Talks advance as planet continues to warm
Monday, June 5, 2006

NEW YORK (AP) -- Britain and Sweden are on target for reducing global-warming gases, but other countries will have to toughen policies and rely on "carbon trading" to achieve their Kyoto Protocol goals by 2012, says a new U.N. report.

In the United States, meanwhile, emissions of so-called greenhouse gases climbed by 16 percent between 1990 and 2004, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in its latest assessment. The United States, by far the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming, rejects the Kyoto pact on reductions.

Against this backdrop of rising emissions and discord over what to do about them, delegates from more than 160 nations on May 26 wrapped up two weeks of semiannual U.N. sessions in Bonn, Germany, on how to confront the threat of climate change.

On one track, they began talks on a stricter regime of emissions cuts for Kyoto nations after the 2012 expiration of that 1997 agreement, named for the Japanese city where it was negotiated.

On a second, less formal track, they began a "dialogue," including U.S. representatives, to try to draw Washington and other outsiders into the mandatory controls system.

"Both tracks got going in a fairly smooth way," Richard Kinley, chief U.N. organizer of the sessions, told The Associated Press. "It means there will be some very intensive talks in the next two, three years."

Scientists, meanwhile, are reporting mounting evidence of climate change:

• NASA satellite monitoring shows Greenland glaciers dumping water into the sea at twice the rate of 1996. Such melting land ice is helping raise sea levels, along with the expansion of seawater as it warms.
• The sea around the South Pacific island of Tonga has risen 4 inches (10 centimeters) in 13 years, according to the latest Australian measurements.
• Warmer water, followed by disease, has killed about one-third of coral reefs at official monitoring sites in the Caribbean since last year.
• Globally the year 2005 was either the warmest or second-warmest since record keeping began in the mid-19th century, according to NASA and the World Meteorological Organization. The warming is accelerating, boosting the mercury every decade by more than 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius), NASA says.

For more than a decade, a U.N.-organized network of scientists has warned of shifting climate zones, rising oceans and more extreme weather events if emissions of heat-trapping gases were not reined in.

The atmosphere today holds over one-third more carbon dioxide, byproduct of automobile engines, power plants and other fossil fuel-burning, than it did before the Industrial Revolution.

Kyoto, a protocol to the 1992 U.N. climate treaty, mandates controls in 35 industrialized countries that on average would reduce greenhouse emissions by 5 percent from their 1990 levels by 2012, with varying limits assigned to individual countries.

At this point, among 18 countries reporting, "only the United Kingdom and Sweden are projected to meet their individual Kyoto targets with current policies and measures," U.N. experts said in a progress report issued at the Bonn meeting.

Britain, benefiting from a switch from coal power plants to natural gas, projects it will reduce emissions by 19 percent by 2012, surpassing its Kyoto target of minus 12.5 percent. Sweden projects a 1 percent reduction, although it would have been allowed to increase emissions by 4 percent under the burden-sharing agreement adopted by the European Union to meet Kyoto's goals.

But such growing economies as Spain and Greece are projected to far overshoot their allowances. Canada, with a targeted reduction of 6 percent, says it is now emitting 30 percent more greenhouse gases than in 1990.

"Countries really have to think about introducing further measures to deal with their emissions," said the U.N.'s Kinley.

Some do plan more taxes and incentives to reduce fossil fuel use, the report notes. But the greatest progress may be made via the "Kyoto mechanisms," investment in clean-energy and similar projects in other countries.

For example, the Netherlands, which has a 2012 target of minus 6 percent but currently projects 1 percent growth instead, will get carbon-trading credits for a Dutch wind-power project in India that has just won U.N. approval.

There were 17 Kyoto countries that had not yet reported on their progress.

In Washington, the Bush administration says it will rely on industry's voluntary cutbacks and on government investment in clean-energy technologies to reduce emissions. In April, however, Government Accountability Office auditors reported that supposed voluntary cutbacks are being inadequately monitored.

On May 23, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution urging the administration to negotiate mandatory cutbacks. Its future in the full Senate is uncertain.

The White House objects that Kyoto-style mandates would badly crimp the U.S. economy, and complains that China, India and other poorer but fast-growing economies are not regulated by Kyoto.

Eliot Diringer, an analyst with Washington's private Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said China has signaled some willingness to join long-term efforts to limit warming. But environmentalists expect no change in the U.S. position before 2009 and the end of the Bush administration. Still, Diringer said, the talks begun in Bonn are important.

"It's important that people have a good understanding of the issues," he said, "so that when the political opportunity arises to actually negotiate a deal, they're in a position to do that."

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The science debate behind climate change
Forecasting the future remains a contentious exercise
By Michael Coren

(CNN) -- Is global warming really a threat?

Absolutely, respond most scientists, but they have only recently been able to approach a basic agreement about our changing climate.

