Accelerating warming alarms more than just liberals

To The Daily Sun,

Bruce Jenket recently wrote, “Democratic candidates have turned a less than 1-degree Celsius increase in temperature over the last 100 years into world Armageddon. Here is the data that no one on the left wants you to see. (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature).”

Above the graph on that page is this: “Given the size and tremendous heat capacity of the global oceans, it takes a massive amount of accumulated heat energy to raise Earth’s average yearly surface temperature even a small amount. Behind the seemingly small increase in global average surface temperature over the past century is a significant increase in accumulated heat. That extra heat is driving regional and seasonal temperature extremes, reducing snow cover and sea ice, intensifying heavy rainfall, and changing habitat ranges for plants and animals—expanding some and shrinking others.”

The graph also shows that uninterrupted warming began around 1975. You can see that “According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies … the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.8°Celsius (1.4°Fahrenheit) since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15-0.20°C per decade.” The warming rate is accelerating, not increasing at the same pace every decade. An important point.

Let’s look at another statement from NASA: “As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degree Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.”

Bruce thinks a change of around a degree over 50 or 100 years is nothing but it took 5000 years for the temperature to rise 4 to 7 degrees. Call it 5 degrees and that is one degree per 1,000 years! So one degree per century (0.1 degree per decade) should be seriously considered as abnormal just as the recent unprecedented rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 is. But now we are nearing 0.20 degree Celsius per decade which would mean 2 degrees a century or 20 times the rate of warming over that 5,000 years.

According to the IPCC’s 2007 report, the total heat accumulated in the environment from 1961 to 2003 was estimated as 15.9 x 10^22 Joules, 14.2 of that in the oceans. The National Oceanographic Data Centre found that in the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean, the heat content had risen approximately 5 x 10^22 Joules since 2003. From the ocean surface to 700 meters, the increase was 20 x 10^22 Joules since 1974! Combining the data available, Solar Energy researcher Glenn Tamblyn estimated that the amount of heat added to Earth from 1961 to 2011 was about 133 Terawatts. That is equivalent to two Hiroshima bombs going off every second for 50 years! That’s 1.6 billion nukes.

Believing in anthropogenic climate change is not a “left” thing. According to Pew and Gallup, around 2/3 of Americans believe it and want climate action. Liberals make up only 26% of the electorate.

James Veverka

Tilton