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CHICAGO (Reuters) - The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday.
"The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously," Chris Field, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
Field said "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report called "Climate Change 2007."
He said recent climate studies suggested the continued warming of the planet from greenhouse gas emissions could touch off large, destructive wildfires in tropical rain forests and melt permafrost in the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gasses that could raise global temperatures even more.
"There is a real risk that human-caused climate change will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide from forest and tundra ecosystems, which have been storing a lot of carbon for thousands of years," Field, of Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science, said in a statement.
He pointed to recent studies showing the fourth assessment report underestimated the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years.
"We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected, primarily because developing countries, like China and India, saw a huge surge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal," Field said.
He said that trend was likely to continue if more countries turned to coal and other carbon-intensive fuels to meet their energy needs. If so, he said the impact of climate change would be "more serious and diverse" than the IPCC's most recent predictions.
www.reuters.com/article/to...29E20090214
"The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously," Chris Field, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
Field said "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report called "Climate Change 2007."
He said recent climate studies suggested the continued warming of the planet from greenhouse gas emissions could touch off large, destructive wildfires in tropical rain forests and melt permafrost in the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gasses that could raise global temperatures even more.
"There is a real risk that human-caused climate change will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide from forest and tundra ecosystems, which have been storing a lot of carbon for thousands of years," Field, of Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science, said in a statement.
He pointed to recent studies showing the fourth assessment report underestimated the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years.
"We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected, primarily because developing countries, like China and India, saw a huge surge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal," Field said.
He said that trend was likely to continue if more countries turned to coal and other carbon-intensive fuels to meet their energy needs. If so, he said the impact of climate change would be "more serious and diverse" than the IPCC's most recent predictions.
www.reuters.com/article/to...29E20090214
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Re: Global warming seen worse than predicted
Sat, February 14, 2009 - 7:51 PMDid I post this already? Kind of fits... Don't get me started as the science I've been reading just gets worse and worse. Every damn new study is so goddam grim!
As an aside, it hasn't snowed here since Jan 4. -
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Re: Global warming seen worse than predicted
Sat, February 14, 2009 - 7:52 PMDidn't post, trying again (probably me).
Published on Thursday, January 22, 2009 by USA Today
Antarctica Not Immune to Warming
by Doyle Rice
WASHINGTON - The Earth's lone holdout to climate change, Antarctica, is actually warming, says a new study in today's edition of the journal Nature.
Scientists had long thought that while some isolated parts of Antarctica had been warming, much of the continent had been cooling over the past 50 years. But the new analysis found that since 1957, when measured as a whole, the continent's temperature has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit .
"The thing you hear all the time is that Antarctica is cooling - and that's not the case," says study lead author Eric Steig, a University of Washington professor of Earth and space sciences. "If anything, it's the reverse, but it's more complex than that. Antarctica isn't warming at the same rate everywhere."
Perhaps most troubling is that "a fairly large part of West Antarctica is warming more than we realized," says study co-author Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University.Scientists say West Antarctica is the ice sheet most susceptible to a possible collapse in the future due to warming global temperatures. If the ice sheet collapsed, it would cause cataclysmic sea-level rise around the world.
Technique questioned
Researchers in this study developed a new technique that combined data from satellites and automated weather stations in Antarctica to make what they say is the best estimate of the continent's temperature so far. However, there are very few weather stations on Antarctica, and the satellite data have been available for only the past 25 years.
This troubles some scientists.
"One must be very cautious with such results because they have no real way to be validated," says atmospheric scientist John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, who was not part of the study. "In other words, we will never know what the temperature was over the very large missing areas that this technique attempts to fill in so that it can be tested back through time."
Researchers had thought Antarctica was getting cooler in part because of the ozone hole over the South Pole. This break in the protective ozone layer brings cooling weather patterns across parts of Antarctica. Steig agrees that the ozone hole has contributed to cooling in East Antarctica.
"However, it seems to have been assumed that the ozone hole was affecting the entire continent, when there wasn't any evidence to support that idea, or even any theory to support it," he adds.
***according to the USGS the West Antarctic ice sheet has a sea-rise potential of 8.09 meters or 26.5 feet. the average elevation of the Sacremento valley is 20 feet -
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Re: Global warming seen worse than predicted
Mon, February 16, 2009 - 10:37 AMTime to get your surf boards out!
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