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Senators Fiddle While Deep Ocean Temperatures Rise
Sunday, August 5, 2012 5:11 AM
NIKI2
Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...
Quote:The latest evidence that average temperatures are increasing around the globe comes from the deepest parts of the ocean, Dr. James McCarthy of Harvard University told a Senate committee hearing on climate change on Wednesday. As it happens, what to do about climate change is the second of 14 questions that ScienceDebate.org is asking President Barack Obama and likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to answer as part of a quest to get more discussion about science and scientific issues in the run-up to this year’s U.S. elections. Scientific American is a partner in this quest because we believe that most of the current challenges, threats and opportunities that the U.S. faces require a better grasp of some key scientific question or research field. As a newcomer to reporting on climate change (I usually cover health and medicine), I was particularly struck by McCarthy’s presentation on deep-ocean temperatures. There is so much water in the oceans, which cover so much of the word at an average depth of 12,000 feet, he told the committee, that the deepest parts are extremely well insulated from any transient temperature changes at the surface. As decades and even in some cases more than 100 years of data show, water temperature does not usually vary much in the deepest parts of the ocean. Over the past ten years, however, the average temperature of even this deepest water has started to rise. Given that the deep ocean is so well protected from the kinds of measuring problems that can confound temperature results on land, the deep water trend provides some of the best evidence to date that average temperatures on the Earth are climbing. “There is no debate that the earth’s temperature is increasing,” McCarthy concluded. “Over the last half century the atmosphere, land surface, ocean surface and deep ocean and ice loss in polar regions have all confirmed this. And they can only be explained by the increase in greenhouse gases. There is no scientific evidence that refutes this conclusion.” (Download McCarthy’s prepared remarks here.) Unfortunately the Senators engaged in pointless political debate rather than grappling with the bitter reality of global warming, how we might mitigate its impact and how we can do it in a way that is fair to the many citizens of the poorest parts of the world who haven’t yet had the opportunity to grow their economies without counting the cost to the planet or our collective future.
Sunday, August 5, 2012 8:42 AM
CHRISISALL
Monday, August 6, 2012 3:58 AM
SIGNYM
I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.
Monday, August 6, 2012 4:20 AM
Quote:WASHINGTON (AP) — An analysis by a top government scientist says the extreme heat and drought seen in the U.S., Europe and other regions in recent years must be global warming. Specifically the study by NASA scientist James Hansen blames climate change for last year's drought in Texas and Oklahoma, the 2010 heat wave in Russia and the 2003 European heat wave that led to tens of thousands of deaths. Hansen told The Associated Press in an interview that the world is now experiencing scientific fact. Hansen's research is respected by other climate scientists. But he is also an activist who has pushed for curbing greenhouse gases. Some experts don't expect the new study to change any minds. Hansen's work was published online Saturday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Quote:The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause. My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases. These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural. Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions....
Monday, August 6, 2012 5:47 AM
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