Climate change science gets more compelling as politicians fiddle
The politics and the science of global warming remain far apart. International climate negotiators in Doha, Qatar this week began talking about a climate treaty to be agreed by 2015 and implemented by 2020, when all that was supposed to be finished in Copenhagen three years ago. Inspiring. Meanwhile, the evidence supporting the broad international scientific consensus on climate change is only becoming more compelling, with three big, peer-reviewed studies out this week alone.
Meanwhile...
In the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Thursday, scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere further solidified the link between human activity and rising global temperatures. The researchers compared the findings of complex climate models against three decades of direct satellite observations. In response to human-related emissions, the models show a particular pattern of temperature change — cooling in the upper atmosphere, warming in the lower atmosphere. That pattern, the scientists found, is also present in the satellite record. Using similar methods, they also found that natural climate variability is extremely unlikely to explain the modeled and observed results.
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As scientists continue to articulate the risks of global warming, the best policy response is obvious — put a common price on carbon emissions and apply pressure on big polluting countries who refuse. But it's still anyone's guess when the politics will finally catch up.
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