Earth temps heading for millions of years' Highs

Earth temps heading for millions of years' Highs



Feb 2007 - The 
leaders of the world's largest general scientific society 
issued an imperative climate change warning Sunday. "The 
atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a critical 
greenhouse gas, is higher than it has been for at least 
650,000 years. The average temperature of the Earth is heading 
for levels not experienced for millions of years." 
Global warming is not a theory, it is a fact based on a 
"growing torrent of information," said the Board of Directors 
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 
AAAS, in its first consensus statement on climate change. The 
statement was issued at the association's annual meeting in 
San Francisco, which concludes today. 
"Scientific predictions of the impacts of increasing 
atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from fossil 
fuels and deforestation match observed changes. As expected, 
intensification of droughts, heat waves, floods, wildfires, 
and severe storms is occurring, with a mounting toll on 
vulnerable ecosystems and societies," the board said. 
This photo-realistic image of the Earth was made using MODIS 
surface reflectance data collected and composited over the 
late spring and early summer of 2001. (Image by Reto Stockli 
courtesy NASA Earth Observatory)
Approved by the board on December 9, 2006, nearly two months 
before a similar statement by the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change, the AAAS statement warns, "Delaying action to 
address climate change will increase the environmental and 
societal consequences as well as the costs. The longer we wait 
to tackle climate change, the harder and more expensive the 
task will be." 
"Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array 
of effects: rapidly melting glaciers, destabilization of major 
ice sheets, increases in extreme weather, rising sea level, 
shifts in species' ranges, and more," the board stated. 
"The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased 
markedly over the last five years. The time to control 
greenhouse gas emissions is now." 
"These events are early warning signs of even more devastating 
damage to come, some of which will be irreversible," warned 
the board. 
The 14 member board includes scientists from Harvard, Yale and 
Princeton, the University of Michigan, University of Utah, 
Ohio State, Lehigh, the California Institute of Technology, 
and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. 
Dr. John Holdren, who becomes board president today, told 
delegates in his presidential address, "Global climate change 
is real, humans are responsible for a substantial part of it, 
and it's taking us in dangerous directions." 
President of the American Association for the Advancement of 
Science Dr. John Holdren delivers his presidential address to 
delegates at the 2007 AAAS annual meeting. 
Without swift and urgent action, he said, the problems could 
spiral toward disastrous, permanent changes for all of life on 
Earth. 
"Climate change is not a problem for our children and our 
grandchildren - it is a problem for us. It's already causing 
harm," said Holdren, who serves as director of the Woods Hole 
Research Center, and is the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of 
Environmental Policy at Harvard University. 
Holdren's address was a review of evidence which, taken 
together, shows a planet under profound stress. One of the 
central problems, and the most complex, he said, is ending the 
reliance on fossil fuels that is damaging and destabilizing 
the Earth's ecosystem. 
The year 2005 was the hottest on record, he said. The 13 
hottest years on record all have occurred since 1990. 
Twenty-three out of the 24 hottest years have occurred since 
1980. The sort of heat wave that killed 35,000 people in 
Europe in the summer of 2003 is expected to become normal by 
2050, he warned. 
By 2100, Holdren said, some projections say global 
temperatures could rival those of the Eocene epoch some 35 
million years ago, a time of global warming that caused waves 
of extinction in Earth's ecosystem. 
He quoted a colleague who envisioned "crocodiles off of 
Greenland and palm trees in Wyoming." 
But the warming temperatures do not simply make the weather 
warmer - they destabilize the weather and generate more 
extremes, Holdren said. 
Some areas are getting wetter; others are experiencing unusual 
long-term droughts. Cyclones are becoming more powerful. 
When Ethiopia's worst drought since 1984-85 hit the southern 
Somali region in 2000, 15,000 people found food aid, water and 
shelter at the Denan IDP camp in Gode zone. 
Between 1950 and 2000, he said, the number of major floods and 
wildfires has increased dramatically in almost every region of 
the world. 
To address the challenges, Holdren said that world leaders 
would have to cooperate as never before on economic, 
diplomatic and technological fronts. 
Such cooperation would have to yield new commitments and 
strategies to resolve the crushing poverty that affects 
perhaps two billion people - about one in every three people 
on Earth. 
A cap on carbon emissions or a "carbon tax" to encourage use 
of alternative fuels is "desperately" needed, Holdren said. 
In his morning media briefing and his presidential address in 
the evening, Holdren said solutions must be pursued across a 
range of disciplines - economics, science, medicine, 
technology, and education. 
Holdren cautioned against expectations that a single 
technological solution such as nuclear fusion would emerge to 
solve energy and climate problems. Eight countries are now 
cooperating to build a demonstration fusion facility in 
France. "Belief in technological miracles," Holdren told 
reporters, "is generally a mistake." 
Climate change research from around the world was presented at 
the annual meeting, which winds up today. 
The Inuit people have spent thousands of years working and 
living in the Arctic, but climate change is forcing them to 
change their traditional way of doing things. 
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grantee 
Barry Smit told conference delegates the Inuit are sometimes 
not being given the tools they need to make the correct 
decisions for their lifestyles. 
"We have plenty of climate change models for the Arctic, but 
often they do not measure the things the Inuit rely on to make 
the best decision on how to use their resources," says Smit, a 
University of Guelph researcher and the Canada Research Chair 
in Global Environmental Change. 
Smit travels to coastal Inuit communities such as Arctic Bay, 
at the north end of Baffin Island, to study how the Inuit are 
adapting to climate change. Smit says the transfer of 
knowledge between the old and the young today does not happen 
as often as it used to, and the knowledge itself is no longer 
as relevant. 
Inuit husband and wife share a snowmobile ride on Baffin 
Island. 
"A generation ago, Inuit used dogs to travel over sea ice. Now 
they use snowmobiles, which are faster and more convenient, 
but don't sense thin ice like dogs do," Smit said. "As ice 
becomes more unpredictable with climate change, this is 
becoming a serious problem. Degradation of the permafrost is 
affecting travel on the land and the stability of some 
structures." 
Bridging the gap between scientific and traditional knowledge 
is the impetus Smit uses as part of ArcticNet, a Network of 
Centres of Excellence that studies the impact of climate 
change in the North. 
At a news conference on the opening day of the meeting, 
Thursday, Lonnie Thompson, who has achieved global recognition 
for studying ice cores to learn about climate change, warned 
that Peru's Quelccaya, the world's largest ice cap, has lost 
about 22 percent of its glacial mass over the past 20 years 
and is retreating at 200 feet per year. 
A geological sciences professor at Ohio State, Thompson said 
that in Peru tropical glaciers like Quelccaya store essential 
fresh water for consumption, agriculture and hydroelectricity. 

