Year 3, Month 12, Day 5: A New Pair Of Glasses

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer notes that things are, predictably, worse than predicted:

Deniers of human-caused climate change found themselves burdened with more to deny on Wednesday, with disclosure of new evidence that polar ice caps are melting, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing and sea levels around the planet are rising.

The director of the World Meteorological Organization at the United Nations reported that the Arctic ice pack melted over an area larger than the United States during the summer of 2012. The polar ice pack shrank to a record low in September before slowly beginning its fall and winter growth.

“The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far reaching changes taking place in Earth’s oceans and biosphere: Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” Michel Jarraud, director of the WMO, said in a statement.

Have a nice day! Thank you for shopping Walmart! Sent November 29:

Although current scientific studies of global climate change differ dramatically from one another, they share one absolutely predictable element: the recurring phrase, “worse than predicted.” Sea level rise; Arctic ice melt; storm intensity; drought severity; all these and many more are happening faster and harder than experts imagined. Why?

Climatology, like other areas of science, tends to focus narrowly. Individual researchers or teams concentrate on learning as much as possible about specific phenomena. Only recently have we learned that in a complex system like Earth’s climate, these factors interact, building positive feedback loops of terrifying speed and intensity — an environmental “arms race” with a destructive potential matching that of the Cold War’s escalating nuclear arsenals. While climate scientists are only beginning to understand these deadly synergies, unless global climate negotiations start taking them into account, our policy responses will always be a decade late and a trillion dollars short.

Warren Senders