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Report Says People To Blame For Global Warming
Rising sea water temperature due to global warming threatens to destroy the majority of coral reefs on earth, with potentially huge ecological and economic consequences.
By Reuters
Start Date: 11/26/98
New measurements make it increasingly clear that people, and not something natural such as sunspots or volcanoes, are responsible for global warming, U.S. researchers said on November 26, 1998.
Tom Wigley of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado and colleagues analysed 115 years of global temperature data and concluded the release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide explains most of the 1 degree F (0.6 degree C) increase in the planet's average temperature over the last century.
"These results provide another important piece in the jigsaw puzzle of climate change, strengthening yet further our confidence that there has been a discernible human influence on climate," they wrote in a report in the journal Science.
They used a new kind of statistical analysis, looking at the average temperature for each year in both the northern and southern hemispheres, and then comparing these measurements to readings taken up to 20 years earlier or later. They also figured in the effects of volcanoes -- which throw up dust that can affect the atmosphere and temperatures -- and of changes in the sun's radiation, including sunspots and solar flares.
They said the sun was probably responsible for some of the changes. But the Earth's climate would have to be about six times as sensitive to the sun's effects than it actually is for the sun alone to be responsible for global warming, they wrote.
But when the production of greenhouse gases is figured in along with the sun's effects, current computer models of global warming look just fine, they said.
[Disclaimer: This article is copyright (c) Reuters. The information contained in Reuters reports may not be republished, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without prior written permission. This text is posted in the public interest.]
 Excelsior, Michael Lindemann's new novel (written under the pen name Michael Paul), depicts a wholly plausible near future in which human cloning is both widespread and widely abused; terrorists have access to target-specific biological weapons; recreational space travel is commonplace; and mounting pressures of global climate change, environmental decline, population growth and civil unrest inspire radical new approaches to urban security.
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