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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (324531)	2/4/2007 3:28:25 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575914

Climate Experts Say It's Time to Act Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News Feb. 2, 2007 — Global warming is "unequivocal" and "very likely" being exacerbated by human activities, according to the most comprehensive and carefully prepared scientific report on climate change ever prepared. The new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been in the works for six years and involved thousands of scientists who make it crystal clear that any more debate over whether climate change is real is folly. What’s needed instead is swift and dramatic action regarding the unavoidable changes already underway and the greater changes that are in store for coming decades. "It is a very emphatic reaffirmation of the reality and consequences of global warming," said climatologist Richard Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Somerville is the lead author of Chapter 1 of the IPCC report. The phrase "very likely" caused by human activities, means there’s a 90 percent certainty, Somerville explained. That’s much stronger than the "likely" used in the previous 2001 IPCC report, reflecting a 66 percent likelihood of human greenhouse gas emissions being the culprit. Not only are there multiple lines of physical evidence that the temperature is ramping up, but the situation is now coming home to people all over the world as torrential rains, severe droughts, shrinking glaciers and other unprecedented events become more common. "The last six out of seven years were the warmest on record," said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and lead author of another chapter in the IPCC report. "Sea ice is melting, glaciers are retreating and level is rising." What’s more, there are more droughts in tropical and subtropical regions and hurricanes are getting more intense, he said. Many of these changes are no surprise to the climate scientists. For years they have been refining climate projections and trying to get the ears of policy makers and business leaders, explained NCAR climate scientist Gerald Meehl, lead author of another chapter in the IPCC report. On the other hand, some changes have come faster and more dramatically than researchers expected, he said. "As we move into the warmer world, we’re seeing things that have never before been seen in human history," said Meehl. The prime examples are the recent rapid destabilization of the Greenland ice sheets and the shrinking Artic sea ice. "These processes are new and we’re struggling to incorporate them into the climate models," said Meehl. Headlines about such dramatic changes are finally beginning to move global warming issues up the list of urgent matters the United States needs to address, said Somerville. "The issue of climate change is up on many more people’s radar screens," agreed Linda Mearns, another NCAR climate scientist and lead author of yet another IPCC report chapter. Even in the United States, where there hasn’t been any leadership on the matter at the federal level, she said, there’s been a grassroots movement, city-by-city, that now includes at least a third of the U.S. population who want to take action. There’s also new hope that the recent changes in US Congress will lead to actions to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and help minimize the damage climate change is already beginning to have on ecosystems, as well as businesses and entire nations, said Trenberth. He and Meehl will be addressing lawmakers next week on the matter — something that’s long overdue, he said. "There’s a lot of concern in the business community," said Somerville. Likewise among religious groups in the United States, he said.