The looming apocalypse … again

For some reason, I watched the NBC Nightly News tonight. Lester Holt was the weekend anchorman. About the second story was a breathlessly urgent story about how time has simply run out to stop global warming. If the world does not act now - right this very minute! - to reverse the greenhouse effect, then it will be too late. The linked report is not a transcript of the broadcast report, which, as of now, is still viewable online at msnbc.com under the title, "strong warming warning." It's javascript, so there's no link to it.

Specifically, the broadcast segment says that "catastrophic" consequences will begin within 13 years unless by 2012 the world reduces CO2 emissions to five percent below 1990's level. The text story says,

As early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia’s large cities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, according to the report.

Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water, says the report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore this year.

The panel portrays the Earth hurtling toward a warmer climate at a quickening pace and warns of inevitable human suffering. ...

"Hurtling" toward warming at a "quickening pace" with "inevitable human suffering"! And as further proof of global warming, South America is having one of the coldest springtimes on record. There's suffering, all right - from the cold.

The report also quotes U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon as saying he "witnessed the devastation of climate change in disappearing glaciers of Antarctica... ." You know, these "disappearing" glaciers:



The white area is the land mass of Antarctica. The purple area is the sea ice, the color indicating that its concentration is at or near 100 percent. This image is from the University of Illinois' cryosphere center, which shows that Antarctic sea ice has been steadily growing since 1978.


Click for full-size image

It's true, as the cryosphere center also shows, that Arctic-area sea ice has been falling in volume, but Antarctic ice has been growing. So in what way is global warming, well, global? And how does a theory of atmospherically-induced global warming account for record low springtime temperatures right now in South America and the growth of sea ice in the south polar regions?

Speaking of Arctic ice, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's news release this week,

A team of NASA and university scientists has detected an ongoing reversal in Arctic Ocean circulation triggered by atmospheric circulation changes that vary on decade-long time scales. The results suggest not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming. [italics added] ...

"Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming," said [James]Morison [of the University of Washington's Polar Science Center Applied Physics Laboratory].

Back in Antarctica,

The Brazilian Base Comandante Ferraz in Antarctica is rationing water. Never in the last twenty years the weather was so cold and snowy this time of the year in the Brazilian post in the South Pole. The nearby lakes that provide water to the base are frozen since September. The heliport that allows the arrival of food and bottled water by air is under three meters of snow. Water for human consumption is limited to the fifty Brazilian researchers in the region and the situations turns more dangerous each day.

The link for that is to this Word document found on Icecap.us.

It would be well to remember that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, IPCC, is primarily a political body rather than a scientific one. And for any political entity anywhere, it is well to remember Den Beste's Law: "The job of bureacracies is to regulate, and left to themselves they will regulate everything they can." Get ready for another round of regulation coming our way.