News from the world . . . .
Yesterday's lead editorial from the Washington Post:
Undeniable Global Warming
By Naomi Oreskes
Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page B07
Many people have the impression that there is significant scientific disagreement about global climate change. It's time to lay that misapprehension to rest. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that Earth's climate is heating up and human activities are part of the reason. We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it.
The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program, the IPCC is charged with evaluating the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action. In its most recent assessment, the IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities . . . are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents . . . that absorb or scatter radiant energy. . . . [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."
The IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. A National Academy of Sciences report begins unequivocally: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and it answers yes. Others agree. The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have all issued statements concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.
Despite recent allegations to the contrary, these statements from the leadership of scientific societies and the IPCC accurately reflect the state of the art in climate science research. The Institute for Scientific Information keeps a database on published scientific articles, which my research assistants and I used to answer that question with respect to global climate change. We read 928 abstracts published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 and listed in the database with the keywords "global climate change." Seventy-five percent of the papers either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view. The remaining 25 percent dealt with other facets of the subject, taking no position on whether current climate change is caused by human activity. None of the papers disagreed with the consensus position. There have been arguments to the contrary, but they are not to be found in scientific literature, which is where scientific debates are properly adjudicated. There, the message is clear and unambiguous.
To be sure, a handful of scientists have raised questions about the details of climate models, about the accuracy of methods for evaluating past global temperatures and about the wisdom of even attempting to predict the future. But this is quibbling about the details. The basic picture is clear, and some changes are already occurring. A new report by the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment -- a consortium of eight countries, including Russia and the United States -- now confirms that major changes are taking place in the Arctic, affecting both human and non-human communities, as predicted by climate models. This information was conveyed to the U.S. Senate last month not by a radical environmentalist, as was recently alleged on the Web, but by Robert Corell, a senior fellow of the American Meteorological Society and former assistant director for geosciences at the National Science Foundation.
So why does it seem as if there is major scientific disagreement? Because a few noisy skeptics -- most of whom are not even scientists -- have generated a lot of chatter in the mass media. At the National Press Club recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen dismissed the consensus as "religious belief." To be sure, no scientific conclusion can ever be proven, absolutely, but it is no more a "belief" to say that Earth is heating up than it is to say that continents move, that germs cause disease, that DNA carries hereditary information or that quarks are the basic building blocks of subatomic matter. You can always find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions represent our best available science, and therefore our best basis for reasoned action.
The chatter of skeptics is distracting us from the real issue: how best to respond to the threats that global warming presents.
The writer is an associate professor of history and director of the Program in Science Studies at the University of California.
And for yet more environmental mayhem and disaster (that probably doesn't alarm you as much if you don't live on a small island . . .):
11,500 dead as tidal waves strike across Asia
AFP
JAKARTA (AFP) - Some 11,477 people were killed and thousands more were missing after a powerful earthquake triggered giant tidal waves that slammed into coasts across southern Asia, swallowing villages and wreaking death and devastation on beach resorts.
The quake, the fifth largest ever recorded measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale, struck off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, unleashing tsunamis that hit Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Indonesia, the Maldives, Myanmar and Malaysia.
Terrifying walls of water up to 10 metres (33 feet) high were reported across the Indian Ocean, roaring ashore with bewildering speed, sweeping people off beaches, flattening hotels and homes, uprooting trees and overturning cars.
In Indonesia at least 4,185 people were killed as the country took the full force of the earthquake and the ensuing waves. "The wave swept all settlements on the coast, and most houses, on stilts and made of wood, were either swept away or destroyed," said an official in the northwestern Aceh province. "Some areas were under between two and three meters of water for about two hours," he added.
The quake, the most powerful for 40 years, came a year to the day after a temblor in the Iranian city of Bam killed over 30,000 people. Many children were reported to be among the victims in India and Sri Lanka, along with foreign tourists who had flocked to idyllic resorts in Southeast Asia for the Christmas holidays.
South Asia was the worst hit region, with nearly 7,000 deaths reported across Sri Lanka and India and thousands missing. The Sri Lankan government declared a state of disaster as at least 4,300 people, including many children and the elderly, were killed on the island. At least 2,606 people were killed and hundreds more feared dead across south India and the Andaman Islands, Indian officials said. There were scenes of mayhem in Tamil Nadu state, where scores of villages were under water. Local television footage showed bodies being loaded into ambulances.
In Thailand, at least 310 people were killed and more than 5,000 injured in the south of the country, officials said. The nation's top beach attractions were among the worst-hit as monster waves swept scores of people out to sea, drowned snorkellers, sank boats and shattered buildings along the coast. The popular resort of Phuket and the idyllic island of Phi Phi were devastated by the huge waters.
