For many years now, we've seen this administration dodging the implications that global warming is the result of human activity... and that's driven policy. The Kyoto Accords just took effect this week, and the United States of America isn't a signatory.
So this is a bombshell:
"The debate about whether there is a global warming signal now is over, at least for rational people," said Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. "The models got it right. If a politician stands up and says the uncertainty is too great to believe these models, that is no longer tenable."
More under the fold...
In the study, Dr Barnett's team examined more than seven million observations of temperature, salinity and other variables in the world's oceans, collected by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and compared the patterns with those that are predicted by computer models of various potential causes of climate change.
It found that natural variation in the Earth's climate, or changes in solar activity or volcanic eruptions, which have been suggested as alternative explanations for rising temperatures, could not explain the data collected in the real world. Models based on man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, however, matched the observations almost precisely.
"What absolutely nailed it was the greenhouse model," Dr Barnett told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Washington. Two models, one designed in Britain and one here in the US, got it almost exactly. We were stunned. They did it so well it was almost unbelieveable."
Dr. Barnett's assertion that the debate is over, "at least for rational people" doesn't give me any comfort that conservative columnists and administration officials won't continue to muddy the waters, literally and figuratively. Their economic interests are too powerful to accept these facts.
Jared Diamond has recently published "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" an excellent book about what happens to societies that aren't capable of recognizing the damage that they do to their own critical ecological systems. God help us.
