Posted by ActiveX on September 6, 2008, 2:24 am, in reply to "Re: ice core data CO2 temperature discrepancy"
24.18.77.X
As a PhD air pollution scientist with about 65 research publications, I have yet to receive any funding either to support or deny global climate change. However, I have studied this topic since 1968, when I was an UCLA chemistry student viewing CO2 concentration data from Mauna Loa Observatory. Thus, 40 years ago, I knew enough about IR absorption spectroscopy to make a rough estimate from the Mauna Loa data trend that the global warming signal would rise above background noise levels in about 30 years. I have mentioned this estimate to many over the years. Now time shows I was dead on. In fact, all of the last 1,000 related peer-reviewed research studies basically agree with me. And it appears that only Big Oil-funded researchers, plus a handful of crackpot "scientists" now seriously reject this position. (I could show you my own vetting of these people, but that would be another article. For reasonable verification, just look up global warming controversy in wikipedia).
There remains little doubt among serious research scientists that global warming will eradicate summer arctic sea ice within 25 years. This will increase arctic absorption of solar radiation, due to decreased albedo, a positive feedback effect. We also agree that large quantities of potently global warming methane will probably be released from the arctic permafrost, as it thaws. It's probably a bit late to forestall these two nearer-term tipping points, since there is about an 8 year warming hysteresis, or lag if you will, in the atmospheric CO2 loop between CO2 level and warming. This is also compounded by more recent observations that our current climate models are still too conservative regarding the warming rate. The observational data now indicate essentially double the glacial retreat rate, along with more rapid increases in other global warming symptoms than had been forecast by the usual suite of climate models. I.e., it's worse than we had thought.
In fact, the current controversy among climate scientists has moved beyond whether global warming is an anthropogenic effect and whether we will encounter these nearer term tipping points, to if and when we will experience catastrophic, runaway global warming.
On the runaway greenhouse effect issue, I am personally more hopeful than my Euro colleagues who feel that the U.S. political climate will not shift rapidly enough to forestall more ominous global climate changes. Certainly, I concede that those living another 30 years are in for considerably warmer weather in most locations. But I think we still have the possibility of keeping our Antarctic and Greenland ice caps from melting completely over the next 100 years. However, any further stalling by political scoundrels paid by the fossil fuel industry will soon make this all but impossible.
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