22 de janeiro de 2010

E continua ... um momento pedagógico

A revista Nature revisita os principais mitos climáticos ventilados pelos denegacionistas da responsabilidade humana no aquecimento global, ou mesmo da existência desse fenómeno:  

"Climate scientists grapple with real uncertainties, but those who doubt the reality of human-driven global warming usually ignore those issues and, instead, perpetuate a series of claims that do not hold up to scrutiny. What follows is a selection of myths about climate: 

Climate models can't provide useful information about the real world.

Models can reproduce much of the climate variation over the past millennium, but projections for the future are subject to well-described uncertainties, both in the understanding of climate and in estimates of future economic development. They cannot therefore provide decision-makers with exact information of the rate of future changes, but they can offer useful general information and they unconditionally predict a warmer world. 

Global warming stopped ten years ago.

Climate is not weather. The climate is the multi-decade average of the constantly changing state of the atmosphere. Natural variations can cause temperatures to rise and fall from year to year or decade to decade. Although global temperatures did not rise as quickly in the past decade as in previous ones, the most recent decade was the warmest on record. 

Temperatures were higher in pre-industrial times. 

The consensus of proxy-based reconstructions of pre-industrial climate is that the second half of the twentieth century was probably warmer than any other half-century in more than a millennium. Warmer periods did occur in the more distant past, albeit under different orbital and geological conditions. In any case, warm spells in the past do not disprove human influence on climate today. The cause of any particular climate change needs to be investigated separately. 

Temperature records taken in the lower atmosphere indicate that the globe is not warming. 

A decade ago, there seemed to be a discrepancy between surface and tropospheric temperatures. But this issue was resolved when long-standing calibration problems with satellite sensors were discovered. Satellite measurements show that the lower atmosphere is warming at a rate consistent with the predictions of climate models. 

A few degrees of warming are not a big deal. 

In the most recent ice age, the world was only a few degrees cooler on average than it is today. The current rate of warming is in all likelihood unique in the history of humankind. There may be no such thing as an 'optimum' temperature for the planet, but modern human societies are adapted to the weather patterns and sea levels of the past millennia. The rapidity of global warming substantially adds to the problem. 

Measured increases in temperature reflect the growth of cities around weather stations rather than global warming. 

Climate researchers have taken great care to correct for the impact of urbanization in temperature records by matching data from more-urban stations with data from rural ones. Moreover, some of the largest temperature anomalies on Earth occur in the least populated areas, including around the Arctic and the Antarctic Peninsula. Measurements also show warming of the surface ocean and deeper marine layers."

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