[Vision2020] For Pat:Daily News Op-Ed: Human Effects On Climate Change Are Real

[Ted Moffett]

All:

Note that what I wrote about atmospheric CO2 levels reaching 500 ppm by
around 2100 is now, given recent data, almost certainly overly optimistic.
Given current CO2 emission rates, we will reach 500 ppm much sooner

Ted Moffett

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, 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 ! a! ges and interglacials.

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 t! hat the evidence 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, in Scientific 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-scientific skepticism, 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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