On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty

[RedEarth]

On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty
By WILLIAM K. STEVENS
In the decade when I was the lead reporter on climate change for this newspaper, nearly every blizzard or cold wave that hit the Northeast would bring the same conversation at work. Somebody in the newsroom would eye me and say something like, “So much for global warming.” This would often, but not always, be accompanied by teasing or malicious expressions, and depending on my mood the person would get either a joking or snappish or explanatory response. Such an exchange might still happen, but now it seems quaint. It would be out of date in light of a potentially historic sea change that appears to have taken place in the state and the status of the global warming issue since I retired from The New York Times in 2000.

......

The panel said last week that the fact of global warming itself could now be considered “unequivocal,” and certified that 11 of the last 12 years were among the 12 warmest on record worldwide. (The fact of the warming is one thing contrarians no longer deny.)

But perhaps the most striking aspect of the 2007 report is the sheer number and variety of directly observed ways in which global warming is already having a “likely” or “very likely” impact on the earth.

In temperate zones, the frequency of cold days, cold nights and frosts has diminished, while the frequency of hot days, hot nights and heat waves has increased. Droughts in some parts of the world have become longer and more intense. Precipitation has decreased over the subtropics and most of the tropics, but increased elsewhere in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

There have been widespread increases in the frequency of “heavy precipitation events,” even in areas where overall precipitation has gone down. What this means is that in many places, it rains and snows less often but harder — well-documented characteristics of a warming atmosphere. Remember this in the future, when the news media report heavy, sometimes catastrophic one-day rainfalls — four, six, eight inches — as has often happened in the United States in recent years. Each one is a data point in an trend toward more extreme downpours and the floods that result.

All of these trends are rated 90 percent to 99 percent likely to continue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/science/earth/06clim.html?ei=5089&en=53862c0ddd77d1c0&ex=1328418000&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

[rock]

1. It's still amazing to me that many people

think anecdotal evidence trumps scientific evidence.

[GliderGuider]

2. Not really that surprising

A person can perceive a current condition much more easily than they can detect a trend. GW is all about detecting the trend within the noise of daily life. When weighing the immediate evidence of our senses against the intellectual knowledge of science, our animal nature gives much more importance to our senses. This is understandable, because death from exposure is a much more immediate threat than a few more days of rain or a few more warm nights per year.

I'm actually impressed (not to mention relieved) that we finally seem to be paying so much attention to the science.

[phantom power]

3. And yet "sitting on our thumbs" is not giving way to "doing something."

[Dead_Parrot]

4. Patience, PP

Give it another 50 years or so and something is bound to happen.