11.27.09
Are the Climate Skeptics Right?
RG mail
MOTHER JONES November 27, 2009
THIS WEEK IN THE BLOGOSPHERE
Kevin drum
Are the Climate Skeptics Right?
I got an email this week from an old high school buddy. I haven’t seen him in years, but after he left Pacifica High School a year ahead of me he went off to Princeton and then to UC San Diego, where he got his doctorate in earth sciences. For the last 20 years he’s been a geology professor at Yale University. Smart guy.
His name is Jeffrey Park, and he wanted to alert me to his latest paper, published Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters. The subject of his paper is atmospheric CO2, which, as we all know, is the major greenhouse gas that drives global warming. But that’s in the long term. In the short term, it’s the other way around: Changes in temperature drive changes in the amount of CO2. The strength of this change was last calculated 20 years ago, so Jeff decided it was time for an update.
His results were grim: In the past there used to be a five-month lag between short-term temperature changes and the resulting changes in CO2 levels. Today it’s at least 15 months. So what is it that’s keeping CO2 in the atmosphere so long these days? In the dry language of science, his paper explains: “Our hypothesis implies that human activities have lately outpaced the ocean’s capacity for absorbing carbon.”
Here’s the less technical version: “Think of the oceans like soda,” he says. “Warm cola holds less fizz. The same thing happens as the oceans warm up.” By itself, that’s unsurprising, but the magnitude of the change was much bigger than he expected. Like a lot of other recent results, it suggests, ironically, that climate skeptics are right: Our models of climate change really are wrong. Unfortunately, they’re wrong in the wrong direction. It’s not that global warming isn’t happening, it’s that it’s happening even faster than anyone ever imagined.