Why climate scientists’ hair is aflame
December 1st, 2008 by Jim JustEven as international climate talks are beginning in Poznan, Poland, the world’s top climate scientists are warning that Earth’s climate is changing more quickly and deeply than the benchmark IPCC report predicted just last year.
New studies are showing that human activity may be triggering powerful natural forces that may be nearly impossible to reverse and that could push temperatures up even further. At the top of the list is the rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap. When the reflective ice surface retreats, the Sun’s radiation is absorbed by open water rather than bounced back into the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop of heating.
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a great summary of why scientists are running around with their hair on fire:
Joe Romm passes along the news today that Himalayan glaciers are melting faster than anyone has previously predicted. You can add this to Romm’s list of other climate change impacts that are happening faster than most climate models predict, including the canonical IPCC models:
- “The recent [Arctic] sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models” [PDF] — and that was a Norwegian expert in 2005. The retreat has accelerated in the past two years.
- The ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.” That was Penn State climatologist Richard Alley in March 2006. In 2001, the IPCC thought that neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.
- Sea-level rise from 1993 and 2006 — 3.3 millimetres per year as measured by satellites — was higher than the IPCC climate models predicted.
- The ocean carbon sink is saturating sooner than expected.
- The subtropics are expanding faster than the models project.
This op-ed by Elliot Diringer, Pew Center on Global Climate Change illustrates why cap-and-trade schemes are a waste of precious time and political energy. They simply can’t accomplish what is necessary to accomplish within the time frame necessary to avert climate catastrophe.
What’s needed is an international agreement to not build any more coal-fired power plants (without carbon capture and storage, which of course is not feasible) and to phase out existing coal plants within 20 years.