Here's an update on global warming. From "1999 Continues Warming Trend Around Globe", by William K. Stevens, NYT 12/19/99, available via site search at nytimes.com .
Certainly it seems that way of late. Last month was the warmest November in 105 years of record-keeping in the contiguous 48 states, and the fourth-warmest in the Northeast. The trend continued into December in most of the country; as of Friday, the average temperature for the month in New York, for instance, was 5.7 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
But that is almost the least of it. Federal scientists reported last week that in the contiguous 48 states and on other global land masses, including Europe and Asia, 1999 is certain to join 1998 as one of the two warmest years on record, continuing a long-term trend toward a warmer climate.
The trend has been especially sharp in the last quarter of the 20th century. Since the mid-1970's, the scientists reported, the average global surface temperature has increased at a rate of about 3.5 degrees per century -- about the same rate estimated for the 21st century if emissions of waste industrial gases that trap heat in the atmosphere are not reduced. . . .
At 55.7 degrees, for instance, this year's average temperature in the 48 states is projected to fall just shy of a record 56.4 degrees set in 1998. The projected 1999 average global land temperature is 56.9 degrees, 1.42 degrees above the average for the years 1880-1998. The warming was especially pronounced in Europe, Asia and North America. In June and July, for example, Russia experienced one of its longest heat waves of the century.
Thomas R. Karl, the director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., which reported the latest figures, said he was surprised at the persistent warmth on land in a La Ni¤a year. "We haven't seen anything like this in the observed temperature record," he said. . . .
Underlying these natural machinations of atmospheric behavior -- and possibly modifying them in ways not yet clear to scientists -- is a century long global warming trend. The average global surface temperature has risen by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last century, according to the federal experts. The dominant scientific view is that emissions of heat-trapping atmospheric gases like carbon dioxide, produced by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, are at least partly responsible.
But in the last quarter-century, the rate of warming has been more than double that of the 20th-century average. Mr. Karl's group reported last week that since the mid-1970's, the global temperature has risen at a rate of about 0.35 degrees per decade, or 3.5 degrees per century. Scientists predict that the planet will warm by 2 to 6 degrees over the next 100 years (the best estimate is 3.5 degrees) if emissions of the heat-trapping gases are not cut.
Compare and contrast Mr. anxietycenter's bit:
Since then, the earth has warmed about one degree Fahrenheit in the past century, but that warming ended in the 1940's, fully 50 years ago. For the past 20 years, meteorological satellites and radiosonde balloons all have produced data suggesting little change, but possibly a very slight cooling.
I don't know, offhand, I'd say Mr. Anxiety is relying on some Neoconian "best data" or something. Maybe he read it in USNews. Not that it matters, living in the land of the frozen tundra, I'm all for global warming myself. I washed the car the old fashioned way, with a hose and bucket of water, on New Year's Eve this year. Less flippantly, but perhaps more cynically, the thing about global warming is that nothing's going to be done about it. The only experiment that might present strong enough evidence to get anything done, politically, is the one taking place in real time. The results of that one may come in a little late for the easier fixes to be workable anymore, but that's life.
More info on that at nytimes.com, a review of a couple books, one by a geoscientist that I've read parts of, the other by a Cato guy of the "don't worry, be happy" school. The reviewer's conclusion, similar to my own:
Economics, perhaps no less than climatology and other disciplines that probe complexity, has a hard time foreseeing change. Its subject matter, after all, is people, whose behavior is famously at odds with expert prediction. Moore may be as unrealistic as the prophets of doom, perhaps more so. The truth is that we all live in a great climate experiment, the outcome of which, good or bad, no one is likely to forecast with any certitude.
Cheers, Dan. |
