Climate is the hot topic at this year’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, happening this week. Roughly three hundred separate talks mention the subject. How does climate change alter wind-generated power production? Does planetary orbit affect climate change? What was climate change like in the past? And how does it impact salmon, pikas, skiing?
There are oblique talks and posters composed primarily of acronyms, and practical sessions on prediction and prevention. There are many scary graphs with red lines that keep going up.
“Humanity has transitioned from passive bystander to an active agent of change in the climate system,” said Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley. “We can no longer plead ignorance.”
Santer, who is a co-author of the report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, went on to decry the recent Climategate scandal. And indeed, in this environment, the dubious content of a few emails seems to pale beside the wealth of earnest evidence. The world as we have known it is changing; the drastic effects we have made in our atmosphere are indisputable. The connection between these two facts is a questionable thing to question.
Already we are seeing increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows.
This year, 16,000 students, professors, researchers, policymakers and land managers are at the country’s foremost convention on earth sciences. Does this sound dry? Earth sciences affect everything from food to water to electricity to recreation. And all of these are affected by climate change.
It’s a sobering thought.
