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The middle of March saw the world's most reputable scientists united in outrage
at the action of US president George
W. Bush, who elected not to cap the carbon dioxide emissions of US power
generation facilities, citing the claim that the world's scientists were
yet to agree that carbon dioxide emissions are linked to global warming.
The end of March saw the world's more sensible politicians joining in as
the US president decided that the US economy could not take the strain of
adherence to the Kyoto protocol. Unlike the scientists, who preferred to
remain dispassionate, European politicians in particular were scathing of
Bush and his decision.
As we pointed out in Global warming - too early to judge, August1997,
the problem then was that we could not at that time be certain that carbon
dioxide was the major cause of global warming, but that even then, faced
with the common political stance that we have seen no problems so far, some
scientists were already suggesting that this was a bit like the person who
jumps from the twentieth storey of a building, and reports no problems after
completing 95% of the fall.
We also explained in Former Nobel laureates call for Greenhouse cuts,
October 1997, how more than 1500 of the world's leading senior scientists,
including the majority of Nobel laureates in science, had signed a landmark
consensus declaration urging leaders world wide to act immediately to prevent
the potentially devastating consequences of human induced global warming.
In The Evaporation Paradox, November 1997, we pointed out that
scientists have no shortage of data in support of a trend to global warming:
temperature, precipitation, stream flow and cloud cover records all indicate
that warmer, rainier weather is now more common in many regions of the world.
In that article, we showed how one apparent problem in the theory, the
'evaporation paradox' had been overcome, and by that time, the tide of opinion
was turning.
In Climate Change and Greenhouse Gases, September 1999, we recalled
that the
nature of science and the way science is done means that nothing is ever
totally absolutely proved to be true. Even so, there are
many things that
all scientists believe and accept, because to believe otherwise seems
ludicrous. This was in the context of noting that the vast majority of
scientists were now inclined to favour the view that carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases were at the base of our problems. In that story, we described
how the American Geophysical Union had published a thorough, documented analysis
of the peer reviewed literature, itself rigorously peer-reviewed. The document
included a bibliography of 189 authoritative research studies, and the analysis
was based on those studies. From that time on, anybody who claimed the scientists
were in disagreement was grasping at straws.
The question of global warming, of course, is aside from the risk of coral
bleaching, described in Threat to tropical coral reefs, April 1999,
where there is no room for doubt that carbon dioxide alone is causing the
problem by changing the acidity of the
oceans. Nonetheless,
there remain 'greenhouse deniers', people who will argue that carbon dioxide
is not to blame, and some of those may be reputable (if elderly) scientists
who prefer to cling to an old paradigm, like Wilhelm Ostwald, who refused
to accept the reality of atoms until 1915.
But for any politician to act on the assessment that 'the scientists cannot
agree' is doubly irresponsible; the scientists who are in the best position
to know are in agreement, and even if they were wrong, there is a clear and
present danger, and the precautionary principle tells us that we must act
as though there was no shred of doubt in the mind of any scientist anywhere.
Instead, president George W. Bush has elected to listen to people whose idea
of scientific proof is to say that carbon dioxide is only 0.03% of the atmosphere
and what effect a low concentration like that have?
One slightly emotive response heard around the Internet recently is to note
that an atmosphere containing 0.03% hydrogen cyanide is quite different from
cyanide-free air, and to invite these people to test the difference. This
is admittedly a little childish, though it has the merit of being no more
so than the argument that there is not enough carbon dioxide to have an effect,
but still the 'greenhouse deniers' ask where the smoking gun is, the evidence
that nails CO2 as the source of our worries?
We need look no turther. Scientists from Imperial College, London, have produced
the first direct observational evidence that the Earth's greenhouse effect
increased between 1970 and 1997. Note: they have measured the greenhouse
effect, not any form of global warming
Writing in Nature for March 15, the researchers from the College's Department
of Physics show that there has been a significant change in the Earth's
greenhouse effect over the last 30 years, a finding which is consistent with
concerns over so-called 'radiative forcing' of the climate.
Previous studies in this area have depended on theoretical simulations because
of the lack of data, but the Imperial team reached its conclusions after
analyzing data collected by two different earth-orbiting spacecraft, in 1970
and 1997. This comparison of the two data sets has unequivocally established
that significant changes in greenhouse gas emissions from the Earth have
caused the change to the planet's greenhouse effect over this time period.
In the careful language of science, the scientists observe that'' . . . a
strong link between increases in surface temperatures and greenhouse gases
has been established. But this relationship is complicated by several feedback
processes - most importantly the hydrological cycle - that are not well
understood.''
The team examined the infrared spectrum of long-wave radiation data from
a region over the pacific Ocean, and also over the whole globe. They discovered
significant differences in the levels of atmospheric methane, carbon dioxide,
ozone and chlorofluorocarbons 11 and 12 between the data, collected in 1970
and 1997.
The scientists found that by taking the difference between the two sets of
data for the same region, they observed the change in the outgoing longwave
radiation, and therefore a change in the greenhouse trapping by the
atmosphere. John Harries, the lead author of the paper says: ''These unique
satellite spectrometer data collected 27 years apart show for the first time
that real spectral differences have been observed and that they can be attributed
to changes in greenhouse gases over a long time period.''
Although the two experiments were flown on separate spacecraft, 27 years
apart, the team showed that their comparison of outgoing infrared long-wave
radiation spectra is valid. Even allowing for the different spatial and spectral
resolutions of the two instruments, there are significant changes in the
spectra of the greenhouse gases of the Earth, over this time period.
Comparison data based on different instruments are always open to question,
so the team took a number of steps to ensure that its data were reliable.
The effects of cloud cover were effectively removed by using a cloud-clearing
algorithm. The resulting two datasets were of comparable resolution and
representative of clear-sky conditions. To reduce 'noise' in the data, the
team selected several regions of the globe and calculated clear sky average
spectra. To avoid seasonal artefacts, it used only selected data from the
same three-month period (April-June).
The next step, according to Harries, is to assess whether these data can
provide information about changes in not only the greenhouse gas forcing,
but the cloud feedback, which is a response of the cloud field to that forcing.
But in the meantime, the research shows clearly that greenhouse gases are
involved in the observable and entirely undeniable global warming.
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