(Photo of Alps from Flickr and Philippe Tarboureich.)
News Update: An international team of scientists has affirmed and expanded on last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report by linking human activity and rising temperatures to physical and biological changes observed on Earth over the past 30 years. “The human footprint on the planet is clear,” said one of the authors, Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The study, published in Nature, matched changes like melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, warming lakes and rivers, longer growing seasons, earlier migration and breeding of birds, movement of heat-intolerant species up mountains, and changes in fish communities. They point to a few specifics, by continent: 89 flower species blooming earlier in Europe, melting glaciers in the Alps and in Patagonia, changes in the freeze depth of permafrost in Russia, and a 50% decline in the Emperor penguin on the Antarctic peninsula. Temperature was far more a factor than land use, pollution and population, according to the 30,000 data sets studied. In a second study published in Nature, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was found to be 28% higher than at any time in 800,000 years, according to gas bubbles in ice in Antarctic -- and methane was 124% higher. Both add carbon to the atmosphere. (Sources: E&E News PM, The Daily Green, Planet Ark.)
1 comment:
1) These events have been happening for 20,000 years (since the beginning of the current interglacial warming period).
2) As is evident in the previous chart, the first 13,000 years of this interglacial warming period saw much more rapid warming than we see today.
3) “Meltwater Pulse 1A”, just over 14,000 years ago, is an example of how much more extreme the Climate Change was in the earlier stages of the current interglacial warming period.
4) We are not yet as warm as ANY of the previous FOUR interglacial warming periods.
5) The forces of nature so utterly overwhelm what tiny little bit of warming is caused by humans that it is utterly absurd for anybody to assert that they can tweeze out the tiny bit of human influence from the far larger forces of nature (unless they’re just looking to lock in their share of the estimated $50,000,000,000 gravy train of easy government money for studying this nonsense.
6) Get some additional much needed perspective here.
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