCM models predicted that Arctic sea ice and would thin and the extent of sea ice would decrease, and since 1980 Arctic sea ice extent has been decreasing at rate of ca. 3.8 percent per decade, a value significantly in excess of the worst case prediction scenario.
10. A warming atmosphere should be characterized by higher average humidity, and satellite studies from 2005 and 2014 found this is occurring. However, this factor does not preclude Global Warming producing intense droughts in some localities, like those currently hitting California, Taiwan and Argentina.
11. GCM models predict the Earth's oceans will warm, and numerous studies show significant warming of the oceans, with as much as 90 percent of the heat trapped by atmospheric Greenhouse gases currently being stored there.
Finally, after showing that the warming of the Earth seen over the last 100 years is fully consistent with predictions of global warming due to CO2 releases from fossil fuel combustion, Ronald Bailey notes recent predictions that the rate of warming of the Earth will soon rise to 0.25°C per decade ----- a remarkable and ultimately rather unpleasant rate of warming to contemplate.
Given the high level of success achieved by past predictions of the effects of global warming, I sincerely hope both liberals and conservatives take these new predictions quite seriously. Since the prospect of continued rapid warming is ultimately untenable we may be approaching the time when there is no option but to try some non-partisan Planetary Geoengineering to mitigate future climate change.
No comments:
Post a Comment