The Carbon War : Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era by Jeremy K. Leggett - Discussion of the conflict between the big oil companies, and international efforts to stop excessive burning of oil, gas, and coal, which is raising the level of carbon in the atmosphere and causing a number of distressing environmental problems.
Global Warming : Opposing Viewpoints
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have produced a detailed picture of how California's climate is likely to change within the next 50 to 100 years as a result of global warming. Their study, complete with temperature and precipitation data for different parts of the state, goes far beyond the usual speculation about the potential impacts of climate change on the state.
Despite uncertainties in the climate models used to generate these scenarios, they are valuable tools for planning, said Lisa Sloan, an associate professor of Earth sciences at UCSC. The findings of Sloan and her coauthors will be published online on June 7 by the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The study supports what many have already guessed--global warming will mean warmer temperatures and smaller snowpacks in California, with serious adverse effects on the state's water supply. But the study also reveals more subtle details, and offers regional specificity and precise numbers backed by a statistical analysis.
"Everybody has guessed at the effects on water resources, but now we have numbers and locations. It's a lot different from the standard arm-waving," Sloan said. "Our hope is that this kind of study will give state and regional officials a more reliable basis for planning how to cope with climate change."
Sloan's research group used a sophisticated computer model of the regional climate system to look at the response of California's climate to changing concentrations of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping "greenhouse gas" released by burning of fossil fuels. Sloan worked with graduate students Mark Snyder, who is first author of the paper, and Jason Bell, now a computer programmer in the Earth Sciences Department, to develop a regional climate model centered over California. The regional model offers much finer spatial resolution than larger models used to study the global climate. Since the regional climate is driven by global processes, the regional model was coupled with a global climate model.
The researchers looked at the effects of doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere compared to the preindustrial level. The latest projections of carbon dioxide emissions indicate that the atmospheric concentration will be twice the preindustrial level well before the end of this century and possibly as soon as 2050.
With atmospheric carbon dioxide doubled, the California regional climate model showed higher average temperatures every month of the year in every part of the state. The extent of the warming varied, however, with the greatest increases in temperature occurring at high elevations in the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range. For example, the average temperature in June in the Sierra Nevada increased by 11 degrees Fahrenheit.
The model also showed rainfall increasing in northern California but staying largely the same in southern California, while snow accumulation in the mountains decreased dramatically. In March, for example, it showed an additional 8 inches of rain falling in the central Sierra, while the height of the snowpack at the end of March dropped by 13 feet. By the end of April, the snowpack was almost completely gone.
"With less precipitation falling as snow and more as rain, plus higher temperatures creating increased demand for water, the impacts on our water storage system will be enormous," Sloan said.
Snyder said this report is only the first step in an ongoing effort to understand the implications of climate change for California. The results represent an "average" year, based on 15 years worth of data generated by the model for each carbon dioxide concentration. Additional studies will try to capture the natural variability of the climate and how that variability may change in the future, he said.
"This opens the door for a lot more studies to look at regional climate change in more detail, and to understand the variability that is likely to occur," Snyder said. "It's important to consider not only the average conditions but also what the extremes will be."
The researchers are also exploring refinements in the model that would yield even higher spatial resolution. Already, the model provides more detail than any previous study, showing how climate change is likely to affect different parts of the state, such as the Coast Ranges, the Central Valley, the Mojave Desert, and the Sierra Nevada.
All of the major features of the results were statistically significant, Sloan said. She added, however, that the results are not predictions.
"The model gives us scenarios of what the future may look like," Sloan said. "There are only two ways to tell how good the model is: One is to wait for 50 years and see what happens, and the other is to model the present day. We've done the latter quite rigorously and have satisfied ourselves that the model does a good job of representing the present climate. So our confidence in these scenarios is pretty good."
June 6, 2001 - The National Academies
Leading Climate Scientists Advise White House on Global Warming
In a report requested by the Bush administration, a committee of the National Academies' National Research Council summed up science's current understanding of global climate change by characterizing the global warming trend over the last 100 years, and examining what may be in store for the 21st century and the extent to which warming may be attributable to human activity. The committee -- made up of 11 of the nation's top climate scientists, including seven members of the National Academy of Sciences, one of whom is a Nobel-Prize winner -- also emphasized that much more systematic research is needed to reduce current uncertainties in climate-change science.
