This isn’t really new in broad brush terms, but it’s news because little public attention has been paid to it: climate change, for all practical purposes, is forever. Carbon dioxide really is oxidized to the max – it floats, and it hardly reacts with anything very fast. Making limestone the natural way takes, like, eons. So we’re stuck with it. That is, unless the geoengineers figure out a way to scrub the CO2 from the air (and even then, the thermal inertia of the oceans would keep our recent heat pulse evident for quite awhile, one assumes). A report, largely by researchers at the Nat’l Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out why the warming already here or in the pipeline will remain substantial for more than 1000 years. It won’t ebb away to trivial levels for another 2000 years after that. Imagine if people in the Aegean were still paying the piper for the Bronze Age deforestation of islands in the Mediterranean. Oh, wait. They are. Anyway, it’s a long time. If anything, the study understates things. It ran calculations assuming that after CO2 hits a peak – say, twice its current level – emissions of additional fossil carbon then fall immediately to pre-industrial levels. We can only hope.

The news got played heavily, due in part to a teleconference for reporters.  The AP’s Randolph E. Schmid rounds up a decent array of responses from outside researchers, with the news’s gist in a quote from the main author: “Climate change is slow, but it is unstoppable” and he paraphrases her meaning further to evade evoking too much despairing resignation in readers: All the more reason to act quickly, so the long-term situation doesn’t get even worse.

The news comes as a flurry of policy shifts from the White House are getting heavy play, continuing a surge that began yesterday with word on new tightenings in curbs on greenhouse gases. With this new science report in PNAS providing muscular support for such shifts, The Tracker’s giving compilation of the overtly political side of climate journalism a rest today.

Other headines:

• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin :  Long Droughts, Rising Seas Predicted Despite Future CO2 Curbs ;
  
• NYTimes – Cornelia Dean : Emissions Cut Won’t Bring Quick Relief, Scientists Say ;
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Climate change has a firm grip / Researchers say that even if nations can get carbon dioxide levels under control, it would take 1,000 years or longer for the climate changes already triggered to be reversed ; Nice lede, starting with “Even if by some miracle….” ;
• NPR All Things Considered – Richard Harris : Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says ;
• BBC: Global warming is ‘irreversible’ ;
• Bloomberg – Jim Efstathiou Jr. : Study: Global warming effects to last 1,000 years ; and that’s an understatement, it would seem.
• Inquirer (UK) Silvie Barak : Whatever we do the planet is doomed … dooomed! ; and (see previous bullet) there’s news balance for you – somebody actually overstated it. The reporter, incidentally, is somewhat more circumspect than the headline writers on the news desk.
• Rocky Mountain News – Todd Harman : Study: CO2 impacts could last centuries / Rising levels could lock in droughts, sea level increases ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Richard A. Kerr : A Millennia-Long Greenhouse Disaster ;
• Florida Today – Jim Waymer: Study: Global warming impacts irreversible ;

Explicit Grist for the Mill: NOAA Press Release ;

General Grist for the Energy, Climate, and CO2 Mill: Any reporter (or anybody else) wanting to know more, and in energy context, about this ought to read – while underlining the important stuff and keeping it handy – any of the several versions of a talk called Powering the Planet that Caltech chemist Nathan Lewis has been polishing for six or seven years. It is among the finest big-picture and round-numbers looks at our predicament, and in plain English (this guy knows how to say things clearly) that I’ve seen. One good version, transcribed in the Caltech Engineering & Science quarterly magazine, is here.

Pic source ;

-CP

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.