The weather channels website acknowledges warming, but doesn't say it's man caused. More disinformation.
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One degree Fahrenheit. One tiny mark on the thermometer. It doesn't sound like much, but it has served as the spark for an explosive debate.
Scientists agree that the planet has seen an overall warming trend of about 1 degree Fahrenheit during the last century.
So is the debate over? Hardly.
"Until fairly recently, the scientific community was debating about whether we could detect with reasonable certainty that there was some warming, and I think that the consensus now is that there is warming. But that's just on the edge of understanding what the present recorded temperature record is showing us," said Dr. Ray Weiss, marine and atmospheric geochemist in the Geosciences Research Division at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The earth is warming. So what? What's the big deal? Scientists disagree on this sentiment. Some say global warming is a natural process. Some say it could be beneficial. And others say if humans don't do something to curtail their influence on the climate, the consequences could be serious.
What makes global warming such a hot topic is that, in some ways, the evidence contradicts itself.
Think about this
In the United States, 50 percent of all-time state record highs were set in the 1930s, before industrialization was widespread.
1999 was the warmest year on record globally.
Throughout natural history, overall temperatures have swung as much as 10° F or more in one decade.
Although the Earth's surface temperature is warming, weather balloons and satellites don't show any warming in the lower atmosphere over the last two decades.
Scientists agree that the earth's average surface temperature has warmed 1° over the last century.
Warming temperatures are most obvious in the Western States, and that trend is more pronounced during winter.
However, in recent decades, a cooling trend has been observed in the fall across much of the central and eastern United States. Remember that U.S. recorded climatology only spans about the last hundred years and the earth has been around for 4.5 billion years.
Tree rings, sediment samples, and ice cores, have been used to study Earth's ancient climate record. These proxy records have revealed that history has seen more severe temperature swings than modern times. Researchers have found that, over the course of the millennia, overall temperatures have swung as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit or more in one decade.
However, when comparing current records to proxy records, the data suggests that several years in the 1990s were the warmest in much more than a century. But the records paint an unfinished picture.
Modern day information is, in many ways, substandard. The oceans, for example, are a largely unobserved abyss of information, as there are very few measurements able to be taken from its vast area. One way scientists compensate for this void is to use satellites.
"We have satellite records that fly in polar orbits, measuring the entire earth. They don't show any warming over the last two decades. We have balloons that go up around the world twice every day. The balloon records of temperatures are in perfect agreement with the satellite record," said Dr. Robert Balling, director of the Office of Climatology and professor in the department of geography at Arizona State University.
Scientists also use computer models to help them predict the future of the planet. However, the inconsistencies are overwhelming.
"The computer models are in a state of infancy, in a sense that, we're trying to take a very complicated system and radically simplify it. So it's not surprising that they don't all agree. But they do agree that it's going to be warming. They disagree by how much. The low end ones say there'll be 2 degrees of warming," said Jeffrey Severinghaus, associate professor of geosciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Other models show that the earth's temperature could rise as much as 8 degrees (Fahrenheit).
So the question remains: If scientists can't even agree among themselves, what are we to think?
Dr. Dan Cayan, research meteorologist and director of the Climate Research Division at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, advises, "As for the public, I think they have to listen. To not only perhaps a sensational voice, but essentially to a chorus, which may not have entirely the same tune. But I think this is going to be a sort of an evolving story over the next decades."
Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist at The Weather Channel, points out that there are many different components to the global warming debate. Issues include to what extent if any are humans responsible for the current warming; how much warming as averaged worldwide has there been and will take place from this point forward; and what are the specific impacts past, present, and future of climate change. |
