Debating climate and securityGlobal warming unequivocal in its advance, says NCAA expert
Global warming is unequivocal in its advance and will lead to more record-setting temperatures, says Warren Washington, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; in a talk at Sandia Lab, Washington presented graph after graph showing how various atmospheric processes have combined to create stronger rainfall near the equator and more intense droughts in the subtropics, as well as sea-level rises and increased storm surges
Global warming is unequivocal in its advance and will lead to more record-setting temperatures, said Warren M. Washington, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in the seventh lecture of Sandia National Laboratories’ Climate Change and National Security series, sponsored by the Lab’s Climate Security Program. The talk was given in mid-May.
Washington, a pioneer in atmospheric computer modeling, served as science adviser to five presidents — Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. He received a lifetime achievement award from then-DOE Undersecretary for Science Raymond Orbach in 2007 and was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama in 2010.
A Sandia Lab release reports that Washington presented graph after graph showing how various atmospheric processes have combined to create stronger rainfall near the equator and more intense droughts in the subtropics, as well as sea-level rises and increased storm surges. He said more tropical diseases would move poleward as the tropics expand.
He also envisioned stresses on national security when some island and coastal countries either disappear or sink below sea level because of rising oceans. “Their populations will need to migrate elsewhere, causing immigration issues,” he said.
Basically, he advised, “People shouldn’t be building houses on the seacoast or putting houses in flood plains.”
With a nod to climate-change skeptics, he cited noted University of California-Berkeley professor Richard Muller as a one-time skeptic of the general scientific belief that “we’ve warmed the planet by almost a degree [Celsius] from 1880 to 2010 in the global land temperature average.”
Washington said Muller and his colleagues used a different technique to compute Earth’s land temperature, but his graph only reproduced what others found earlier.
In several instances, he challenged climate-change skepticism.
“Climate skeptics often mention that solar radiation has changed and that is what is causing the climate change,” he said as he presented a graph charting the intensity of solar irradiance at the top of Earth’s atmosphere. “You can see 11-year cycles from 1975 on and you can see there is no significant trend on radiation coming into the atmosphere. So this argument by skeptics isn’t valid to the climate change community.”
Meanwhile, he said, extremes in temperature have grown since the 1960s, methane and nitrous oxide concentrations are increasing, ozone depletion is increasing, the usually ice-locked Northwest Passage this fall should be open for shipping if accompanied by an icebreaker and 2010 was “a
