CLIMATE CHANGE

On February 15, as he has done many times in the past, George Will of The Washington Post wrote a howler-filled column about global warming. The gist echoed a point Will has often made: Environmentalist doomsayers like to scare us, but they’re often flat wrong. To this end, the article contained a head-scratchingly long and pseudo-referenced paragraph, making the-oft refuted claim that during the 1970s, the scientific community was convinced that “global cooling” had arrived. In reality, while a few scientists were indeed worried about cooling at the time, and some journalists wrote alarmist stories about the subject, there was no consensus like there is today about human caused global warming.


How to make the case that we still need these hallowed gray newspapers to police our society and discourse?

Will’s column also took several other angular swipes at the mainstream scientific understanding of climate change’s human causation, without directly taking it on. In one case, it cited the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center to claim that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” In other words, we’re not really warming up—the ice is doing fine. (The Arctic Climate Research Center quickly repudiated Will’s assertion.) In closing, meanwhile, Will made this truly extraordinary claim: “According to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.”

As the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization are central scientific authorities that have long supported the idea of human-caused global warming, this was a particular shocker.
In essence, then, a number of Will’s claims—about “global cooling,” sea ice, and the WMO—were either flatly false or extraordinarily misleading, whether due to dishonesty, ignorance, or some combination of both. This wasn’t necessarily new for Will, any more than it is new for a number of other conservative columnists or pundits who write about global warming. But for some reason, the outrage this time built and fed upon itself. There’s no way to fully list all the things that have since been posted about the matter-the volume is far too great—but Joe Romm of Climate Progress seems to have kicked it off; Adam Siegel of EnergySmart has a very comprehensive overview; the folks at Media Matters and TalkingPointsMemo have driven the story; and Brad Johnson of the Wonk Room has not only written about the controversy in detail but gotten responses from the Post itself. In short, the paper takes the cowardly route and refuses to correct Will’s copious errors of fact, interpretation, and so forth. It equivocates. And it claims that Will’s column was fact-checked by multiple people “to the fullest extent possible.”



By George F. Will
Sunday, February 15, 2009; B07

A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be." Energy Secretary Steven Chu, an atomic physicist, seems to embrace that corollary but ignores Gregg Easterbrook's "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong.

Chu recently told the Los Angeles Times that global warming might melt 90 percent of California's snowpack, which stores much of the water needed for agriculture. This, Chu said, would mean "no more agriculture in California," the nation's leading food producer. Chu added: "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going."

No more lettuce or Los Angeles? Chu likes predictions, so here is another: Nine decades hence, our great-great-grandchildren will add the disappearance of California artichokes to the list of predicted planetary calamities that did not happen. Global cooling recently joined that lengthening list.

In the 1970s, "a major cooling of the planet" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950" (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the "cooling trend" could result in "a return to another ice age" (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The "continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that "a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery" (International Wildlife, July 1975). "The world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of "ominous signs" that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down," meteorologists were "almost unanimous" that "the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was "cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool," glaciers had "begun to advance" and "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).

Speaking of experts, in 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.

An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser. Credentialed intellectuals, too -- actually, especially -- illustrate Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

An unstated premise of eco-pessimism is that environmental conditions are, or recently were, optimal. The proclaimed faith of eco-pessimists is weirdly optimistic: These optimal conditions must and can be preserved or restored if government will make us minimize our carbon footprints and if government will "remake" the economy.

Because of today's economy, another law -- call it the Law of Clarifying Calamities -- is being (redundantly) confirmed. On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked which of 20 issues should be the government's top priorities. Climate change ranked 20th.

Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.





Welcome. This website is a portal to recent research related to Arctic climate and climate change at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois.

** NEW ** Global climate models (GCMs) are being used more and more to diagnose and project future climate changes in the Arctic. We are currently producing a set of animations illustrating the use of GCMs in addressing some of the most pressing questions related to Arctic climate change.

Observed Climate Change

Recent observed surface air temperature changes over the Arctic region are the largest in the world. Winter (DJF) rates of warming exceed 4 degrees C. over portions of the Arctic land areas (shown left). We provide Arctic temperature trends and changes of other primary surface variables (e.g., sea level pressure, precipitation, sea ice cover) archived in this climate summary, portions of which are published each year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Sea ice extent averaged over the Northern Hemisphere has decreased correspondingly over the past 50 years (shown right). The largest change has been observed in the summer months with decreases exceeding 30%. Decreases observed in winter are more modest. We maintain this updated archive of sea ice concentrations and extents at the University of Illinois Department of Atmospheric Sciences.

