A major international analysis of climate change due Friday will conclude that humankind's reliance on fossil fuels — coal, fuel oil and natural gas — is to blame for global warming, according to three scientists familiar with the research on which it is based.
The gold-standard Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report represents "a real convergence happening here, a consensus that this is a total global no-brainer," says U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, former director of the federal government's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey.
"The big message that will come out is the strength of the attribution of the warming to human activities," says researcher Claudia Tebaldi of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.
Mahlman, who crafted the IPCC language used to define levels of scientific certainty, says the new report will lay the blame at the feet of fossil fuels with "virtual certainty," meaning 99% sure. That's a significant jump from "likely," or 66% sure, in the group's last report in 2001, Mahlman says. His role in this year's effort involved spending two months reviewing the more than 1,600 pages of research that went into the new assessment.
Among the findings, Tebaldi says, is that even if people stopped burning the fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas blamed most for the warm-up, the effects of higher temperatures, including deadlier heat waves, coastal floods, longer droughts, worse wildfires and higher energy bills, would not go away in our lifetime.
QUICK QUESTION: What do you fear most about global warming? | WEATHER GUYS BLOG: Serendipity: Climate report coming out on Groundhog Day
"Most of the carbon dioxide still would just be sitting there, staring at us for the next century," Mahlman says.
"The projections also make clear how much we are already committed" to climate change, Tebaldi says, echoing the comments of more than a dozen IPCC scientists contacted by USA TODAY. Even if every smokestack and tailpipe stops emissions right now, the remaining heat makes further warming inevitable, she says.
The report will resonate worldwide because the current debate over global warming has been more about what is responsible — people or nature? — than about whether it is happening.
President Bush only recently has acknowledged the link, mentioning global warming in last week's State of the Union address. It was the first time he has included climate change in the annual speech before Congress. Bush called for developing renewable and alternative fuels.
The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program. This will be its fourth climate assessment since 1990. The last one, in 2001, predicted average global temperatures would rise 2.5 to 10.4 degrees by the end of this century. The rise from 1901 to 2005 was just 1.2 degrees.
The report is the work of more than 2,000 scientists, whose drafts were reviewed by scores of governments, industry and environmental groups. The document is based on research published in the six years since the last report.
The analysis comes at a time when awareness of global warming in the USA and efforts to combat it are more intense than ever. Former vice president Al Gore's climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth scored two Oscar nominations last week. Meanwhile, some states and hundreds of American cities are taking steps to curb emissions that intensify the heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere.
Leaks about droughts, floods
Officially, the panel's 2007 findings are still under wraps, but details have been leaking out for a year, particularly in recent weeks.
News accounts have featured projections of more droughts, floods, shrinking glaciers and rising sea levels.
There is so much media attention now, "I almost think there won't be any surprises compared to six years ago," says Steve Running, a University of Montana ecologist. "When the report came out (in 2001) it was all 'new' news. This time, I think everybody will say, 'Well, yeah, that's already what we've been hearing about.'
"Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for the Climate Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says the studies underlying the report make the broad conclusions clear anyway. A 2005 Nature magazine study, for example, narrowed the 2001 estimate of warmer temperatures to an increase from 2.7 to 8.1 degrees by the year 2100.
Similarly, two Science magazine studies in 2005 of satellite and balloon measurements of temperature confirmed the Earth's atmosphere is warming exactly as predicted from human-caused increases in carbon dioxide.
Wave of new initiatives
What will be released this week is the first of three parts of the report: a scientific synthesis of global warming's physical manifestations that includes measurements and projections of temperature, precipitation, storms, wind, polar melting and sea levels. New this time is a chapter on paleoclimatology, the study of climate change from fossils and the reconstruction of data and clues going back hundreds of thousands of years.
In addition to the extensive scientific conclusions, which MacCracken says have been settled, a short "summary for policymakers" is still being hammered out and will be released Friday in Paris.
The second phase of the report is on the effects of those measured and projected changes and is due in April. A third group's work on ways to try to lessen those impacts is to be released in May.