"We know that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere, causing surface temperatures to rise," said committee chair Ralph Cicerone, chancellor, University of California at Irvine. "We don't know precisely how much of this rise to date is from human activities, but based on physical principles and highly sophisticated computer models, we expect the warming to continue because of greenhouse gas emissions."
Based on assumptions that emissions of greenhouse gases will accelerate and conservative assumptions about how the climate will react to that, computer models suggest that average global surface temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius) by the end of this century.
With regard to the basic question of whether climate change is occurring, the report notes that measurements show that temperatures at the Earth's surface rose by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (about .6 degrees Celsius) during the 20th century. This warming process has intensified in the past 20 years, accompanied by retreating glaciers, thinning arctic ice, rising sea levels, lengthening of the growing season in many areas, and earlier arrival of migratory birds.
The committee said the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the global warming that has occurred in the last 50 years is likely the result of increases in greenhouse gases accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community. However, it also cautioned that uncertainties about this conclusion remain because of the level of natural variability inherent in the climate on time scales from decades to centuries, the questionable ability of models to simulate natural variability on such long time scales, and the degree of confidence that can be placed on estimates of temperatures going back thousands of years based on evidence from tree rings or ice cores.
The greenhouse gas of most concern is carbon dioxide since the naturally occurring chemical also is generated by the continuing burning of fossil fuels, can last in the atmosphere for centuries, and "forces" more climate change than any other greenhouse gas, the committee said. Other significant greenhouse gases include methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor, tropospheric ozone, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which together have a "forcing" on climate change approximately equal to that of carbon dioxide. Man-made sources of methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone have resulted in substantially increased concentrations in the atmosphere in the 20th century, although each of these gases also has natural sources. CFCs are entirely synthetic compounds.
The best information about past climate variability comes from ice cores drilled miles deep in Antarctica and Greenland, which reveal that temperatures changed substantially over the past 400,000 years. Although most of these changes occurred over thousands of years, some rapid warmings took place over a period of decades.
The ice cores also trapped carbon dioxide and methane, which shows that the gases were present in the atmosphere at their lowest levels during cold eras and at higher levels during warm eras. Carbon dioxide did not rise much above 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) until the industrial revolution. By the end of the 20th century, it had reached 370 ppmv, with an average increase in the last two decades of 1.5 ppmv a year. Both carbon dioxide and methane are more abundant in the atmosphere now than at any time during the 400,000-year ice core record.
The committee noted that the IPCC has examined a range of scenarios concerning future greenhouse gas emissions. The committee called such scenarios valuable because they provide a warning of the magnitude of climate change that may occur if emission rates continue to climb at a rate similar to last century, but it also said alternative scenarios are needed to illustrate the sensitivity to underlying assumptions, particularly with regard to future technological development and energy policy.
The committee also was asked by the White House to examine whether there were any substantive differences between the IPCC reports and their abridged technical and policy-maker summaries. The IPCC was established by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization in 1988 and its reports and summaries have been influential in international negotiations related to the Kyoto protocol.
The full IPCC Working Group 1 report does an admirable job of reflecting research activities in climate science, and is adequately summarized in the technical summary, the committee said. The corresponding summary for policy-makers, it added, placed less emphasis on the scientific uncertainties and caveats. Looking to the future, the committee suggested that improvements to the IPCC process may need to be made to ensure the best scientific representation possible, and to keep the process from being seen as too heavily influenced by governments "which have specific postures with regard to treaties, emissions controls, and other policy instruments."
To reduce some of the uncertainties inherent in current climate change predictions, a strong commitment must be made to basic research as well as to improving climate models and building a global climate observing system, the committee said. More comprehensive measurements of greenhouse gases and increased computational power also will be needed.
Although potential impacts from global warming were looked at in the report, it was not part of the committee's charge to make policy recommendations for dealing with them.
The White House requested this fast-track review of the state of climate science in preparation for international discussions on global warming scheduled to take place in the coming weeks. "In view of the critical nature of this issue, we agreed to undertake this study and to use our own funds to support it," said Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council. The study took a month.
The National Research Council is the principal operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. It is a private, nonprofit institution that provides scientific and technical advice under a congressional charter.