Global Warming breaks the ice

In last Saturday’s New York Times, Richard A. Muller, head of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, asserted on the basis of his team’s findings that human emissions are in fact driving climate change.

A professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Muller is also a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Saul Perlmutter, the 2011 Nobel Prize winner for Physics (and a member of the BEST team) was his protégé.

The BEST team discovered that global warming was occurring at a slightly faster rate than that claimed by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

They found that global temperature had increased by1.5 degrees Celsius since 1753 and by 0.9 C since 1960.

For example, Sri Lanka has heated up by Sri Lanka has been warming at the annual rate of 0.014 - 0.022 degrees Celsius since 1960. Svalbard, the Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean, has been heating up the most rapidly, at 0.03 - 0.044 C per year. At the other end of the spectrum is New Zealand, where temperatures have been rising at 0.008 - 0.015 C annually.

Climate studies

And, whereas the IPCC was definite that human activity has caused global warming since 1956 (which is the consensus among most climate scientists), but was unsure about whether natural effect had been mainly responsible earlier, Muller concludes, based on an observed correlation between global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, that human emissions had been predominantly responsible for climate change over the last 250 years.

The significance of the conclusions is that they come from one of the world’s leading global warming sceptic scientists and amount to a public volte face. Muller’s op-ed article began:

‘Call me a converted sceptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct.

I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.’

BEST received funding from ultra-rightwing oil billionaire Charles Koch (head of the second biggest company in the USA). The environmental activist organisation Greenpeace says that Koch, together with his brother David, have given over US $ 61 million to groups that deny the existence of climate change. BEST was hence considered unlikely to publish reports that would adversely affect the petroleum industry, which makes its findings all the more extraordinary.

Most of the BEST findings were old hat to established environmental scientists. Kenneth Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist of The Carnegie Institution for Science and one of ‘New Scientist’ magazine’s ‘Hero Scientists of 2008’, told the ‘Climate Progress’ blog:

‘I am glad that Muller et al have taken a look at the data and have come to essentially the same conclusion that nearly everyone else had come to more than a decade ago.’

Michael E. Mann, Director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University, a member of the IPCC and one of the more conservative of climate change scientists, tweeted:

‘At this rate, Muller should be caught up to the current state of climate science within a matter of just a few years!’

Human activities

What is most significant about these findings is that it shows how human activities may actually be reversing the natural cooling of the Earth.

According to Mann, ‘Astronomical climate forcing may have contributed to a long-term cooling trend throughout the second millennium that terminated in the 20th century.’

Between the 17th and 19th Century, much of Europe and North America experienced a ‘Little Ice Age’, with significantly colder winters.

For example, in 1678 the villagers of Fiesch, in the Swiss canton of Valais began a holy pilgrimage to rid themselves, by means of prayer, of the glaciers which were encroaching on their pasture lands. A few years ago, the glaciers began retreating due to global warming. On Tuesday this week, the annual procession reversed its usual liturgy, and began Vatican-sanctioned prayers to prevent the glaciers shrinking.

The glaciers are retreating at about 10 metres per year and cracks are appearing in some, causing worries about catastrophic floods.

The Swiss are renegotiating their border with Italy, due to the reduction in size of glaciers. Environmentalists are suggesting the creation of hydro-electric schemes to utilise the greatly augmented melt waters.

In Greenland last month, a giant chunk of ice broke off from the Petermann Glacier, forming a giant 120 square kilometre iceberg, more than three times bigger than Colombo City. This followed an ‘unprecedented’ rate of melting of Greenlands icecap in mid-July, revealed by satellite data from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Effective action

The ice melt was discovered from radar data from the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Oceansat-2 satellite and confirmed by figures from Nasa and US Air Force satellites.

They showed that 40 percent of the surface of the ice-sheet had melted by July 8, which expanded to 97 percent by July 12.

NASA indicated that the record melting may have been driven by an unusually strong ridge of warm air, a ‘heat dome’, which started to move over Greenland on July 8 and hovered over the ice sheet, dissipating by July 16.

This event has deep significance. ‘Arctic ice is a key feedback,’ Karl Braganza, the climate monitoring manager at the Melbourne Bureau of Meteorology, a contributor to the annual State of the Climate report, told the Sydney Morning Herald ‘and the warming in the Arctic has been slightly faster than was predicted 10 or 20 years ago’.

He says scientists find this ‘alarming’. The latest data gives credence to the direst predictions of the climate change theorists. Unless the ‘International Community’ starts taking effective action, we may all be in for a re-run of the Biblical flood.