Global Warming… Fact or Fiction

When scientists look back over the 4.6 billion year history of Earth it is clear that the climate has changed many times, ranging from ice ages to long periods of warmth. Throughout time, natural forces including major volcanic eruptions, small fluctuations in the Earth's orbit, solar cycles, and even asteroid impacts have affected the Earth's climate. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th late century, human actions have also changed the composition of the atmosphere. By burning Fossil fuels for energy man is increasing the amount of carbon and Methane in the atmosphere. and therefore likely are influencing the Earth's climate.

Carbon is called a “Greenhouse” gas because it works in the atmosphere in a similar way that the panes of glass work in a greenhouse. They allow the sunlight (Ultra-violet rays) to enter warming the ground and air. Then the resulting inferred energy is trapped inside causing the room (or planet) to heat up. Global warming is the result of more energy coming in, than what is able to leave. If greenhouse gases continue to increase, climate models predict that the average temperature at the Earth's surface could increase from 2.5 to 10.4ºF above 1990 levels by the end of this century. Scientists are certain that human activities are changing the composition of the atmosphere, and that increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases will change the planet’s climate. We all have a vested interest in the “Status Quo”

I have to laugh when I hear people talk about “Saving the Planet”, with the exception of an Everest sized asteroid hitting Earth; our planet is pretty safe form the next few billion years. The Earth does not care if the oceans are 30 feet higher or 10 degrees warmer. For more than one billion years the earth had no oxygen. The simple truth is we all have a vested interest in the “Status Quo.” The Earth does not care what the coastline is but if you just paid $900,000.00 for a condo in South Beach, you do not want to see it washed out to sea.

Every scientist working in climatology will tell you just how complicated and difficult it is to create a climate model. Even the most advanced super computers with thousands of parallel processors are only able to scratch the surface of the data required to generate a complete picture. So anyone who says they “Know” the precise future of the Earths next 100 years of climate in delusional, but history and reasonable projections give us insight into the direction we appear to be headed.In the film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth”, the former Vice President, Al Gore lays out a tail of Earth’s recent past and possible near term future. The question is how accurate are some of the scientific claims made in the documentary?

In an attempt to clear the air, National Geographic News checked in with Eric Steig, an earth scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who saw An Inconvenient Truth at a preview screening.He says the documentary handles the science well.“I was looking for errors,” he said.“But nothing much struck me as overblown or wrong.”Claim: Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense as temperatures rise.“There’s no question about this,” the University of Washington»s Steig said. “If the average is going up, the extremes have to go up as well.”2005 was the hottest year on Earth since the late 19th century, when scientists began collecting temperature data. And Britain»s Meteorological Office said there was a 60 percent probability that 2007 would break that record. The past decade featured five of the warmest years ever recorded, with the second hottest year being 1998. (Article continues below)

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Claim: Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet (6 meters) with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.There is little doubt that sea levels would rise by that much if Greenland melted.Reduction of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets similar to past reductions would cause sea level to rise 10 or more meters. A sea-level rise of 10 meters would flood about 25 percent of the U.S. population, with the major impact being mostly on the people and infrastructures in the Gulf and East Coast.All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines.“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now.”The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet.
Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.
“That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps,” Dr. Boggild said. “If you lose that much volume you»d definitely see new islands appear.”
“Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario,” said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.
On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just one foot would send water thousands of feet inland. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas; virtually all of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.
“Here in Miami,” Dr. Leatherman said, “we»re going to have an ocean on both sides of us.”
Claim: The Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by 2050.Some climate models are more conservative, suggesting that there will be no summer ice in the Arctic by the year 2100.But new research shows it could take as little as 20 years for the sea ice to disappear.“Since the advent of remote satellite imaging, we»ve lost about 20 percent of sea-ice cover,” said Mark Serreze, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.“We»re setting ourselves up for very big losses this year.”“We think of the Arctic as the heat sink to the climate system,” Serreze said.“We»re fundamentally changing this heat sink, and we don’t know how the rest of the climate system is going to respond.”There is no doubt that as sea ice continues to melt, habitat for animals like polar bears will continue to shrink.
In addition to the legitimate complexity of environmental models, you also have some companies funding reseach explicitly for the purpose of “Throwing up smoke,” in order to create the illusion that the scientific community is more divided than is actually the case. Of these companies Exxon has been the largest funding source for data contrary to the main wave of the scientific community.Therefore it was noteworthy when Exxon announced it had stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank that last year ran television ads saying that carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is helpful. After funding them previously, Exxon decided in late 2005 not to fund for 2006 CEI and “five or six” other groups active in the global-warming debate,said Kenneth Cohen, Exxon»s vice president for public affairs.Exxon says important questions remain about the degree to which fossil-fuel emissions are contributing to global warming. But “the modeling has gotten better” analyzing the probabilities of how rising greenhouse-gas emissions will affect global temperatures, Mr. Cohen said. Exxon continues to stress the modeling is imperfect; it is “helpful to an analysis, but it»s not a predictor,” he said. But he added, “we know enough now - or, society knows enough now - that the risk is serious and action should be taken.”
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