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To: Jill who wrote (5651)	3/27/2000 11:11:00 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8096

Jill..." Uncool is the least of it."...I realize Im most likely causing some to start their flame throwers...but I'd like to think all involved must at times take into consideration the so called over heating of the economy and the 'apparent ' overheating of the planet.....have traveled in the 3rd world over the last 30 years...and have seen such rapid development that ...well...I am at a loss for words...can we continue to add 100 Million people per year...ahead of the death rate and feel no impact on a global level......??.....Guess Im wondering about hidden agendas.......On the one hand..Feel AG is a little trigger happy...on the other...considering my ' Green Views'...( I am a father of two young ladies)...He may be necessarily applying the brakes on a run away train......How does one define 'Right Action' in the face of all we 'Appear' to know..... Stay Well........ Tim Washington Post Friday, March 24, 2000 The temperature of the world's oceans has increased dramatically over the past four decades, according to a major study in today's issue of the journal Science that gives new credibility to projections of increased global warming. For years, many experts have suspected that heat stored in the sea may have kept the planet's atmosphere from heating up as much as greenhouse-warming scenarios predict. But there has been no convincing evidence because detailed, long- term records of ocean temperatures -- especially at extreme depths -- were unavailable. Now, that evidence has arrived. In the first effort of its kind, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spent years painstakingly piecing together millions of seawater temperature records made by hundreds of independent observers worldwide over the past 50 years but never compiled into a single database. As a result, it's now clear that ``the oceans can store lots of heat,' said lead researcher Sydney Levitus, who heads NOAA's Ocean Climate Laboratory in Silver Spring, Md., ``and for the last 40 years, they've kept it away from the atmosphere.' No one knows whether, how or when that stupendous rise in thermal energy content -- an average of 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the world's seas to a depth of two miles, roughly equivalent to the energy consumed by 100 trillion 100- watt lightbulbs burning for a year -- will change the atmosphere's temperature. But the NOAA team reports that increases in ocean temperature appear to have preceded increases in air temperature by a decade or so in the recent climate record, suggesting additional warming might be on the way. The new research ``is of enormous importance to the climate change issue,' said climate modeler James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. ``In my opinion, the rate of heat storage in the ocean is the single most important number that we need to check our understanding of decadal climate change.' Because the ocean heat record appears to follow the same general pattern as warming trends in the atmosphere and melting rates of sea ice observed over past decades, the new study supports the contention that global warming continues. That is what most climate models -- the complex, computerized simulations of global-scale weather interactions among oceans, air and land -- have projected for the 21st century, and perhaps beyond. MODELERS `IN THE BALLPARK' ``Unfortunately for all of us, it shows that the modelers are still in the ballpark,' said Jerry Mahlman, director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., one of the world's top modeling centers. ``If either the ocean or the Arctic (sea ice) was going in a different direction' from the air- temperature record, ``it would give you pause. But it now appears that all three are acting in concert.' Critics of climate-model results have noted that many models project two or three times as much warming as has been measured at the Earth's surface. Global average temperatures increased by about 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit in the 20th century, about half the amount predicted by several leading models. Model defenders countered that the ``missing' heat was probably in the ocean. But the case was hard to make. Although numerous worldwide measurements have been taken and coordinated in the past 15 years, about 2 million other records dating to 1948 have been lying around in a variety of forms in a dozen countries. Levitus' group ``took enormous gobs of badly cared-for data, worked really hard and found things that nobody had ever pulled out,' Mahlman said. ``It's really quite an achievement.' There's no direct evidence that the oceans' rising heat content, which apparently peaked in 1998, is the result of human-caused increases in greenhouse gases, and the researchers note that it ``could be due to natural variability, anthropogenic effects, or more likely a combination of both.' ENERGY IMBALANCE Whatever the cause, the new study ``confirms that the immediate `reason' for the observed warming at the Earth's surface is a planetary energy imbalance, with the planet giving off less heat than it absorbs from the sun,' Hansen said. The reason is that the infrared heat radiation emitted from the globe's surface is trapped by greenhouse gases such as water vapor and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and re-radiated back toward Earth. According to calculations Hansen and colleagues published in 1997, ``if human-made greenhouse gases have been the dominant (climate-modifying factor) in recent decades,' the energy imbalance would average out to about half a watt per square meter around the world, Hansen said. At the time, Hansen said, the ``excess heat must primarily be accumulating in the ocean.' The NOAA researchers found a net heat increase of 0.3 watts per square meter. ``The observed changes are not small,' they write, ``and can make an appreciable contribution to Earth's heat balance on decadal time scales.'