Warming's impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto
Tom Davos
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP
WASHINGTON b Since the 1997 international accord to fight global
warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated b beyond some
of the grimmest of warnings made back then.
As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next,
new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of
the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost
trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America,
Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.
And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the
heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit
in Copenhagen:
_The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.
_Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the
U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.
_Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not
just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global
warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire
stands of North American pine forests.
_Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer
than the dozen years leading up to 1997.
Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn't forecast
results quite this bad so fast.
"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we
thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon.
And here's why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution
was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon
dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent. Officials from across
the world will convene in Copenhagen next month to seek a follow-up
pact, one that President Barack Obama says "has immediate operational
effect ... an important step forward in the effort to rally the
world around a solution."
The last effort didn't quite get the anticipated results.
From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning
of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; U.S. emissions of this
greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the
biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that
time period. When the U.S. Senate balked at the accord and President
George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three
carbon polluters b the U.S., China and India b were not part of the
pact's emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered
by the Kyoto Protocol and that is a major issue in Copenhagen.
And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful and happening
sooner than predicted, scientists said.
"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated;
the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia Burkett, chief
scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey.
That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped
broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto.
"By far the most serious differences that we've had is an acceleration
of the crisis itself," Gore said in an interview this month with
The Associated Press.
In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists,
environmentalists and policy wonks. Now biologists, lawyers,
economists, engineers, insurance analysts, risk managers, disaster
professionals, commodity traders, nutritionists, ethicists and even
psychologists are working on global warming.
"We've come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem
working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem
is in everyone's face," said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria
climate scientist.
The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most
alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and
around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. It's
all happening far faster than predicted.
Back in 1997 "nobody in their wildest expectations," would have
forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic
that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997,
sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million
square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2
million square miles. What's been lost is the size of Alaska.
Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the
cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic
Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves b adding up
to the size of Delaware b came off the Antarctic peninsula.
While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn't raise sea levels, the melting
of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the
seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles.
Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5
trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion
tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this
fall.
In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change reports, scientists didn't anticipate ice sheet loss in
Antarctica, Weaver said. And the rate of those losses is accelerating,
so that Greenland's ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as
they were just seven years ago, increasing sea level rise.
Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the
1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997,
said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service
at the University of Zurich.
"Glaciers are a good climate indicator," Zemp said. "What we see
is an accelerated loss of ice."
Also, permafrost b the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines
are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane b
is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said.
Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very
concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the
carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That
causes acidification, an issue that didn't even merit a name until
the past few years.
More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately
threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.
In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals" and how they
are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist
Terry Root. Now scientists are talking about which species can be
saved from extinction and which are goners. The polar bear became
the first species put on the federal list of threatened species and
the small rabbit-like American pika may be joining it.
More than 37 million acres of Canadian and U.S. pine forests have
been damaged by beetles that don't die in warmer winters. And in
the U.S.
West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than
doubled.
The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the U.S.
West, were nearly full in 1999, but by 2007 half the water was gone
after the region endured the worst multiyear drought in 100 years
of record-keeping.
Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global
warming is partly to blame. The number of major U.S. weather-related
blackouts from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than
from 1993-1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence
Berkeley National Lab.
"The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did
in 1997 and it's all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of
the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "Things are much worse
than the models predicted."
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On the Net:
U.S. government's 2009 report on climate change impacts:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report on changes
already observed:
http://tinyurl.com/worldimpacts
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate change: http://unfccc.int
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