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Climate Change Report Says We’re Worse Off Than We Thought

Katie Fehrenbacher | posted on June 19, 2008

If all this attention to cleantech was starting to make you feel all warm and fuzzy, there’s a report out this week that could kill that glow. The oceans are warming and the sea levels are rising faster than previously predicted. According to a group of researchers, that 2007 report from the Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change actually underreported the rise in both ocean temperature and sea levels from 1961 to 2003 by a very significant 50 percent. Oops.

The new report was created by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Center for Australian Weather and Climate Research, and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center. The researchers say they have corrected for “systematic biases” in standard ocean observation techniques and also used statistics to fill in missing information.

Sea levels can rise by both thermal expansion of the heated seas and melting bodies of ice. The new report found that thermal expansion caused a greater rise in sea levels than the IPCC had previously reported — 0.53 millimeter per year, compared with 0.32 mm per year, according to the Agence France-Presse. The results are being reported in this week’s Nature.

In the grand scheme of things this means that we just need all these technologies scaled up faster if we’re ever going to find a global fix for climate change.

Originally published here: http://earth2tech.com/2008/06/19/climate-change-report-says-were-worse-off-than-we-thought/


1 COMMENT SO FAR


posted by: Kerry Bradshaw on June 19th, 2008 at 9:15 pm


Why would anyone try to measure the depth of the oceans
when the concern is the shoreline and temperature? Obviously that’s the only conceivable reason for measuring ocean depth, but what’s the prupose if the only interest we have is in either determining global warming or shoreline destruction? If you want to measure shoreline recession, etc. then that’s what you do: you don’t attempt to measure an indirect correlative and one far more difficult (i.e. attempting to measure sea levels, which must be horrendously error prone and difficult, as evidenced by the supposed massive previous error). If you want to measure global warming, then, guess what? That’s right - you should measure global TEMPERATURES, not sea levels, which is infinitly more difficult. This sounds like junk science. Nor should anyone asssume that just because this study is more recent than the previous one that it is any better. You also have to wonder about the errors of measurement involved. Quite frankly, I don’t see any reason to pay attention to research like this that avoids the main issue of concern.


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