[Vision2020] Ted Moffett on Global Warming

[jeanlivingston]

>From tonight's Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

HIS VIEW: Human effects on climate change are real

By Ted Moffett

Friday, February 23, 2007

In “The gloomy global warming gang is no fun,” Ed Iverson attempts
to undermine the recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel On
Climate Change, ignoring hard science regarding historical, present
and projected CO2 levels, and implying the IPCC suppressed evidence
regarding the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age, mocking
efforts to mitigate human impacts on global warming.

A Science magazine article (Nov. 25, 2005: Vol: 310), giving results
of studying atmospheric samples trapped in Antarctic ice cores dating
back 650,000 years, reveals that current CO2 levels of 380 parts per
million are 27 percent higher than the high point of 300 ppm during
this period, according to Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern in
Switzerland. This 650,000-year period covers numerous ice ages
andinterglacials.

Consider that pre-industrial CO2 levels were 270-280 ppm, and that the
current increase to 380 ppm is almost entirely due to human activity.
If CO2 output continues to increase due to human fossil-fuel use, as
it currently is, atmospheric CO2 levels will rise to around 500 ppm by
around 2100.

According to Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Daniel Schrag,
director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, who
accepts the 500 ppm figure for the projected human-caused CO2 increase
in the next century, the last time atmospheric CO2 levels were that
high was 55 million years ago during the Eocene, when ocean levels
were hundreds of feet higher due to the absence of polar ice caps.

I recently listened on C-SPAN as IPCC scientists addressed questions
from a member of the U.S. Congress in hearings held Feb. 8, about the
Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice age answered frankly and
expertly. Iverson’s claims that theevidence of these recent climate
periods is suppressed because this evidence contradicts human induced
climate change theory are unfounded.

On June 14, 2000, in U.S. Congressional briefings on global climate
change, under the auspices of the U.S. Global Change Research Program,
Texas A&M University’s Dr. Thomas J. Crowley presented evidence that
the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age can be explained by
variations in solar output and volcanic activity, but that these
variables do not explain late-20th-century warming.

We hear variations of Iverson’s skeptical theme that natural climate
change explains the current warming trend, not human impacts. But what
if natural climate change variables should be cooling our planet? Why
is this possibility not widely considered by the skeptics of human
-induced global warming?

The climate model theory put forward by William F. Ruddiman, Professor
Emeritus at the University of Virginia, inScientific American, March
2005, focusing on the precession of the equinoxes and solar output
influencing methane and CO2 releases, coordinated with ice ages and
interglacials over hundreds of thousands of years offers compelling
evidence. But his findings suggest we should be entering another
cooling period. Human-induced variables that warm the climate are
overcoming natural climate change. In effect, human activity is now
stopping the next ice age, as we begin to induce temperatures on Earth
far above the moderate temperatures seen during interglacial periods
for tens of thousands of years.

Unless a mitigating variable like an asteroid impact or large-scale
volcanic activity intervenes, we have merely decades to lower CO2
output in absolute amounts, sequester atmospheric CO2, or block solar
energy by artificial means, or radical climate change will occur if
atmospheric CO2 levels reach 500 ppm or higher. The scientific
evidence is compelling. Iverson’s anti-scientificskepticism, which
is hampering efforts to stop human impacts on global warming, is
likely to be viewed by history as not very laughable.

Ted Moffett has a bachelor of science degree in philosophy from the
University of Idaho and lives near Troy.
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