At first glance it’s hard to imagine how the proliferation of human activity upon the environment has been a major factor in climate change given that climate change alone is nothing new. Over two million years the earth’s history has seen enormous changes. Indeed, in the last ten thousand years the warming and cooling of the earth has been on a larger scale that what we see today.
The climate is however very changeable these days. Getting the politics right has been half the fight. Unfortunately, the right policy has been held at bay partially by having the right knowledge of what’s happening to the climate. The climate changes we see today are the result of only a century and a half of study, peanuts in comparison the huge shifts over the earths history.
The recent UN Climate Change Conference sought to put in place a policy to take over the Kyoto protocol. At its core were some recently publicised results:
1. The warming trend on the earth’s surface has been taking place since the early part of the twentieth century. The last ten years have been the warmest of that millennium.
2. There have been rapid signs of melting the Arctic circle. The sea ice there has fallen by around eight percent over thirty years.
3. The old inconsistency in the data between the temperature rise in the atmosphere and on the planets surface seems to have levelled out. They appear to rise in parallel. Read the rest of this entry »