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Rising global temperatures could have destructive effects on the landscape if measures aren’t taken soon to combat global warming, scientist Linda Mearns of the National Center for Atmospheric Research told an audience during a talk at the Wisconsin Climate Change Forum Tuesday night.
The third annual forum took place in Weeks Hall and addressed a group of students and professors on the future of the global and regional climate.
According to scientific models, she said, if steps in adaptation and mitigation are not taken to reduce global warming, the world is in danger of drastic climactic changes.
“The global temperature right now is the highest that we’ve seen in well over a 1,000 years,” Mearns said.
According to Mearns, the problem includes not only the rapid increase in temperature, but shrinking of the polar icecaps, increased flooding and increased wildfires.
Much of the data backing her claims comes from research she has done as a member of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group led by former Vice President Al Gore, who received the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work with that organization.
The committee has done four assessments of global climate change, starting in 1990.
According to Mearns, much of the assessments are based on computer-generated models, which take past trends and use them to try to predict future changes in the climate.
However, the reliability of these models in predicting future climate is up for some debate. According to Mearns, there is still some room for surprise in their accuracy.
“Dare I say some of the surprises in the world economy in the past few weeks just indicate how surprised we can be by how the world develops in the future,” Mearns said.
Due to the complexity of the models and all the work that has gone into them it is easy to take them for granted, but not everybody was so sure about their dependency.
One man in the audience questioned Mearns several times during her presentation, and some UW students in attendance were hesitant to believe the models as well.
“From a general standpoint it is hard to say whether the models are good. From year to year you notice things change which is more short term stuff,” UW senior Ted Condon said. “At some point you would think things will kind of level off because we are not going to just burn up.”
While addressing the future of Wisconsin’s climate due to global warming, Mearns once again said it is hard to predict.
But in some of her research models we can expect warmer winters with an increase in precipitation. Among the problems that could arise from this temperature increase is enlargement in the number of pests in the upper Midwest.
Whether the future holds massive climactic changes due to global warming has yet to be proven, but according to Mearns, it is a fact that changes in the climate are presently taking place.
“We don’t know all the details about climate change, but we know enough to know that we certainly need to take action now,” she said.
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Globalk warming might be a problem for Wisconsin. It might even be caused by human activity instead of the Sun.
OTOH, glogal cooling would be the death knell for Wisconsin.
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Could we put aside the politics and emotional cries of “crises” and address the hypothesis of Man-Made Global Warming with reason and data? Let’s start with a simple statement of fact: Our planet has been much warmer in the geologic past than it is today. It has also been much cooler. The climate has constantly changed over many glacial epics to accommodate these warming and cooling cycles.
The dire global warming predictions that Mearns so stridently asserts as facts are based on computer models. These ‘Global Warming’ computer models have not and can not be validated. They are unreliable, by any honest scientific standard of validation. Our best current computer models can not predict the local weather 2 weeks from today with 2 degree celcius accuracy. Yet many advocates of Anthropogenic Global Warming, including the politcally motivated United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN-IPCC), would have us believe that they can predict the temperature in Greenland 100 years from now will be 2 - 4 degrees celcius higher and causing global floods and disasters! You don’t have to have advanced degrees in science and engineering to recognize the intrinsic folly of statements like that.
There are many scientists contesting the hypothesis of Man-Made Global Warming. The fundamental physics are challenged (Ref: “Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics” http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161 ). The methods currently used to measure CO2 gas in the atmosphere and within ice core records from Greenland and Antarctica are shown to be be erroneous (Ref: 180 YEARS OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 GAS ANALYSIS BY CHEMICAL METHODS http://www.biomind.de/nogreenhouse/daten/EE%2018-2Beck.pdf ). The correlation of CO2 atmospheric content with ‘global mean temperature’ is challenged and shown to be without merit (Ref: Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide http://www.petitionproject.org/gwdatabase/GWArticle/GWReview_OISM600.pdf ).
Reducing pollution and finding more efficient ways to manufacture and utilize energy is a goal we should all ascribe to. However, strident political assertions of impending disaster based on hotly contested hypotheses, unvalidated computer models, and climatic variables and complexities beyond our current understanding do nothing to support those goals. The politics of imagined “crises” and “disaster” lead to wasted public resources and unanticipated adverse complications. The Law of Unintended Consequences has a way of regularly smiting the Innovation By Governmental Decree League about the head and shoulders. As we are currently witnessing, tax subsidies for grain based ethanol fuel production has lead to higher food prices here in the US and increasing hunger and starvation in undeveloped countries without the financial means to buy the higher priced grains. If you follow Mearns and the UN-IPCCs meritless hystrionic urgings, you will get more such wasted time, effort, tax money, and adverse consequences.
More than 31,000 degreed American scientists have signed a petition stating that “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the foreseeable future, catastrophic heating of the earths atmosphere�.” (Ref: The Glogal Warming Petition Project, http://www.petitionproject.org/ ). Collectively, these Americans urge our government and politicians to reject the Anthropogenic Global Warming hypotheses and any national and international programs or agreements based on them. You should also.
Invictus Maneo