New Findings Reveal Much Faster Warming
Scientists predict rising global temperature range
CNN.com
, Jan. 27, 2005LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Greenhouse gas emissions could cause global temperatures to rise by up to 11 degrees Celsius (20 degrees Fahrenheit), according to first results from the world's largest climate modeling experiment.
The top end of the predictions, which range from 2-11 degrees, is double estimates produced so far and could make the world dramatically different in the future.
"Our experiment shows that increased levels of greenhouse gases could have a much greater impact on climate than previously thought," said David Stainforth, the project's chief scientist, from Oxford University.
Without significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, scientists estimate the Earth's temperature and sea level will rise, leading to increased flooding and drastic climate changes.
The temperature range predicted is based on assumptions of carbon dioxide levels double those found before the Industrial Revolution. Scientists estimate these levels will be reached by the middle of this century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced.
"This is really just the beginning of the process to try and understand the uncertainty and predictions of climate change," Stainforth added.
Processing powerFrom Uruguay to Uzbekistan and Sierra Leone to Singapore, 95,000 people from 150 countries are taking part in the climateprediction.net experiment to explore the possible impact of global warming.
By downloading free software from
http://www.climateprediction.net/
on their personal computers, participants run their own unique version of Britain's Met Office climate model.
While their computer is idle, the program runs a climate simulation over days or weeks and automatically reports the results to Oxford University and other collaborating institutions around the world.
Together, the volunteers have simulated more than 4 million model years, donated 8,000 years of computer time and exceeded the processing power of the world's largest supercomputers. The first results of the continuing experiment are reported in the latest edition of the science journal Nature.
"... it is entirely possible that even current levels of greenhouse gases, if stable and maintained for a long period of time, could lead to dangerous climate change," Stainforth told reporters.
The Kyoto protocol, the main U.N. scheme to reduce greenhouse gases, aims to cut emissions of carbon dioxide by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
"The danger zone is not something we are going to reach in the middle of this century. We are in it now," said Dr Myles Allen of the Met Office.
Climateprediction.net was conceived more than five years ago and launched in 2003. It is funded by Britain's Natural Environment Research Council.
Copyright 2005 Reuters
'Scary' science finds Earth heating up twice as fast as thought
The largest ever climate-change experiment reveals that scientists may have dramatically underestimated the threat of global warming.
The study by British scientists, which is published today, found the planet's global temperature could climb by between 2C and 11C because of skyrocketing levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.
That more than doubles the current prediction of a 1.4C to 4.5C rise this century.
"When we started out we didn't expect anything like this," said Oxford University's David Stainforth, chief scientist for climateprediction.net.
The project is a collaboration of experts at Oxford and Reading universities, The Open University, London School of Economics, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
The findings are published in the journal Nature.
"If this is the case, it's very dramatic and very scary," Mr. Stainforth said.
Even rises that are more modest are expected to trigger disastrous changes, including melting glaciers, sea-level rises, shut-down of the Gulf Stream, and increases in droughts, cyclones and other extreme weather events. The new results follow two reports in last week's edition of Science, showing that global warming probably caused the "Great Dying".
Although that was the worst extinction in Earth's history wiping out more than 90 per cent of all life it involved gradual extinctions over about 10 million years, culminating in a sharp extinction pulse 250 million years ago. Further concern comes from an international report released in London last Monday. It warned that climate change could kick in within 10 years, unless greenhouse gas emissions are cut.
The initial goal of climateprediction.net was to evaluate the sensitivity and variables of the Hadley computer model of climate change.
In order to obtain their findings, Mr. Stainforth and his colleagues ran 50,000 climate simulations.
Because so much computing power was needed, they relied on help from 90,000 people from 150 countries to run the programs on their personal computers.
More than 1200 Australians, sych as Melbourne academic Nick Hoffman, participated. "I'm interested in the dynamics of planetary atmospheres, so it was well worth supporting (the project)," Dr. Hoffman said.
According to Neville Nicholls, head of climate forecasting at the Bureau of Meterology in Melbourne, climateprediction.net is a "terrific project" that tackles the uncertainty of climate predictions. He agreed with CSIRO climate modeller Tony Hirst that: "This may mean that the world could warm up faster than most of us are happy anticipating."
Study: Global Warming Worse Than Feared
Discover.com,
Jan. 27, 2005Global warming may be twice as bad as expected, according to a new assessment of a commonly used yardstick of possible carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution.
Until now, most computer models of climate change predict that if atmospheric levels of CO2 reach double of the pre-industrial age, the Earth's surface temperature will be between 2 and 5° C (3.6-9.0° F) warmer when compared with 1990 levels.
But a study published Thursday in the journal Nature suggests that the temperature rise could be much higher of between nearly 2° (3.6° F) and more than 11° C (19.8° F).
