Global warming: our most serious crisis
October 27th, 2008We shouldn’t let the worsening global financial crisis detract our attention from a far more serious crisis: global warming.
Joseph Romm at Climate Progress reminds us that as the evidence keeps coming in, it is becoming increasingly apparent that key climate change impacts — sea ice loss, ice sheet melting, desertification, and sea level rise — all are either near the top or actually in excess of their values as predicted by the IPCC’s climate models.
For example, a new study in Geophysical Research Letters titled “Water-vapor climate feedback inferred from climate fluctuations, 2003–2008” analyzed recent variations in surface temperature and “the response of tropospheric water vapor to these variations” concluded:
The existence of a strong and positive water-vapor feedback means that projected business-as-usual greenhouse-gas emissions over the next century are virtually guaranteed to produce warming of several degrees Celsius.
Romm points out that a “warming of several degrees Celsius” means the end of life as we know it. He links to an earlier blog post, “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction“). Romm’s target of 450 ppm is itself proving to be optimistic. The evidence is mounting that scaling back to 350 ppm is necessary if we are to avoid an unacceptable risk of catastrophic climate change.
A new WWF report “Climate Change: faster, stronger, sooner” provides an overview of the climate science published since the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, focusing on impacts in Europe. Its findings are sobering:
“Scientific research on climate change and its impacts published since the deadline for the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is revealing that global warming is accelerating, at times far beyond IPCC 2007 forecasts.”