Original source : http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-01-30-ipcc-report_x.htm
The gold-standard Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report represents "a real convergence happening here, a consensus that this is a total global no-brainer," says U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, former director of the federal government's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey.
"The big message that will come out is the strength of the attribution of the warming to human activities," says researcher Claudia Tebaldi of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.
Mahlman, who crafted the IPCC language used to define levels of scientific certainty, says the new report will lay the blame at the feet of fossil fuels with "virtual certainty," meaning 99% sure. That's a significant jump from "likely," or 66% sure, in the group's last report in 2001, Mahlman says. His role in this year's effort involved spending two months reviewing the more than 1,600 pages of research that went into the new assessment.
Among the findings, Tebaldi says, is that even if people stopped burning the fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas blamed most for the warm-up, the effects of higher temperatures, including deadlier heat waves, coastal floods, longer droughts, worse wildfires and higher energy bills, would not go away in our lifetime.
QUICK QUESTION: What do you fear most about global warming? | WEATHER GUYS BLOG: Serendipity: Climate report coming out on Groundhog Day
"Most of the carbon dioxide still would just be sitting there, staring at us for the next century," Mahlman says.
"The projections also make clear how much we are already committed" to climate change, Tebaldi says, echoing the comments of more than a dozen IPCC scientists contacted by USA TODAY. Even if every smokestack and tailpipe stops emissions right now, the remaining heat makes further warming inevitable, she says.
The report will resonate worldwide because the current debate over global warming has been more about what is responsible — people or nature? — than about whether it is happening.
President Bush only recently has acknowledged the link, mentioning global warming in last week's State of the Union address. It was the first time he has included climate change in the annual speech before Congress. Bush called for developing renewable and alternative fuels.
The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program. This will be its fourth climate assessment since 1990. The last one, in 2001, predicted average global temperatures would rise 2.5 to 10.4 degrees by the end of this century. The rise from 1901 to 2005 was just 1.2 degrees.
The report is the work of more than 2,000 scientists, whose drafts were reviewed by scores of governments, industry and environmental groups. The document is based on research published in the six years since the last report.
The analysis comes at a time when awareness of global warming in the USA and efforts to combat it are more intense than ever. Former vice president Al Gore's climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth scored two Oscar nominations last week. Meanwhile, some states and hundreds of American cities are taking steps to curb emissions that intensify the heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere.
Leaks about droughts, floods
Officially, the panel's 2007 findings are still under wraps, but details have been leaking out for a year, particularly in recent weeks.
News accounts have featured projections of more droughts, floods, shrinking glaciers and rising sea levels.
There is so much media attention now, "I almost think there won't be any surprises compared to six years ago," says Steve Running, a University of Montana ecologist. "When the report came out (in 2001) it was all 'new' news. This time, I think everybody will say, 'Well, yeah, that's already what we've been hearing about.'
"Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for the Climate Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says the studies underlying the report make the broad conclusions clear anyway. A 2005 Nature magazine study, for example, narrowed the 2001 estimate of warmer temperatures to an increase from 2.7 to 8.1 degrees by the year 2100.
Similarly, two Science magazine studies in 2005 of satellite and balloon measurements of temperature confirmed the Earth's atmosphere is warming exactly as predicted from human-caused increases in carbon dioxide.
Wave of new initiatives
What will be released this week is the first of three parts of the report: a scientific synthesis of global warming's physical manifestations that includes measurements and projections of temperature, precipitation, storms, wind, polar melting and sea levels. New this time is a chapter on paleoclimatology, the study of climate change from fossils and the reconstruction of data and clues going back hundreds of thousands of years.
In addition to the extensive scientific conclusions, which MacCracken says have been settled, a short "summary for policymakers" is still being hammered out and will be released Friday in Paris.
The second phase of the report is on the effects of those measured and projected changes and is due in April. A third group's work on ways to try to lessen those impacts is to be released in May.
Original source : http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-01-30-ipcc-report_x.htm
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