Earth temps soar higher
dgrm...@telus.net
Earth temps soar higher
Some plants, insects moving poleward as result of warming.
Updated 9/27/2006 11:51 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AP) - Mother Earth is beginning to resemble a Peggy Lee
song - "fever in the morning, fever all through the night."
The planet's temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of
years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers
report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36°F per decade for the last
30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current
interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.
The researchers noted that a report in the journal Nature found that
1,700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average
rate of about four miles per decade in the last half of the 20th
century.
The warming has been stronger in the far north, where melting ice and
snow expose darker land and rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the
sun to be absorbed, and more over land than water.
Water changes temperature more slowly than land because of its great
capacity to hold heat, but the researchers noted that the warming has
been marked in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. Those oceans have
a major effect on climate and warming that could lead to more El Niño
episodes affecting the weather.
"This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of
human-made pollution," Hansen said in a statement.
Few scientists doubt that the planet has warmed, though some question
the causes of the change.
Hansen, who first warned of the danger of climate change decades ago,
said that human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate
change factor.
The study said the recent warming has brought global temperature to a
level within about 1°C - 1.8°F- of the maximum temperature of the
past million years.
"If further global warming reaches 2 or 3°C, we will likely see
changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The
last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about three
million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25
meters (80 feet) higher than today," Hansen said.