For many years, the few hold outs in the climate change community from the consensus view that Global Warming is occurring (many of whom are well-funded by major oil, energy and mining interests) have consistently pointed to what they considered to be a giant monkey wrench: the difference in temperature measurements between surface and air temperatures. Typically surface temperatures were generally rising, while temperatures in the lower atmosphere were not. Critics of global warming have long argued that such an inconsistency in those temperature readings demonstrated that emission of man-made greenhouse gases were not having any effect on overall climate
Well now a new government study is out which reconciles those differences, and puts the critics’ claims that global warming is a myth finally to rest:
A government study released yesterday undermines one of the key arguments of climate change skeptics, concluding there is no statistically significant conflict between measures of global warming on the earth’s surface and in the atmosphere.
For years some global warming critics had pointed to the fact that satellite measurements had recorded very little warming in the lower atmosphere, while surface temperature readings indicated that the earth is heating up. Now the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, an interagency body, has concluded the two data sets match.
“The bottom line is there are no significant discrepancies in the rates of warming,” said Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a telephone call with reporters. Karl said reconciling the two sets of temperature readings is “really a major step forward” in understanding climate change.
The report also concluded that humans are driving the warming trend through greenhouse gas emissions, noting in the official news release, “the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, nor by the effects of short-lived atmospheric constituents such as aerosols and tropospheric ozone alone.”
Naturally, of course, just to be balanced, WaPo’s reporter had to interview a spokesman for an influential Republican Senator to criticize the work of the 21 scientists who co-authored the report…
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who maintains there is no evidence that human activity is warming Earth, noted that observed land temperatures have risen about the same amount over the past 30 years as in the period from 1918 to 1945, when industrial sources were emitting fewer greenhouse gases.
“What is clear is that our increased confidence in land-based temperature data in no way implies or supports a conclusion that recent observed warming is due to man instead of natural variability,” said Inhofe’s spokesman, Matthew Dempsey.
Inhofe’s analysis does not account for the acceleration in global surface temperatures since the mid-1970s on top of earlier warming at the turn of the century, Pomerance said, and Earth has now entered the warmest period on record.
[Note: the Pomerance quoted here is “chairman of the Climate Policy Center, a group that advocates mandatory curbs on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. . .”]
Senator Inhofe, by the way, is widely known for claiming that human activity has absolutely nothing to do with global warming. My favorite quote by him on this topic is this one:
“Global warming is ‘the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.'”
Yes. That’s what he said. A giant hoax concocted by those nefarious climate change scientists to dupe the world into emitting fewer greenhouse gases. I wonder if being a senator from a state heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry (Oklahoma) has anything to do with his assertion of that allegation?
Nonetheless, the datasets from this study are pretty damning evidence for all those who have claimed that the differences in temperatures recorded on the surface and in the lower atmosphere were a reason to doubt that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. Furthermore, buried at the bottom of the WaPo story, another the result of another climate change study is referenced which, once again, puts the lie to the Bush administration’s propaganda efforts regarding climate change. And this study involves a topic that the administration would like us all to forget:
In a separate study published Monday in the journal Climate, NOAA scientists determined that human activity has helped warm the area of the tropical Atlantic where many hurricanes originate. The paper, by scientists at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., concluded that human-induced warming “in various tropical ocean basins” could affect the intensity of hurricanes stemming from the region.
Remember all the baloney we heard from the Bush administration last year that global warming had nothing to do with the intensity and frequency of the hurricanes the Gulf Coast and Florida experienced last summer? Hard for NOAA’s spokespeople to claim that now, when the evidence from their own research makes it clear that global warming is a factor in the increased ferocity of hurricanes affecting the United States.
That study on hurricane intensity and global warming deserves a separate, expanded article by the Washington Post. Hopefully it will get one. In the meantime I’ll be monitoring the Real Climate website (a blog maintained by several climate change scientists) for their take on the significance of these studies.
Government Studies on the effects of Global Warming
