Global Warming – the facts

Much ink has been spilled, breath expended and heat generated over the subject of global warming, often in the form of uninformed and often partisan opinion and unjustified accusatory diatribes. In an attempt to clear the air, I would like to present what is known about current climate change and how well we know it. I will make no predictions, references to societal impact or include any political opinions; instead I will present only the science and how well we know it. Readers can draw their own conclusions about the future.

I will base this essay partly on the Synthesis Report derived from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was prepared by approximately 50 scientists from a much larger document derived from the research of many more climate scientists, including those from Penn State. Although public discussion seldom includes known uncertainties in the data, I will attempt to provide some balance by referring to the IPCC confidence levels (in italics).

Global average temperatures, based on almost 30,000 data series , show small fluctuations from year to year amidst a clear rise of almost 1 degree Fahrenheit (° F) between 1910 and 1940. Global average temperature remained fairly flat from 1940 to 1960, after which it rose once again with increasing steepness by another degree until the ‘present’ (2007). Eleven of the previous twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the warmest years of the instrumental record since 1850. Increases are widespread over the entire globe, are greater at northern latitudes and tend to be smaller in the southern hemisphere than the northern hemisphere.  Antarctica may be experiencing little change.

When Joseph Stack crashed his plane into the Internal Revenue Building in Texas this past February, he became the first indigenous American suicide bomber. What this destructive act intended to accomplish or did accomplish, other than smash a number of windows and kill a Vietnam veteran who was looking forward to retirement, is not clear. On the surface, what provoked Stack to commit this act was anger, sheer unbridled anger, ostensibly at the government. Why he did this is a question that requires one to look below the surface motivations.