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One of the big reasons that ordinary folks have so much trouble getting their arms around the problem of climate change is that the discussion so often concerns events in the distant past or the remote future. We are either debating climate events from thousands of years ago or worrying about what might happen 100 years from now. Small wonder that recent polls have found the American public to be disengaged from the topic of climate change.
Then there are those who willfully misconstrue the science. Case in point. Nature.com's blog posted a summary of a report that examined climate change during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) of 55 million years ago. The report stated was that only about half of the rise in temperature could be attributed to carbon dioxide. The conclusion of the report's authors was that the models we use today to estimate the effects of carbon emissions on global temperatures were incomplete in some fundamental way.
Well, that unleashed a barrage of news stories trumpeting the fact that global warming climate models had gotten it wrong. USA Today led with the headline "Could we be wrong about global warming?" The denial machinery went into full gear, hailing the end of global warming as a crisis.
Of course, they overlooked one small detail. Yes indeed, the models might be wrong because they might have UNDERSTATED the problem. The report says that for some unknown reason carbon levels rose. This was followed by a rise in global temperature. So far exactly what we are seeing today.
Then for some reason temperatures rose dramatically, suggesting an ADDITIONAL factor. What that feedback mechanism might be remains to be determined, but to say that the models are wrong and that therefore global warming is not real is a complete misreading and misrepresentation of the report. David Beerling of the University of Sheffield put it this way: "The upshot of the study by Zeebe and colleagues is that forecasts of future warming could be severely underestimating the extent of the problem that lies in store for humanity as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere."This article first appeared in PlanetRestart.org
