Deborah Byrd, founder of the great EarthSky network, has always had an ear for the language as well as an eye on the sky, and writes this week of two climate change studies, both of which found that the change was happening ten times faster than in the past…in fact, faster than in the past sixty-five million years.
These phrasings seem pretty straightforward, and possibly even hard-hitting, in contrast to the blandly bureaucratic diction of an NOAA administrator, releasing a 2012 State of the Climate report.
“Many of the events that made 2012 such an interesting year are part of the long-term trends we see in a changing and varying climate — carbon levels are climbing, sea levels are rising, Arctic sea ice is melting, and our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place," said Acting NOAA Administrator Kathryn D. Sullivan, Ph.D.
"Interesting?" I guess I'm too sensitive, as a famous poet named Dylan once said, but this kind of bizarrely unemotional language about vast and harmful changes in our world just drives me crazy. Sounds like a mortician discussing an unusual disease detected in an autopsy.
Back to Deborah, who I think does a much better job of putting the news in context.
"Two recent studies suggest that the climate warming occurring on Earth today is happening at a dramatically fast rate. It’s this rate of change, scientists say – the speed with which average global temperatures are expected to climb over the coming decades – that will make the ongoing climate warming troublesome for living things on Earth. Both groups of scientists used the phrase “10 times faster” to describe climate changes. One study, from Stanford University, suggests that climate change is happening 10 times faster than it has at any time in the past 65 million years. The other study, from the University of Texas, suggests that Antarctic permafrost is now melting 10 times faster than in 11,000 years, adding further evidence that Earth’s Antarctic is, in fact, warming just as Earth’s Arctic is.
Climate warming 10 times faster than in 65 million years. In a study announced August 1, 2013, Stanford University climate scientists say that Earth is undergoing one of the largest climate changes in the past 65 million years. They say, moreover, that the change is currently on pace to occur at a rate 10 times faster than any change in 65 million years. Without intervention, these scientists say that this extreme pace could lead to a 5-6 degree Celsius spike in annual temperatures by the end of this century.
Noah Diffenbaugh and Chris Field, both senior fellows at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, published these results as part of a special report on climate change in the August 2013 issue of Science. They conducted a “targeted but broad” review of scientific literature on aspects of climate change that can affect ecosystems, and they investigated how recent observations and projections for climate change in the coming century compare to past events in Earth’s history.
For instance, they compare the current warming to the 5-degree-Celsius temperature hike that occurred 20,000 years ago, as Earth emerged from the last ice age. They say that change was:
… comparable to the high-end of the projections for warming over the 20th and 21st centuries.
The difference is that, at the end of the last ice age, the warming took place over thousands of years. The same warming now is expected to occur over decades. Diffenbaugh and Field note that, as the climate warmed at the end of the last ice age, plants and animals moved northward to cooler climates. Similar (but possibly less successful?) migrations are expected in the coming years.
Diffenbaugh and Field also say in their press release that:
… some of the strongest evidence for how the global climate system responds to high levels of carbon dioxide comes from paleoclimate studies. Fifty-five million years ago, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was elevated to a level comparable to today. The Arctic Ocean did not have ice in the summer, and nearby land was warm enough to support alligators and palm trees."
[graphic from the NOAA report]
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Kit Stolz 