We\'re warming up even faster than earlier predictions

We're warming up even faster than earlier predictions
 
 
By Stephen Hume, Vancouver Sun

March 11, 2009
 
A sobering update on the latest climate-change science was recently delivered to the United States Senate's environment committee.

Among the four experts testifying before the committee on Feb. 25 was Stanford University's Christopher Field, an expert on global ecology. Impacts upon the world's biosphere are occurring at a much more rapid rate than even the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted, Field said.

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level," Field reported.

Human burning of fossil fuels is now putting CO2 into the atmosphere at levels in the extreme range of IPCC scenarios. Moreover, there's increasing evidence that a polar thaw will release up to 500 billion additional tons of CO2 now frozen into permafrost, "amplifying climate change."

Field's testimony was preceded by similar reports 10 days earlier to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulation," the Washington Post quoted Field as saying there.

Meanwhile, Field's comments appeared to get independent support from a Canadian scientist at the Centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec. Warwick Vincent said last week the Arctic is now melting so fast summer sea ice could vanish as soon as 2013.

"I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place," Vincent, who has studied the phenomenon for a decade, reportedly told the Reuters news agency.

He, too, said the more pessimistic models of change appear to be closer to reality than those projected by the IPCC's early models.

Not everyone is pessimistic. William Happer, a physicist from Princeton, told the Senate committee that global warming is happening -- but he believes it will benefit humanity.

However, R.K. Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, told the Senate committee that some African countries where crops rely on rainfall will lose 50 per cent of their yield by 2020.

Here in North America, Field told the AAAS, expect corn and soybean yields to decline by nine per cent for every one degree Fahrenheit that temperature increases.

The IPCC's reports were excoriated by climate-change skeptics as pandering to environmentalists. Now it appears the estimates were conservative.

The AAAS was told by Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University's Ice Core Palaeo Research Group that glaciers are disappearing globally with implications for hydro power generation, irrigation and municipal water supplies.

Back at the U.S. Senate, Howard Frumkin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he's director of the national centre for environmental health, also updated the committee.

"Over the coming years and decades, climate change is likely to have a significant impact on health in the United States and globally," he testified.

Even with the advantages of well-developed health infrastructure and a wealthy, powerful government "Americans may experience difficult challenges," Frumkin predicted.

Risks will come from "direct effects of heat" and "health effects related to extreme weather events" as well as a rise in water and food-borne infectious diseases and diseases transmitted through other vectors.

"An increase in the severity, duration and frequency of extreme heat waves is expected," Frumkin warned. Flooding, severe storms, wildfires and large-scale population displacements are all on the CDC worry list, he said.

It's starting to sound like a case of adapt or perish.

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