[Mb-civic] Climate: The debate is changing

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

UPI via Washington Times - Jan 3, 2005
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20041231-043147-5101r.htm

Climate: The debate is changing

By Dan Whipple
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Boulder, CO, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- The global warming debate will shift in
the United States in 2005 because evidence that the phenomenon is
real has reached a crescendo.

The catalyst for the shift is not some esoteric discovery by an
atmospheric scientist, but a fairly simple paper by a history
professor, Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego.

Oreskes has found there is a "scientific consensus" on global
warming -- that is, it is real and it is being caused by humans.

Oreskes' paper's strength is its simplicity. It is something
everyone can understand, without knowing the chemistry of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere.

She looked at nearly 1,000 technical papers in the peer-reviewed
scientific literature and could not find a single one that disagreed
with "the basic consensus statement, that CO2 is increasing, that it
is changing the chemistry of the atmosphere, and it's having
discernible effects," she told UPI's Climate. Further, she added,
these CO2 increases are the result of human activity.

There has been an avalanche of evidence indicating the effects of
warming are being felt more and more on the planet. In only the last
six months:

-The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment found winter temperatures in
the Arctic have increased by 4 degrees to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (2
degrees to 4 degrees Celsius) in the past 50 years and should go up
about twice that much more in the next hundred;

-Arctic summer sea ice will decline by 50 percent by the end of the
21st century, the ACIA found, with some models predicting complete
disappearance of summer sea ice;

-Coastal native villages in the Arctic are eroding, requiring
relocating their inhabitants further inland;

-Climate change is affecting the migration patterns, habitat
preferences and ecology of hundreds of animal species in the
United States, according a report by the Pew Foundation;

-Floating ice shelves in Antarctica, stable for the past 13,000
years, have collapsed;

-Glaciers around the world are melting at rates unprecedented for
thousands of years;

-Glaciers in Antarctica -- previously thought to be relatively immune
from warming trends -- are thinning and speeding up dramatically.

"We're beginning to push past the normal range of climate
variability of the Holocene (post-Ice-Age period)," said Ted
Scambos, a glaciologist at the Snow and Ice Data Center in Denver.
"We're seeing the first few steps, the first few responses of a
globally warming world. People will point back to these first few
years of the 21st century and say that this is when we saw it in the
polar regions."

The polar changes could mean a dramatic increase in sea-level rise,
he said, well beyond current projections.

"I don't want to mince words," Scambos told Climate. "It looks to me
like we are headed toward a more rapid sea-level rise than projected
by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report."

In 2001, the panel had predicted a range of 4 inches to 30 inches
(11 centimeters to 77 centimeters) in sea-level rise between the
years 1990 and 2100.

Each piece has its critics, of course, but taken as a whole, across
many disciplines, the mounting evidence presents a strong case
global warming is real and it already is causing tangible effects
that are at least potentially serious.

Whether the effects are serious and damaging enough to warrant
potentially expensive actions -- such as attempting to curtail CO2
emissions -- should now become the focus of the debate in the United
States and elsewhere.

Because the Oreskes paper is easy to understand, and because she
did not find even a single paper dissenting from the consensus position,
there has a flurry of Internet commentary downplaying the meaning of
this consensus.

Roger Pielke Jr., of the University of Colorado's Center for Science
and Technology Policy Research, wrote in "Prometheus: The Science
Policy Weblog," that "I am amazed by the recent attention being paid
to the issue of a scientific consensus on climate change. Naomi
Oreskes wrote an article a few weeks back in (the journal) Science,
claiming that a literature review shows that a central statement of
consensus reported in the IPCC is indeed a consensus. Since that
article was published, debate and discussion has taken place on,
among other things, whether it is in fact a unanimous perspective
rather than the overwhelming view of most scientists."

Roy Spencer, of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, argued on the
Web site TechCentral Station that Oreskes' definition of what issue
on which everyone apparently agreed was so weak it was nearly
meaningless.

"Let's be honest about what that consensus refers to," Spencer
wrote, "that 'humans influence the climate.' Not that 'global
warming is a serious threat to mankind.'"

Interpretations aside, the studies included in the Oreskes paper
also show the costs and benefits of climate change are not
distributed evenly. The climate will change differently for
different regions. Some studies indicate the United States, for
instance, may come out a net winner from a warmer climate. On the
other hand, the burden is expected to fall heavily on poor and
developing countries. What else is new?

Even if humanity strides through the changes unbowed, other
residents of Planet Earth might not fare so well -- polar bears
dependent on vanishing Arctic sea ice, for example, or pikas at
alpine altitudes with a lifestyle evolved to survive in
near-permanent snow cover.

Hard-headed and pragmatic policymakers usually give short shrift to
policy recommendation that cannot be measured in dollars, but these
softer issues of human responsibility to the rest of creation have been
an important driver of many environmental polices over the past 35
years.
Global warming quickly may become another one of these arenas.

[Climate is a weekly series examining the science behind and
potential impact of global climate change, by Dan Whipple, who
covers environmental issues for UPI Science News.]

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