Global Warming may be worse than many scientists think

[IrateCitizen]

NOW with Bill Moyers ran an excellent piece on Global Warming this past week, highlighting the work done by UC-Berkeley scientist John Harte. Dispensing with computer models, Harte set out to do an experiment in a Colorado Rocky Mountain meadow in which he used overhead heaters to warm up several strips of actual alpine meadow a small amount (I believe it was 1-2 degrees C).

His results were startling. In place of the grasses and flowers prevalent in the control cells, the experiment cells were overcome with sagebrush. In his words, Colorado will become more like Nevada as climate change acclerates. Perhaps most alarming was the fact that tests on the soil of the experiment cells detected a much lower carbon content than in the control cells -- meaning that as temperatures rise, carbon in the soil is released into the atmosphere as gas, accelerating the process.

Anyway, you can read an interview with John Harte here: http://www.pbs.org/now/science/climateqanda.html. A choice excerpt:

BRANGHAM: I sometimes hear people on talk radio dismissing global warming, saying, "You know, I'm sick of shoveling the snow. I'm sick of the cold. Let's let it get a little warmer."

JOHN HARTE: Well, if those people like to eat food, they should understand that their food is grown on farms. And if they live in the western United States, the chances are those farms are irrigated. They're irrigated with water from snow melt. And without snow, the west would lose its water supply to irrigate its crops, and provide food for all of us.

If you live out here in the west, you probably like to ski. Well, guess what's likely to happen to the ski resorts over the next 50 years? They're gonna go outta business, because there won't be enough winter snow to provide good ski slopes. They may think they're going to create artificial snow from water in the rivers. What water? It's not gonna be there for them.

So we're gonna see drought conditions, losses of water supplies. We're likely to see effects on coastal zones from sea level rise. If these people who don't like to shovel snow think about-- the folks that live along the coast lines, they might feel a little bit concerned for their livelihood, as sea level-- inundates coastal communities. In fact, will lead to the loss of entire island nations in the South Pacific.

The effects of global warming just on heat waves in our southern cities is going to be important. We're gonna get the problem of what I will call killer heat waves. Right now, in cities like Phoenix, we get periods each summer where the temperature is up at 110, 115 degrees, for a few days. We're gonna see longer periods with even hotter temperatures in these cities. And it's going to make life extremely uncomfortable, and unhealthy for people living there.

There's another explanation for the lack of concern on the part of some people about global warming. And it has to do with the fact that projected warming for the next century is on the order of six degrees Fahrenheit, eight degrees Fahrenheit. And people would say, "Well, what's so big a deal about six degrees warmer temperature?" "After all," they might say, "if I walk out of my house this morning, and it's six degrees warmer than yesterday, I probably wouldn't even notice it unless I heard the weather man say it. So, why should we be concerned?" Well, it's important to understand that on a global basis, a six degree warming is a huge event. If you go back 20,000 years ago, when much of North America was under ice, we were in the depths of the last Ice Age, and all around the planet, we were under much colder, Ice Age conditions, it was a hugely different climate than today. Well, if you look at what the global average temperature was then, and compare it to the global average temperature today, it's only about 12 or 15 degrees hotter today than it was then. So, six degrees is about half as big a warming as the warming from the last Ice Age to the present. So, that's a big affect.

It's interesting. That in all of human history, and in fact, if you go back over the last many millions of years, the world has never experienced a global average temperature that's six degrees hotter than today. So, we will be in unknown climate territory in 50 years.

Scary stuff, indeed.... :scared:

[Tamyrlin79]

1. Rule of Thumb:

The situation is always worse than gets reported.

[brokensymmetry]

2. Yikes!

Thanks for posting this!