Climate change: Visible proof?

Climate-change skeptics have been mighty quiet lately, said The Washington Post in an editorial. After a storm dumped 2 feet of snow on the nation’s capital last winter, Republican Sen. James Inhofe openly mocked concerns about global warming. But this summer has silenced the skeptics. Throughout the globe, record heat waves are scorching cities—from Philadelphia to Moscow to Berlin to Helsinki—and 2010 is now on track to become the hottest year on record. Massive monsoons have flooded the homes of 20 million people in Pakistan and China. With the polar ice sheets shrinking, an island of ice four times the size of Manhattan broke away from Greenland this month, and is making its way toward shipping lanes and oil rigs. Even Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has become a believer, after 100-degree temperatures withered his nation’s wheat crop and set peat bogs afire. “What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us,”
 Medvedev said.

Here we go again, said geophysicist Walter Cunningham in the Houston Chronicle. This is the same, unscientific claptrap that the “global warming alarmists” have been peddling for years. Global temperatures have varied naturally for millennia, due to variations in the Earth’s orbit, solar activity, and ocean currents; mankind has adjusted to these temperature fluctuations “for at least 100,000 years.” But the “true believers” insist on the unproven theory that carbon dioxide from human activities is driving a massive change in the climate. “After years of looking, I have not found one piece of empirical evidence that man-made CO2 has a significant impact on global climate.”

Admittedly, a spate of heat waves and monsoons proves nothing, said Justin Gillis in The New York Times. But scientific data unequivocally shows that extreme weather events have become more extreme, and that there are more of them, with wet areas getting wetter, dry areas getting dryer, and increasingly warm air retaining more water vapor, resulting in more violent storms—including more heavy winter snows. There’s also no doubt that there is about 25 percent more CO2 in the atmosphere than a century ago, and that the Earth has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over that time. Will that trend continue? Will the summer of 2010 become the new normal? “The collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably.”

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