http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12064-2001Apr12?language=printer

2 Studies Affirm Greenhouse Gases' Effects

Researchers Directly Link Rising Ocean Temperatures, 'Human-Induced' Emissions

By Eric Pianin,Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, April 13, 2001; Page A06

Two studies released yesterday provide the strongest evidence yet that greenhouse gases are causing the Earth's oceans to warm, further bolstering the case that global warming is real and is being caused at least in part by air pollution, researcherssaid.

Previous research had shown that the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans -- covering 72 percent of the Earth's surface -- have collectively warmed on average of about one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit since 1955. But whether that was caused by global warming has been far from clear.

The new studies, based on parallel computer climate models, show a direct connection between rising ocean temperatures and emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that can trap heat within the atmosphere. The models showed that the ocean warming that has been measured over the last half-century is exactly what would be expected from the amount of greenhouse gases that have been emitted into the atmosphere.

"I believe our results represent the strongest evidence to date that the Earth's climate system is responding to human-induced forcing," said Sydney Levitus of the Commerce Department's National Oceanographic Data Center. He is the lead author of one of the studies.

"This will make it much harder for naysayers to dismiss predictions from climate models," added Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is the lead author of the other study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.

The two studies, published in today's issue of the journal Science, come amid an international debate prompted by President Bush's recent decision to abandon the global warming treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997.

Although administration officials have repeatedly described global warming as a real and serious problem, the president contends the treaty is unfair because it would seriously damage the U.S. economy if implemented and because it exempts China, India and developing countries from the tough strictures on industrial emissions.

Bush has ordered a Cabinet-level panel to draft proposals for combating global warming. They will be presented to U.S. allies later this summer. But the president's unilateral decision to pull out of the treaty has infuriated European, Japanese and Canadian leaders who fear Bush may have torpedoed an international negotiation process that has spanned the better part of a decade.

Underscoring the sensitivity of the issue, government scientists involved in the new global warming studies have been cautioned by a Commerce Department spokesperson to "stick with the science rather than delve into policy" in discussing their findings with reporters.

The two studies add to the wealth of recent data on global warming, which, scientists say may be causing changes in weather patterns and shrinking glaciers and permafrost. That, they added, could eventually touch off catastrophic climate changes.

A United Nations panel of scientists concluded earlier this year that the Earth's temperature could rise by as much as 10.4 degrees over the next 100 years -- the most rapid change in 10 millennia and more than 60 percent higher than what the group predicted less than six years ago.

William Patzert, a scientist with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., cautioned that although there is no doubt that the oceans are warming, "there is a lot of natural variability in the oceans." "The trick is to extract the small warming or sea-level rise over the last 50 years and relate that directly to the greenhouse emissions, which have been significant," he added.

Previous studies on the effects of global warming have focused on surface temperatures -- largely because records of past air temperature are more numerous and reach further back in time than those for ocean temperatures. But those studies frequently were off in predicting future rises in temperature, which provided ammunition to skeptics who question the severity of the warming problem.

Levitus and his colleagues spent most of the past decade attempting to build up a comprehensive database of ocean temperatures. "We got tremendous cooperation from almost every nation," he said in an interview, "and the end of the Cold War was very positive. We received data from Russia that previously was classified. We also received help from the British and U.S. navies."

Last year, Levitus and his colleagues determined an average for how much the oceans had warmed by compiling millions of deep ocean temperature measurements from 1948 through 1995. But they couldn't say for sure whether the heat came from greenhouse warming or just a natural swing in the climate cycle.

To solve that riddle, Levitus and Barnett each used a different sophisticated computer model of the Earth's climate to simulate how ocean temperature should respond to current levels of greenhouse gases and other modern atmospheric conditions. Both models predicted an amount of warming similar to what scientists subsequently measured.

As a precaution, the scientists ran five simulations and averaged their results together. They also ran the model without the extra greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols produced by human activity. Without the "fingerprint" of man-made gases, the simulated ocean did not warm significantly.

"What we found is that the signal is so bold and big that you don't have to do any fancy statistics to beat it out of the data," Barnett said. "It's just there, bang."

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

-- Swissrose (cellier3@mindspring.com), April 13, 2001

Answers

Thank goodness someone is sure of himself and knows what's going on, especially when you consider it was only twenty five years ago the same data available at the time "perfectly fit the global cooling computer model".