Current sea ice and snow conditions (shown left) are available from the Cryosphere Today, in which we provide ice concentrations and snow depth for a variety of map projections. Timeseries of Northern Hemisphere and regional sea ice area and anomalies are also provided and updated daily.

Links to our additional recent observed climate related research:
Evaluation of the ERA40 reanalyses for the Arctic
Submitted paper: Seasonality of observed and projected climate change
Submitted paper: Antarctic temperature analyses
Coldwave research
Surface air temperature distribution skewness
Evaluation of climatic conditions favoring Alaskan forest fires
Antarctic temperature analyses

Modelled Arctic Climate Change

Analysis of output from 15 global climate models for use in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (due in 2007) can be seen here. We evaluate the sensitivity of the Arctic climate to three different greenhouse gas scenarios. The archive shows that variations of temperature projections using different greenhouse gas scenarios are similar to the inter-model variability projected by the 15 different models. Projected changes (from late 20th-century climate state) of surface air temperature, sea level pressure, and precipitation for 3 20-year timeslices of the 21st-century are included.

At the bottom of this link, we evaluate the biases of simulated temperature, sea level pressure, and precipitation fields from the corresponding variables in the ERA40 reanalysis for the 1958-2000 period. The biases in surface air temperature over the Arctic can exceed 15 deg. C over climatalogical sea ice regions (see right) and the Arctic-region biases often exceed those found anywhere else on the globe.

Our work on the IPCC report is an extension to our recent work on the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report and past work identifying a fingerprint of enhanced greenhouse warming in the Arctic (left).

The seasonality of recent observed changes (1948-2003: from the NCEP reanalyses) with changes projected by a composite of 5 GCMs for the next century, correlate well for surface air temperature (right) and sea level pressure. The seasonality correlations drop off substantially for precipitation, however. We have created plots of recent observed changes and projected changes, as well as the correlations of the annual cycle of changes between observations and projections here.

These images of Alaska link to a set of climate change scenarios for created specifically for Alaska. The climate change scenarios are downscaled from a set of global climate model projections to a high resolution domain for Alaska and for approximately three hundred specific population centers and locations of interest.

Finally, this link provides access to an online set of animations of observed and projected changes of surface air temperature, precipitation, and sea ice that we created for the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers: Episode "Hot Times in Alaska". Alan Alda hosts this interesting series.


Basic Information

Climate Change or Global Warming?
The term climate change is often used interchangeably with the term global warming, but according to the National Academy of Sciences, "the phrase 'climate change' is growing in preferred use to 'global warming' because it helps convey that there are [other] changes in addition to rising temperatures."
Climate change refers to any significant change in measures of climate (such as temperature, precipitation, or wind) lasting for an extended period (decades or longer). Climate change may result from:
• natural factors, such as changes in the sun's intensity or slow changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun;
• natural processes within the climate system (e.g. changes in ocean circulation);
• human activities that change the atmosphere's composition (e.g. through burning fossil fuels) and the land surface (e.g. deforestation, reforestation, urbanization, desertification, etc.)
Global warming is an average increase in the temperature of the atmosphere near the Earth's surface and in the troposphere, which can contribute to changes in global climate patterns. Global warming can occur from a variety of causes, both natural and human induced. In common usage, "global warming" often refers to the warming that can occur as a result of increased emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities.

The Earth's climate has changed many times during the planet's history, with events ranging from ice ages to long periods of warmth. Historically, natural factors such as volcanic eruptions, changes in the Earth's orbit, and the amount of energy released from the Sun have affected the Earth's climate. Beginning late in the 18th century, human activities associated with the Industrial Revolution have also changed the composition of the atmosphere and therefore very likely are influencing the Earth's climate.

The EPA climate change Web site has four main sections on climate change issues and another section on "What You Can Do" to reduce your contribution. A "Frequent Questions" section is available, and EPA has provided a frequent questions database where users can search for more specific questions and answers on climate change.

Science | U.S. Climate Policy | Greenhouse Gas Emissions | Health and Environmental Effects | What You Can Do

Science

For over the past 200 years, the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, and deforestation have caused the concentrations of heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" to increase significantly in our atmosphere. These gases prevent heat from escaping to space, somewhat like the glass panels of a greenhouse.