British tourists on the tiny island of Ngai said holidaymakers were given no chance when the tsunamis struck. "Suddenly this huge wave came, rushing down the beach, destroying everything in its wake," Londoner Simon Clark said. "People that were snorkelling were dragged along the coral and washed up on the beach, and people that were sunbathing got washed into the sea."
In Malaysia, 42 people, including many elderly and children, were drowned and many others were missing after tidal waves hit two resort islands.
On the Indian Ocean tourist paradise of the Maldives, a British tourist and 14 other people died after tidal waves lashed the archipelago, officials and witnesses said.
Governments and aid organisations around the world offered messages of sympathy and scrambled to send food, shelter and medicines to nations affected by the tragedy. Aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres said a cargo plane carrying 32 tonnes of medical and sanitary materials would set off for Southeast Asia as soon as possible. Echoing pleas by Asian leaders, Pope John Paul II urged the international community to rush aid to the affected populations.
The United States promised help as President George W. Bush offered his condolences on the "terrible loss of life and suffering." The international Red Cross and Red Crescent organisations launched a five million euro (6.7 million dollar) relief aid appeal.
Reports differed on the exact location and size of the quake. The US Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center initially put the tremor at 8.5 but revised it upwards to 8.9, while the Strasbourg Observatory in France said the tremor hit 8.1 and was located north of Sumatra. Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Office put the quake at 6.8 saying it was centered in the Indian Ocean about 149 kilometres (92.38 miles) south of Meulaboh, a town on the western coast of Aceh.
The USGS said the countries hit Sunday did not possess tsunami warning capability. "It's one of these tragic things that make these hazards which we can't stop into disasters which hopefully technology will start to reduce," spokeswoman Carolyn Bell told AFP.
The tremors were felt as far away as the Thai capital Bangkok, about 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) north of the epicenter, where buildings swayed but no serious damage was reported.
Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 18,000 islands, lies on the Pacific "Ring of Fire" noted for its volcanic and seismic activity, and is one of the world's most earthquake-prone regions. Lying at the collision point of three tectonic plates results in frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as pressure between the massive segments of the Earth's crust is released.
Sunday's quake also sent waves some 7,000 kilometres (4,000 miles) across the Indian Ocean, drowning a handful of people on Africa's east coast and prompting authorities to evacuate beaches and seaside villages.
Undeniable Global Warming
By Naomi Oreskes
Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page B07
Many people have the impression that there is significant scientific disagreement about global climate change. It's time to lay that misapprehension to rest. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that Earth's climate is heating up and human activities are part of the reason. We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it.
The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program, the IPCC is charged with evaluating the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action. In its most recent assessment, the IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities . . . are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents . . . that absorb or scatter radiant energy. . . . [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."
The IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. A National Academy of Sciences report begins unequivocally: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and it answers yes. Others agree. The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have all issued statements concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.
Despite recent allegations to the contrary, these statements from the leadership of scientific societies and the IPCC accurately reflect the state of the art in climate science research. The Institute for Scientific Information keeps a database on published scientific articles, which my research assistants and I used to answer that question with respect to global climate change. We read 928 abstracts published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 and listed in the database with the keywords "global climate change." Seventy-five percent of the papers either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view. The remaining 25 percent dealt with other facets of the subject, taking no position on whether current climate change is caused by human activity. None of the papers disagreed with the consensus position. There have been arguments to the contrary, but they are not to be found in scientific literature, which is where scientific debates are properly adjudicated. There, the message is clear and unambiguous.
To be sure, a handful of scientists have raised questions about the details of climate models, about the accuracy of methods for evaluating past global temperatures and about the wisdom of even attempting to predict the future. But this is quibbling about the details. The basic picture is clear, and some changes are already occurring. A new report by the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment -- a consortium of eight countries, including Russia and the United States -- now confirms that major changes are taking place in the Arctic, affecting both human and non-human communities, as predicted by climate models. This information was conveyed to the U.S. Senate last month not by a radical environmentalist, as was recently alleged on the Web, but by Robert Corell, a senior fellow of the American Meteorological Society and former assistant director for geosciences at the National Science Foundation.
So why does it seem as if there is major scientific disagreement? Because a few noisy skeptics -- most of whom are not even scientists -- have generated a lot of chatter in the mass media. At the National Press Club recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen dismissed the consensus as "religious belief." To be sure, no scientific conclusion can ever be proven, absolutely, but it is no more a "belief" to say that Earth is heating up than it is to say that continents move, that germs cause disease, that DNA carries hereditary information or that quarks are the basic building blocks of subatomic matter. You can always find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions represent our best available science, and therefore our best basis for reasoned action.