The retreating Qori Kalis glacier in the Andes of Peru. 2000. 

Glacial melt also endangers communities through avalanches and 
floods, Thompson said, bringing an increased risk of dam 
breach and floods. 
"The flora and fauna of mountain climates are very sensitive, 
both for the organisms that live in them, and the communities 
that depend on them," said Professor John David All, a 
specialist in geography, global climate change and 
international environmental law at Western Kentucky 
University. 
Organizer and moderator of a related symposium on mountains 
and climate change, All said that mountain communities must 
adapt to the changing climate. 
"In California, the increase in glacial melt changes the 
runoff season. In some places, it occurs in February or March 
                Feb 2007 - too early for the growing season,"
 said All. "When you get 
hooked on high water runoff, and then it dies, it is bad if 
you have not prepared." 
All added that melting snow pack on Mount Kilimanjaro in 
Africa has the potential to affect Tanzanian tourism, the 
nation's largest industry. "Would you invest in hotels if you 
know the snow was melting?" he asked. 
Henry Diaz, climate researcher with the U.S. National Oceanic 
and Atmospheric Administration, is concerned that human 
implications of changing mountain environments are not widely 
understood. 
Diaz has recorded a two degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature 
since the mid-1970s in Western mountains of the United States. 
This has caused snowmelt and flowering of trees to occur about 
two weeks earlier than 50 years ago. 
"The issue is ignored, but demands on mountains are high and 
snow pack have clear economic and social impacts," said Diaz. 
"The message is not getting out because mountains are 
under-instrumented and the information is scattered among 
different experts." 
Citing shrinking tropical glaciers on mountains in the Andes, 
Himalayas, and on Kilimanjaro, Thompson warned that many show 
evidence of the disappearance of glacial mass that accumulated 
over 5,000 years. 
Even if we stopped producing greenhouse gases immediately, 
Thompson said, we would not see an immediate benefit because 
"there are still some gases and energy stored in the system." 

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