Human Flower Project

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Climate Change/Consensus Gentian

A panel of scientists from across the world now concurs with a blue mountain flower.

Change in global average temperatures 1961-1990

Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change



It’s taken six years and several hundred scientists to authorize what many hundreds of species (even some humans) have been saying for awhile now. Climate change is real, we caused it, and it’s not going away.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its report yesterday. Here’s the summary in full and, below, a few blinding low lights.

* “Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years. The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land-use change, while those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture.”

* “The understanding of anthropogenic (people-caused) warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment Report, leading to very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming. At continental, regional, and ocean basin scales, numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed. These include changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones.”

* “Continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would very likely be larger than those observed during the 20th century.”

* “Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized.”

The synopsis: We’ve caused the world to heat up with our cars, industries. and mega-agriculture. It’s causing violent weather, changing the level and chemistry of the oceans, and bringing drought. It’s all getting worse. And even if we change our ways, it won’t get better FOR CENTURIES.

Here’s one of hundreds of stories that appeared today in Canada and earlier stories from England and China and Australia.

Alpine gentian

(Gentiana Acaulis L.)

Photo: Rolland Douzet, Jardin Botanique Alpin du Lautaret

Last year, we started seeing stories from the European Alps about bears that couldn’t fall asleep for the winter. Alexandra Zawadil‘s article for Reuters reported that sales for winter clothes were off, and “meteorologists have recorded the azure trumpet-shaped Alpine gentian flower as high as 1,100 metres (3,609 ft) in the Austrian Alps, and the vernal forsythia in some valleys.” That was early December. The beautiful Alpine gentian normally blooms in April.

Last evening we had dinner with a brilliant scholar who complained that in his field—the law—theory possessed a dangerous upper hand over empirical study and legal practice. The same imbalance has tilted our approach to (and denial of) climate change. Broken ice, untimely bird migrations, and the too-early blooming of flowers have been noted by research scientists and backyard naturalists for years. How do we aggregate all these observations by people who are on the front lines of ecology and speak truth to money, abstraction, and fantasy?