When someone tells me the oceans have collectively increased in temperature 1/10 degree C. since 1955 I can already tell it's an estimate and not a direct observation. Think about it.

Hell, if he put a jar full of water on his back porch and sealed it tight with a thermocouple inserted, what could he tell you about the temperature of that jar of water for the past fourty five years. Not damn much.

I'm probably missing something. Whatever. Here's another view:

http://www.heartland.org/environment/apr01/evidence.htm

Environment & Climate News April 2001 Contents New evidence casts doubt on global warming

Claims are "based on false data," international team of scientists says

by Robert Matthews

Fresh doubt has been cast on evidence for global warming following the discovery that a key method of measuring temperature change has exaggerated the warming rate by almost 40 percent.

Studies of temperature records dating back more than a century have seemed to indicate a rise in global temperature of around 0.5C, with much of it occurring since the late 1970s. This has led many scientists to conclude global warming is under way, with the finger of blame usually pointed at man-made emissions of such greenhouse gases as carbon dioxide.

Now an international team of scientists, including researchers from the Met Office in Bracknell, Berkshire, United Kingdom, has found serious discrepancies in the temperature measurements, suggesting that the amount of global warming is much less than previously believed.

Measuring water, not air

The concern focuses on the temperature of the atmosphere over the oceans, which cover almost three-quarters of the Earth's surface. While scientists use standard weather station instruments to detect warming on land, they have been forced to rely on the crews of ships to make measurements over the vast ocean regions.

Crews have taken the temperature by dipping buckets into the sea or using water flowing into the engine intakes. Scientists have assumed there is a simple link between the temperature of seawater and that of the air above it.

However, after analyzing years of data from scientific buoys in the Pacific that measure sea and air temperatures simultaneously, the team has found no evidence of a simple link. Instead, the seawater measurements have exaggerated the amount of global warming over the seas, with the real temperature having risen less than half as fast during the 1970s than the standard measurements suggest.

Reporting their findings in the influential journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists say the exact cause of the discrepancy is not known. One possibility is that the atmosphere responded faster than the sea to cooling events such as volcanic eruptions.

A big cut

The findings have major implications for the climate change debate because sea temperature measurements are a key part of global warming calculations. According to the team, replacing the standard seawater data with the appropriate air data produces a big cut in the overall global warming rate during the last 20 years, from around 0.18C per decade to 0.13C.

This suggests that the widely quoted global warming figure used to persuade governments to take action on greenhouse gas emissions exaggerates the true warming rate by almost 40 percent. The team is now calling for climate experts to switch from seawater data to sea- air temperature measurements.

One member of the team, David Parker, of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the Met Office, said the discovery of the discrepancy "shows we don't understand everything, and that we need better observations--all branches of science are like that." Yet according to Parker, the new results do not undermine the case for global warming: "It is raising questions about the interpretation of the sea-surface data."

Even so, the findings will be seized on by skeptics as more evidence that scientists have little idea about the current rate of global warming, let alone its future rate. Climate experts are still trying to explain why satellites measuring the temperature of the Earth have detected little sign of global warming, despite taking measurements during supposedly the warmest period on record.

Some researchers suspect the fault may again lie with the ground- based temperature measurements. They say many of the data come from stations surrounded by growing urban sprawl, whose warmth could give a misleading figure. A study of data taken around Vienna, Austria, between 1951 and 1996 found that the air temperature rose by anything from zero to 0.6C, depending on precisely where the measurements were made.

Robert Matthews is a staff reporter for the UK Telegraph, with whose permission this article is reprinted.

Return to April 2001 contents.

End quoted material.

Tom Beckner

-- Tom Beckner (tbeckner@xout.erols.com), April 13, 2001.

Is the Washington Post article a joke? They compiled millions of deep ocean temperature measurements, used a sophisticated model of the earth's CLIMATE to simulate how ocean temperatures should respond to current levels of grewenhouse gasses and other MODERN ATMOSPHERIC COPNDITIONS and got precisely the one-tenth degree Farenheit increase of SURFACE temperature they were looking for. WOW! Plus or minus what, two or three degrees?

-- Warren Ketler (wrkttl@earthlink.net), April 14, 2001.