The Earth is heating up! That's the short version of an international report on global warming released Friday.
Years of research show ice sheets are melting and sea levels are rising. And the big news out of the finding is that thousands of scientists from all over the world now agree, with 90 percent certainty, that human activity is to blame for global warming.
Right here in Austin, we've got researchers at UT studying just about every aspect of climate change, so KXAN thought what better way to really take a look at this report then to get them together to hash it all out. The following is a rundown of their conversation.
"It truly is a consensus in the scientific community now that global warming is because of humans," said Camille Parmesan, who studies the impact of climate change on plants and animals.
"I think the other part that makes the case stronger is that there are multiple lines of evidence that all tell the same story," said Charles Jackson, who studies Earth's history of climate change.
"In fact, very specifically in the report, you take the surface air temperature, and they look 5,000 meters up through the whole troposphere, and then they look 3,000 meters down into the ocean," said Don Blankenship, an expert on dynamics of large ice sheets. "And all those trends are for warming."
"I'd just like to inject some skepticism about the ocean part," said Brian Arbic, who researches Atlantic Ocean temperature change.
"I think it's the rate-of-change problem that we really face," said Terry Quinn, an expert on temperature and sea level change. "Not just whether it's going up, how it's going up, and it's going up more rapidly than it's ever gone up before."
This conversation drove KXAN's Laura Skirde to ask, "Just hearing you all go back and forth, how did over 2,000 scientists come up with set statements?"
"When you sign off on a document like this, I think it really speaks volumes because, in general, scientists are very independent-minded thinking people, and we are trained to be skeptical," Quinn said.
"Another statement I've highlighted out of the report," Skirde said, "It's very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent."
"We've had massive numbers of deaths during the 2003 heat wave in Europe," Parmesan said. "The 1995 heat wave in Chicago had hundreds of deaths. This, very directly, affects people. It's the extreme events that are really going to be the problems for health and society."
"The report goes further to say that human-caused warming and rises in sea level would 'continue for centuries because the process has already started, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized.' The kind of runaway-train analogy. What do you all think about that?"
"Well, the greenhouse gases are already in the atmosphere, so even if we stopped buring fossil fuels, period, it would take a long time," Arbic said.
Quinn says, "Whether we want to or not, we're running the experiment."
"That's not to say we shouldn't do anything about it!" Ginny Catania, an expert on ice processes and sea-level rise, said, prompting laughter in the room.
"The curve could go higher," Quinn said.
"It's still important to recognize that the time is now to start acting on these kinds of problems," Catania said.
Friday's report also says global warming will likely make future hurricanes more intense, with higher winds and heavier rains. There's a lot of fascinating research in there, so we've got a link for you to check it out for yourself.