The chatter of skeptics is distracting us from the real issue: how best to respond to the threats that global warming presents.
The writer is an associate professor of history and director of the Program in Science Studies at the University of California.
And for yet more environmental mayhem and disaster (that probably doesn't alarm you as much if you don't live on a small island . . .):
11,500 dead as tidal waves strike across Asia
AFP
JAKARTA (AFP) - Some 11,477 people were killed and thousands more were missing after a powerful earthquake triggered giant tidal waves that slammed into coasts across southern Asia, swallowing villages and wreaking death and devastation on beach resorts.
The quake, the fifth largest ever recorded measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale, struck off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, unleashing tsunamis that hit Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Indonesia, the Maldives, Myanmar and Malaysia.
Terrifying walls of water up to 10 metres (33 feet) high were reported across the Indian Ocean, roaring ashore with bewildering speed, sweeping people off beaches, flattening hotels and homes, uprooting trees and overturning cars.
In Indonesia at least 4,185 people were killed as the country took the full force of the earthquake and the ensuing waves. "The wave swept all settlements on the coast, and most houses, on stilts and made of wood, were either swept away or destroyed," said an official in the northwestern Aceh province. "Some areas were under between two and three meters of water for about two hours," he added.
The quake, the most powerful for 40 years, came a year to the day after a temblor in the Iranian city of Bam killed over 30,000 people. Many children were reported to be among the victims in India and Sri Lanka, along with foreign tourists who had flocked to idyllic resorts in Southeast Asia for the Christmas holidays.
South Asia was the worst hit region, with nearly 7,000 deaths reported across Sri Lanka and India and thousands missing. The Sri Lankan government declared a state of disaster as at least 4,300 people, including many children and the elderly, were killed on the island. At least 2,606 people were killed and hundreds more feared dead across south India and the Andaman Islands, Indian officials said. There were scenes of mayhem in Tamil Nadu state, where scores of villages were under water. Local television footage showed bodies being loaded into ambulances.
In Thailand, at least 310 people were killed and more than 5,000 injured in the south of the country, officials said. The nation's top beach attractions were among the worst-hit as monster waves swept scores of people out to sea, drowned snorkellers, sank boats and shattered buildings along the coast. The popular resort of Phuket and the idyllic island of Phi Phi were devastated by the huge waters.
British tourists on the tiny island of Ngai said holidaymakers were given no chance when the tsunamis struck. "Suddenly this huge wave came, rushing down the beach, destroying everything in its wake," Londoner Simon Clark said. "People that were snorkelling were dragged along the coral and washed up on the beach, and people that were sunbathing got washed into the sea."
In Malaysia, 42 people, including many elderly and children, were drowned and many others were missing after tidal waves hit two resort islands.
On the Indian Ocean tourist paradise of the Maldives, a British tourist and 14 other people died after tidal waves lashed the archipelago, officials and witnesses said.
Governments and aid organisations around the world offered messages of sympathy and scrambled to send food, shelter and medicines to nations affected by the tragedy. Aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres said a cargo plane carrying 32 tonnes of medical and sanitary materials would set off for Southeast Asia as soon as possible. Echoing pleas by Asian leaders, Pope John Paul II urged the international community to rush aid to the affected populations.
The United States promised help as President George W. Bush offered his condolences on the "terrible loss of life and suffering." The international Red Cross and Red Crescent organisations launched a five million euro (6.7 million dollar) relief aid appeal.
Reports differed on the exact location and size of the quake. The US Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center initially put the tremor at 8.5 but revised it upwards to 8.9, while the Strasbourg Observatory in France said the tremor hit 8.1 and was located north of Sumatra. Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Office put the quake at 6.8 saying it was centered in the Indian Ocean about 149 kilometres (92.38 miles) south of Meulaboh, a town on the western coast of Aceh.
The USGS said the countries hit Sunday did not possess tsunami warning capability. "It's one of these tragic things that make these hazards which we can't stop into disasters which hopefully technology will start to reduce," spokeswoman Carolyn Bell told AFP.
The tremors were felt as far away as the Thai capital Bangkok, about 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) north of the epicenter, where buildings swayed but no serious damage was reported.
Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 18,000 islands, lies on the Pacific "Ring of Fire" noted for its volcanic and seismic activity, and is one of the world's most earthquake-prone regions. Lying at the collision point of three tectonic plates results in frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as pressure between the massive segments of the Earth's crust is released.
Sunday's quake also sent waves some 7,000 kilometres (4,000 miles) across the Indian Ocean, drowning a handful of people on Africa's east coast and prompting authorities to evacuate beaches and seaside villages.