From one of the principal authors of the paper on the recent 3 year cooling of the ocean...he essentially laments the dangers of information in the hands of neophytes and does not dispute either GW nor the role humans play...
Al
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Josh Willis on climate change: Global warming is real
Posted: March 31, 2008, 4:54 PM by Marni Soupcoff
Josh Willis
As a scientist, I always enjoy it when people outside my field take an interest in oceanography. But I was a bit disappointed to read Lorne Gunter's column: Perhaps The Climate Change Models are Wrong, March 24.
It is a well-established fact that human activities are heating up the planet and that global temperatures will continue to rise for decades to come. Climate change skeptics often highlight certain scientific results as a means of confusing this issue, and that appears to be the case with Mr. Gunter's description of our recent results based on data from Argo buoys.
Indeed, Argo data show no warming in the upper ocean over the past four years, but this does not contradict the climate models. In fact, many climate models simulate four to five year periods with no warming in the upper ocean from time to time. The same is true for the warming trend observed by NASA satellites; it too is in good agreement with climate model simulations. But more important than agreement with computer models is the fact that four years with no warming in the upper ocean does not erase the 50 years of warming we've seen since ocean temperature measurements became widespread. Nor does it erase the eight inches of sea level rise we've experienced in the past 100 years. Both of these are important indicators of human-kind's effect on the climate.
It is important to remember that climate science is not a public debate carried out on the opinion pages of newspapers. What we know about global warming comes from thousands of scientists pouring over countless data sets, conducting experiments to figure out how the climate works and scrutinizing every aspect of each other's work.
Scientists don't determine which results will be picked up by the media and "broadcast far and wide" -- reporters do that. New science results often spark new questions (that's what makes science fun), but they don't often change the answers to old ones and it's important to place new results in their proper context. For instance, Mr. Gunter quoted me saying we are in a period of "less rapid warming." This was not "climate change dogma," but simply a reminder that other parts of the climate like the atmosphere, sea ice, glaciers and probably the deep ocean-- which is not measured by Argo buoys --did continue to heat up even though the upper-ocean didn't.
It is easy to pick on computer climate models for not simulating certain things or point out the odd measurement that isn't well understood. Despite this, models and data of all different types tell the same story about the past century: the oceans are warming, sea levels are rising, the temperature of the atmosphere is increasing and carbon dioxide levels continue to go up. Given that, you don't need a fancy computer model or an Argo buoy to tell you that the future will be warmer.
The real debate is not over whether global warming exists, but how we as a society will address it. The climate system is already committed to a certain amount of warming from carbon dioxide emissions of the past, but the worst effects of global warming can still be avoided. It only requires the will to look toward the future and to curb our addiction to fossil fuels. That's not alarmist, it's just common sense.
— Josh Willis is an oceanographer and climate scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. |