The research comes from a highly ambitious project in "shared computing," in which more than 90,000 people in more than 140 countries downloaded a special programme to crunch through data on their personal computer.
The screensaver software, which operates when the PC is not in use, was first pioneered by a US project, SETIAhome, which sifts through radio noise from deep space that, it is hoped, may one day contain a signal from extra-terrestrial life.
The organizers of the
climateprediction.net project used the volunteers' spare commuting power to run through more than 2,000 different models on possible climate change.Once the first batch of results was obtained, the researchers selected those models that had simulated the past climate accurately.
These best-performing models were then asked to predict how much the Earth would warm after CO2 concentrations had doubled from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm).
The responses ranged from 1.9 (3.4 F) to 11.5 C (20.7 F), "substantially greater" than the conventional model, they found. Most estimates clustered around 3.4 C.
By comparison, the top U.N. scientific authority on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), estimated in 2001 that there would be a temperature rise of between 1.4 C (2.5 F) and 5.8 C (10.4 F) from 1990-2100.
Those figures were respectively based on CO2 scenarios that ranged from 540 to 970 ppm by the end of this century.
Current CO2 levels, as recorded in March 2004 at a Hawaii monitoring station, stood at 379 ppm. In 2000, they were 368 ppm.
The burning of oil, gas and coal, the drivers of the Industrial Revolution and the foundation of the world economy today, is releasing into the atmosphere billions of CO2 that have lain buried for millions of years.
The gas hangs in the atmosphere, trapping heat from the Sun that otherwise would radiate safely back into space.
Scientists say this unbridled pollution is bound to have an effect on the world's delicately balanced climate system.
Their big challenge, though, is to figure out when, where and how the effects will kick in, and if the change will be gradual or if there will be a "tipping point" beyond which change will be cataclysmic.
While there are many uncertainties, recent evidence suggests that carbon pollution is worsening faster than thought and that the first signs of climate change are already visible, in the form of extreme weather events such as recurrent El-Ninos, droughts, floods and storms.
Alarm at new climate warning
BBCNews.com, Jan. 27, 2005
Temperatures around the world could rise by as much as 11C, according to one of the largest climate prediction projects ever run.
This figure is twice the level that previous studies have suggested.
The scientists behind the project, called climateprediction.net, say it shows there is no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide.
The results of the study, which used PCs around the world to produce data, are published in the journal Nature.
Climateprediction.net is run from Oxford University, and is a distributed computing project; rather than using a supercomputer to run climate models, people can download software to their own PCs, which run the programs during downtime.
More than 95,000 people have registered, from more than 150 countries; their PCs have between them run more than 60,000 simulations of future climate.
Each PC runs a slightly different computer simulation examining what happens to the global climate if levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere double from pre-industrial levels - which may happen by the middle of the century.
What vary most between the simulations are the precise nature of physical processes like the extent of convection within tropical clouds - a process which drives the transport of heat around the world.
Lowest rise
So no two simulations will produce exactly the same results; overall, the project produces a picture of the possible range of outcomes given the present state of scientific knowledge.
The lowest rise which climateprediction.net finds possible is 2C, ranging up to 11C.
The timescale would depend on how quickly the doubling of CO2 was reached, but large rises would be on a scale of a century at least from now.
"I think these results suggest that our need to do something about climate change is perhaps even more urgent," the climateprediction.net chief scientist David Stainforth told BBC News.
"However, with our current state of knowledge, we can't yet define a safe level in the atmosphere."
On Monday, the International Climate Change Taskforce, co-chaired by the British MP Stephen Byers, claimed it had shown that a carbon dioxide concentration of over 400 ppm (parts per million) would be 'dangerous'.
The current concentration is around 378 ppm, rising at roughly 2ppm per year.
Dangerous warming
Next week the UK Meteorological Office hosts an international conference, Stabilisation 2005, announced by Tony Blair late last year.
Its aim is to discuss what the term "dangerous" global warming really means, and to look at ways to stabilise greenhouse gas levels.
Myles Allen, the principal investigator of climateprediction.net, said the focus on stabilisation might not be appropriate.
"Stabilisation as an exclusive target may not be adequate," he told BBC News.
"Stephen Byers claims to know that 400 ppm is the maximum 'safe' level; what we show is that it may be impossible to pin down a safe level, and therefore we should not focus exclusively on stabilisation."
Distributed computing has been used before, notably by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or Seti, where several million people have downloaded software enabling them to analyse data from observations of distant galaxies for signs of alien life.
The scientists behind climateprediction.net believe their project, because it is distributed to individual PCs, can help inform people about climate change - and that, in turn could bring political change.
"It's very difficult to get politicians to collaborate, not only across the globe but also over sustained lengths of time," Bob Spicer from the Earth Sciences Department at the Open University, told BBC News.
"The people who can hold politicians to account are the public; and with this project we are bringing cutting-edge science to the stakeholders, the public."
