Climate change is here and now and getting personal 3

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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A disturbing development in the march of global warming, revealed in science’s use of the English language.

Not long ago, most climate scientists stuck to the future tense when they talked about the impacts of global warming. Now, they are using the present tense—and using it more and more often.  Now, they tell us the damages have arrived in the United States.

In other words, climate change isn’t just a problem for our kids anymore. It’s here and now and getting personal.

What concerns climate scientists today is not only that the adverse impacts are showing up faster than they expected; it’s that political leaders are moving slower than they should. Climate scientists from around the world will meet next month in Copenhagen “to warn the world’s politicians they are being too timid in their response to global warming,” according to  The Guardian.

They’ll also introduce information to update the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose findings now are considered conservative and “wishy washy” by many in the science community, in light of more recent research and its more extreme conclusions. As Michael Lemonick reports in Yale Environment 360:

Since (2007), new reports have continued to pour in from all over the world, and climate modelers have continued to feed them into their supercomputers. And while a full accounting will have to wait for the next IPCC report, which is already being assembled (but which will not go to the printer until 2014), the news is not encouraging.

The new reports, many of them documented in an October 2008 paper by the World Wildlife Fund, include estimates that sea level rise may be triple what scientists projected just two years ago; that we should start preparing for an average atmospheric temperature rise of 4°C, twice the level the European Union defines as “dangerous”; that the Arctic Circle may be ice-free 20 years ahead of the most pessimistic IPCC projections; that carbon dioxide emissions are accelerating faster than expected; and that some of these adverse impacts already are locked and irreversible for the next 1,000 years.

Last year, the United Nations invoked the present tense in its finding that “nine out of 10 disasters recorded are climate-related, while the number of disasters has doubled to more than 400 annually over the past two decades.” John Holmes, the Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, concluded:

Climate change is not some futuristic scenario, it’s happening today, and millions of people are already suffering the consequences.

I am blessed with several learned colleagues who tolerate my frequent questions about climate science. I asked one of them, Susan Joy Hassol, when the present tense began to appear in the scientific literature on climate damage. Susan would know. From her office in tiny Basalt, Colorado, she is one of the chief writers and editors of reports that have emerged from major national and international climate assessments. Her response:

I’d estimate this (the present tense) began to show up about 5 years ago or so and has been growing each year since. When we published the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment in 2004, we used the word “now” quite a bit, emphasizing that science had moved from being mainly future projections to including current observations of climate changes and impacts. The difference is also apparent between the IPCC 2001 and 2007 reports ...

The science clearly moved in recent years from only being able to attribute the observed global temperature rise to human activity, to being able to establish causal links between human activities and changes in snowpack, seasonal timing of runoff, changes in minimum and maximum temperatures, ocean temperature changes in hurricane formation regions, and so on.

What about impacts in the United States? Hasn’t the present tense appeared here, too, although somewhat later? Said Susan:

I’d say you are correct that the attribution of impacts in the U.S. to human-induced climate change has been later in coming, mainly happening in 2008 ... There are still some people who think that there is nothing in observed change or impacts that can be clearly attributed to human-induced climate change—that it is still primarily a problem for the future, not the present. I believe they are wrong and that the recent science supports my belief. As you say, it is here and now, personal and local, and growing.

Back in 2005, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies convened scores of experts in Colorado to analyze the gap between what scientists were saying and what the public was willing to do. Dan Abbasi, then associate dean, wrote the conference report and this conclusion:

The problem of climate change is almost perfectly designed to test the limits of any modern society’s capacity for response—one might even call it the “perfect problem” for its uniquely daunting confluence of forces.

One of those daunting forces is the “psychological barriers that complicate apprehension and processing of the issue, due in part to its perceived remoteness in time and place”. Abbasi continued:

The fact is that there is surprisingly little hard evidence about which of the many climate change related risks are of greatest concern to the American population.

Four years later, climate change and its risks are remote no more. For example, a fresh report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, currently in draft form and undergoing public review, concludes:

Climate-related changes already have been observed globally and in the United States. These include increases in air and water temperatures, reduced frost days, increased frequency and intensity of heavy downpours, a rise in sea level, and reduced snow cover, glaciers and sea ice ...  These changes are expected to increase and will impact human health, water supply, agriculture, coastal areas, and many other aspects of society and the natural environment.

Or consider this June 2008 report [PDF] from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program:

Changes in extreme weather and climate events have significant impacts and are among the most serious challenges to society in coping with a changing climate. Many extremes and their associated impacts are now changing. For example, in recent decades most of North America has been experiencing more unusually hot days and nights, fewer unusually cold days and nights, and fewer frost days. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense. Droughts are becoming more severe in some regions, though there are no clear trends for North America as a whole. The power and frequency of Atlantic hurricanes have increased substantially in recent decades.

Or this report based on research by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and others, published in January 2008 by Science Express:

Observations have shown the hydrological cycle of the western U.S. changed significantly over the last half of the twentieth century ...  They portend, in conjunction with previous work, a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States.

Or this report ($ub. req’d) by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and several other institutions, and published last year in Nature:

Significant changes in physical and biological systems are occurring on all continents and in most oceans ... Most of these changes are in the direction expected with warming temperatures ... We show that these changes in natural systems since at least 1970 are occurring in regions of observed temperature increases and that these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone.

So, in the face of this overwhelming evidence that climate change is here, how can it be that some politicians still don’t get it? Consider a report four months ago in Politico (see here):

Climate change skeptics on Capitol Hill are quietly watching a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation.  While the new Obama administration promises aggressive, forward-thinking environmental policies, Weather Channel co-founder Joseph D’Aleo and other scientists are organizing lobbying efforts to take aim at the cap-and-trade bill that Democrats plan to unveil in January.

Not to be outdone by prestigious journals and world-class researchers, D’Aleo found a publisher for his own theory that temperature increases in the U.S. are caused by solar activity and ocean temperatures, not carbon emissions. His article appears in the 2009 edition of that august journal of solid science, the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Good luck to the scientists gathering next month to try to spur the world’s politicians into action. In his report four years ago, Dan Abbasi invoked the following words from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. They should be posted prominently on the walls of every legislative body with the power to address global warming:

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time ...  We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.”

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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