by Plutonium Page
While the oil industry is busy funding conservative groups who claim global warming is a "hoax", the real scientific evidence of climate change mounts:
Using ocean data collected by diving floats, U.S. climate scientists released a study Thursday that they said provides the "smoking gun" that ties manmade greenhouse gas emissions to global warming.
The researchers, some of them working for NASA and the Energy Department, went a step further, implicitly criticizing President Bush for not taking stronger action to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.
They said the findings confirm that computer models of climate change are on target and that global temperatures will rise 1 degree Fahrenheit this century, even if greenhouse gases are capped tomorrow.
If emissions instead continue to grow, as expected, things could spin “out of our control,” especially as ocean levels rise from melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the NASA-led scientists said. "The climate system could reach a point where large sea level change is practically impossible to avoid."
The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the latest to report growing certainty about global warming projections.
The bold emphasis is mine. President Bush's bread and butter isn't his salary as president; it's his oil investments that line his pockets. If the DoE is criticizing him (although implicitly), things are bad indeed, although his speech writers might use this evidence to say that nu-ku-lar power is the way to go. Also, NASA is one of Tom DeLay's interests. I wonder how long those scientists will have their jobs?
Continued below the fold.
The researchers based their conclusions on calculations of the ocean's heat content, via data they obtained from "floats" in oceans all over the world. They found that the oceans are absorbing more heat than they are releasing to space... a historic "energy imbalance":
Significantly, those emissions have increased at a rate consistent with the detected energy imbalance, the researchers said.
“There can no longer be genuine doubt that humanmade gases are the dominant cause of observed warming,” said Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “This energy imbalance is the ‘smoking gun’ that we have been looking for.”
Fourteen other specialists from NASA, Columbia University and the Department of Energy co-authored the study.
Scientists have found other possible “smoking guns” on global warming in recent years, but Klaus Hasselmann, a leading German climatologist, praised the new report for its innovative work on energy imbalance. “This is valuable additional supporting evidence” of manmade climate change, he told The Associated Press.
[snip]
President Bush has said that while he believes manmade emissions are tied to global warming, it's not known just how closely and that therefore drastic steps like mandatory emission curbs are unwarranted.
"We do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming," he said in a major climate policy speech in 2001. "We do not know how much our climate could, or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it."
"No one can say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming," he added, "and therefore what level must be avoided."
How much evidence will it take before the Bush administration and the oil industry can no longer convince people that global climate change is insignificant?
very nice line up of bloggers here.
you guys want to exchange links?
Posted by: skippy | April 29, 2005 at 02:51