First, the Earth has gotten warmer. Since 1850, average global temperatures have risen about .6 degrees Celsius, the United Nations says. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide released by humans burning fossil fuels and clearing land are the likely culprits. Sea levels have also risen about 4 to 8 inches during the past century, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Second, the concentration of greenhouse gases (or GHG) in the atmosphere is near its highest point in recorded history. Since the Industrial Revolution, concentrations of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, have risen 30 percent.

Based on studies of air bubbles trapped in ancient ice, today's levels are higher than any time in at least 420,000 years, said David King, chief science adviser for the British government. If GHG concentrations rise, as expected, concentrations could cross what some consider a "dangerous" threshold, although that designation is contentious.

Finally, almost every scientist agrees upon one thing: the future is highly uncertain. While most scientists support projections by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that temperatures will rise 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) to 5.8 degrees Celsius (10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, the scientific consensus shows cracks beyond this point. (Clues to climate's future)

John Christy, director of Earth System Science Center and critic of severe warming predictions, says forecasting the future "gets messy quickly."

"The Earth system has more unknowns that we are generally willing to acknowledge," he told CNN via e-mail. "It is very difficult for [scientists] to say, 'I don't have a clue.'...Our pronouncements often express more confidence than is warranted given the level of ignorance in which we presently operate."

Climate models inherit this uncertainty. The first crude models -- spinning aluminum dishpans in the 1950s -- have evolved into some of the world's most sophisticated computer simulations replicating the interaction between the atmosphere, oceans and continents. Yet the system's complexity -- a mathematical swamp of biological cycles, ocean circulation, geologic emissions and even solar activity -- injects guesswork into the science.

Despite the uncertainties, says Drew Shindell, a NASA climate modeler at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, climate models, at least in the short term, are good and "getting better."

"The results become steadily less reliable as you go out in time," Shindell said. "We can do a pretty good job 25 to 30 years out; we have a rough idea 50 years out. By the time you get into 100 years, there's a lot of things we can't really say."

The biggest questions in the climate equation are water vapor and airborne particles called aerosols. Water vapor acts like a huge sponge soaking up energy absorbed by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. It is a wild card for climate modelers because water vapor may also cool the planet by increasing cloud cover. Aerosols -- which can also cool or warm the planet -- may have other unknown effects.

But Shindell says dozens of climate models run by scientists around the world convincingly describe a world sweating under the influence of greenhouse gases which trap the sun's energy.

"I think we can say very clearly, with the same amount of energy going in and less going out, [the Earth] has to warm up," he said. "That's elementary physics."

This growing confidence is the result of progress being made with climate models and deciphering cryptic clues about ancient climate in tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores. Paleo-climate measurements, once unattainable, now offer a record of global temperatures stretching back 750,000 years.

"There is no doubt that humans are warming the planet. That's very clear now," says Jeffrey Severinghaus, a geoscience researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. "The data is beautiful. It's very strong. Humans are changing the climate, and we're expected to change it a lot more in the future."

Global warming 'alarmists'?

Scientists were not always so convinced.

As early as 1979, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reported with "high confidence" that a 1.5 to 4.5 degree Celsius temperature increase was likely if carbon dioxide levels doubled. It was greeted by a chorus of skepticism.

However, the past two decades have also seen the retreat of once noisy critics. BP, a major energy company, says it is now taking "precautionary action" against climate change by cutting greenhouse emissions and investing in mitigation of greenhouse gases.

Nonetheless, a minority of scientists reject what they call "alarmist" global warming on scientific grounds. They raise three major objections, which most researchers agree remain troublesome.

• Natural climate variability is not well understood and may be greater than once thought.
• Computer models are oversimplifications that cannot simulate the complexities of the real climate.
• Temperature extrapolations of the past are not precise enough to make dire conclusions about "normal" warming.

Richard Lindzen, a respected meteorologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says in light of these uncertainties, pronouncements about climate change are both self-serving and unscientific.

"Scientists make meaningless or ambiguous statements. Advocates and media translate statements into alarmist declarations. Politicians respond to alarm by feeding scientists more money," said Lindzen at a scientific conference this January. He added that the accepted evidence is "entirely consistent with there being virtually no problem at all."

This sentiment is in the extreme minority of the scientific community, said Richard Sommerville, meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who drew a parallel with proposing that HIV does not cause AIDS.

"[Lindzen] is taken seriously because he's capable of excellent science," Sommerville said. "[But] most of the scientific community thinks he's mistaken... People are given a fair hearing and then we move on."

New research

Plenty of questionable scientific claims muddy the discussion on climate change. Extreme weather events such as last year's hurricane season in the Atlantic are not conclusively linked to global warming, say scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It is exceedingly difficult to establishing a causal link between global warming and these events.

Even melting glaciers, such as the rapidly receding ice cap on Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro or the collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf, while consistent with climate change, cannot be decisively linked to the phenomenon.

But major studies released this year appear to buttress the belief the Earth is undergoing significant warming and will continue to do so.

Tim Barnett, a researcher with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February that the world's oceans are heating up from the top down. Barnett found the world's six ocean basins show a .5 degree Celsius increase since the 1940s in a pattern that could only be explained by human-induced warming.

An Oxford University report, published in the journal Nature, used computers networked over the Internet to conduct one of the most powerful computer climate simulations ever attempted. It appeared to confirm that predictions of warming of at least 2 degrees Celsius -- and perhaps as high as 11 degrees Celsius -- were possible.

Ultimately, scientists who believe global warming is underway say uncertainties do not undermine the significance of the research.

"When you go to your doctor, and she says you're due for a heart attack, you don't turn around and say medicine is imperfect even if she can't predict the date of your heart attack," Sommerville said. "You take it seriously. I think climate science is in that position now."

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Past may hold clues to climate's future
By Alison Pollard

(CNN) -- Climate change could have drastic consequences.

Just ask the ancient Egyptians.

Harvey Weiss, professor of archaeology at Yale University, says climate change was a fact of life for earlier civilizations. From pharaohs to the medieval Vikings, swift and sometimes violent changes in weather patterns sparked mass migrations and technological innovations like irrigation.

"Those episodes proved to be the single most important stimulus for the major transformations in human history," said Weiss, who digs through the traces of vanished empires for evidence of these climatic events.

Climate change was first proposed as a consequence of human activity in 1895. A Swedish chemist theorized that burning fossil fuels like coal might emit enough carbon dioxide to warm the planet. But natural climate variation, caused by fluctuations in the Earth's orbit and other natural cycles, wasn't thought to occur on a time scale perceptible to humans -- until recently. (The science debate)

Climate scientists now say warming and cooling events during the past 10,000 years brought about significant swings in rainfall and temperature in remarkably short periods. The climate record -- stretching back more than 750,000 years -- can be read in the sediments and ice layers from Asia to Greenland. These records, carefully analyzed by scientists, reveal a mercurial climate.

Periodic ice ages going back 10,000 years show extreme temperature swings, exceeding 6 degrees Celsius within 50 years in some cases, said Richard Sommerville, meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

By contrast, human-induced climate change is thought to have raised global temperatures just 0.6 degrees Celsius during the past 150 years. The United Nations predicts the next century could bring temperature increases as high as 5.8 degrees Celsius (10.4 F).

As high-resolution data about prehistoric climates accumulates, archeologists are looking for connections between climate change and human development.

The collapse of early Bronze Age civilizations in modern-day Greece, India and Greece have been theoretically linked to abrupt climate changes about 4,200 years ago.

According to research published in the journal Science, the Anasazi -- the ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians, who built elaborate stone and adobe structures in the American Southwest -- also may have succumbed to decades of intense drought and cooler temperatures during the 13th century, in addition to factors like warfare and religious turmoil. Today, only the sand-swept ruins of their pueblos and cliff dwellings remain.

Ultimately, not all climate change may have been destructive.

Weiss is dusting off evidence in the region known as the Fertile Crescent, including much of modern-day Iraq and Syria, indicating that a human revolution in irrigated agriculture occurred after an extended drought and cold spell.

A 200-year cooling period about 8,000 years ago slashed precipitation levels in the region by thirty percent, according to marine and geological records. Weiss believes this climate change initiated a mass migration away from dry-land farming to the creation of irrigated fields along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, allowing the people to build some of the earliest institutions of civilization.

Weiss says he has found evidence that the drought drove farmers in ancient Mesopotamia to build irrigation channels. Eventually, this allowed farmers to grow enough surplus food to feed the writers, priests, artists, politicians and architects who lived in cities.

More modern examples

The ancients are not the only ones to be influenced by weather, though. More modern -- and far colder -- examples exist.

Scientists from the University of Colorado used ocean sediment cores collected off the coast of Iceland to produce an almost weekly record of temperature changes in the region during the past 2,000 years.

Their findings -- announced in March -- show that in Iceland during what is known as the Little Ice Age (from about 1350 A.D. to 1850 A.D.) there was an increase in cooler winters, colder summers and increased temperature variability. According to the research, these changes influenced the population greatly, as a 1-degree drop in average summer temperatures may have meant a 15 percent drop in crop yields.

Not all scientists regard climate change as the predominant force in the rise and fall of early civilizations, but some researchers believe it may teach the present world about the possibilities of the future.

"The historical lesson ... is that those societies had no knowledge of what was happening to them and certainly no historic knowledge of what could happen to them, where we have both," Weiss said.

Today, scientists are improving predictions and narrowing down some parameters of climate change with new technology.

But no one can say with certainty what the future will bring. The inherent complexity of the climate system means computer models will likely give scientist a broad range of temperature possibilities only.

"The problem is that we don't understand how the climate system works well enough to understand where the thresholds might be," said Woody Hickcox, senior lecturer in environmental studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. "But we're racing towards them, if they're there."

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If you read these articles and still believe global warming is a conspiracy or not true, you either need to seek professional help or grow up if you are saying such things to stir up some arguments.