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Behind the Curve
In 1958, Charles David Keeling began measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. His project kicked off a half century of research that has expanded our knowledge of climate change. Despite more than fifty years of research, however, our global society has yet to find real solutions to the problem of global warming. Why?
In Behind the Curve, Joshua Howe attempts to answer this question. He explores the history of global warming from its roots as a scientific curiosity to its place at the center of international environmental politics. The book follows the story of rising CO2 illustrated by the now famous Keeling Curve through a number of historical contexts, highlighting the relationships among scientists, environmentalists, and politicians as those relationships changed over time.
The nature of the problem itself, Howe explains, has privileged scientists as the primary spokespeople for the global climate. But while the science first forms of advocacy they developed to fight global warming produced more and better science, the primacy of science in global warming politics has failed to produce meaningful results. In fact, an often exclusive focus on science has left advocates for change vulnerable to political opposition and has limited much of the discussion to debates about the science itself.
As a result, while we know much more about global warming than we did fifty years ago, CO2 continues to rise. In 1958, Keeling first measured CO2 at around 315 parts per million; by 2013, global CO2 had soared to 400 ppm. The problem is not getting better - it's getting worse. Behind the Curve offers a critical and levelheaded look at how we got here.
eBook
Our biggest experiment : a history of the climate crisis
Did you know the link between carbon dioxide and global warming was first suggested in the 1850s? Climate change books are usually about the future, but Our Biggest Experiment turns instead asks how did we get into this mess and how and when did we work out it was happening? Join Alice Bell on a rip-roaring ride through the characters, ideas, technologies and experiments that shaped the climate crisis we now find ourselves in.
Book
No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era
Earth’s climate history is often understood by breaking it down into constituent climatic epochs
1
. Over the Common Era (the past 2,000 years) these epochs, such as the Little Ice Age
2
–
4
, have been characterized as having occurred at the same time across extensive spatial scales
5
. Although the rapid global warming seen in observations over the past 150 years does show nearly global coherence
6
, the spatiotemporal coherence of climate epochs earlier in the Common Era has yet to be robustly tested. Here we use global palaeoclimate reconstructions for the past 2,000 years, and find no evidence for preindustrial globally coherent cold and warm epochs. In particular, we find that the coldest epoch of the last millennium—the putative Little Ice Age—is most likely to have experienced the coldest temperatures during the fifteenth century in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, during the seventeenth century in northwestern Europe and southeastern North America, and during the mid-nineteenth century over most of the remaining regions. Furthermore, the spatial coherence that does exist over the preindustrial Common Era is consistent with the spatial coherence of stochastic climatic variability. This lack of spatiotemporal coherence indicates that preindustrial forcing was not sufficient to produce globally synchronous extreme temperatures at multidecadal and centennial timescales. By contrast, we find that the warmest period of the past two millennia occurred during the twentieth century for more than 98 per cent of the globe. This provides strong evidence that anthropogenic global warming is not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures
5
, but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.
Warm and cold periods over the past 2,000 years have not occurred at the same time in all geographical locations, with the exception of the twentieth century, during which warming has occurred almost everywhere.
Journal Article
Reconciling controversies about the ‘global warming hiatus’
Between about 1998 and 2012, a time that coincided with political negotiations for preventing climate change, the surface of Earth seemed hardly to warm. This phenomenon, often termed the ‘global warming hiatus’, caused doubt in the public mind about how well anthropogenic climate change and natural variability are understood. Here we show that apparently contradictory conclusions stem from different definitions of ‘hiatus’ and from different datasets. A combination of changes in forcing, uptake of heat by the oceans, natural variability and incomplete observational coverage reconciles models and data. Combined with stronger recent warming trends in newer datasets, we are now more confident than ever that human influence is dominant in long-term warming.
Apparently contradictory conclusions regarding the ‘global warming hiatus’ are reconciled, strengthening the current scientific understanding that long-term global warming is extremely likely to be of anthropogenic origin.
Analysis of a global warming hiatus
After a spike in global-mean temperature associated with the 1998 El Niño, the climate system experienced several years of reduced warming, and perhaps even slight cooling. This period, variously termed the 'hiatus', 'pause' or 'slowdown', should have come as no surprise given our understanding of El Niño and natural climate variability. However, soon after the recognition of the reduced warming, it appeared that models and observations were diverging, raising the question of whether the models were missing important processes. Although global warming has since recommenced, the hiatus sparked an enormous research effort. Iselin Medhaug
et al
. synthesize the literature and reassess the model and observational evidence. Their assessment reconciles the apparent contradictions between models and data and obviates the need to revise our understanding of the underlying physics of climate systems. The hiatus was an episode of natural variability after all.
Journal Article
Losing Earth : a recent history
\"By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change--including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. [This] is their story\"-- Publisher marketing.
BOOK
Response of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to Past and Future Climate Change
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) contains the vast majority of Earth’s glacier ice (~52 metres sea-level equivalent), but is often viewed as less vulnerable to global warming than the West Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets. However, some regions of the EAIS have lost mass over recent decades, prompting the need to re-evaluate its sensitivity to climate change. Here we review the EAIS’s response to past warm periods, synthesise current observations of change, and evaluate future projections. Some marine-based catchments that underwent significant mass loss during past warm periods are currently losing mass, but most projections indicate increased accumulation across the EAIS over the 21st Century, keeping the ice sheet broadly in balance. Beyond 2100, high emissions scenarios generate increased ice discharge and potentially several metres of sea-level rise within just a few centuries, but substantial mass loss could be averted if the Paris Agreement to limit warming below 2°C is satisfied.
Journal Article
Globally resolved surface temperatures since the Last Glacial Maximum
Climate changes across the past 24,000 years provide key insights into Earth system responses to external forcing. Climate model simulations
1
,
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and proxy data
3
–
8
have independently allowed for study of this crucial interval; however, they have at times yielded disparate conclusions. Here, we leverage both types of information using paleoclimate data assimilation
9
,
10
to produce the first proxy-constrained, full-field reanalysis of surface temperature change spanning the Last Glacial Maximum to present at 200-year resolution. We demonstrate that temperature variability across the past 24 thousand years was linked to two primary climatic mechanisms: radiative forcing from ice sheets and greenhouse gases; and a superposition of changes in the ocean overturning circulation and seasonal insolation. In contrast with previous proxy-based reconstructions
6
,
7
our results show that global mean temperature has slightly but steadily warmed, by ~0.5 °C, since the early Holocene (around 9 thousand years ago). When compared with recent temperature changes
11
, our reanalysis indicates that both the rate and magnitude of modern warming are unusual relative to the changes of the past 24 thousand years.
Paleoclimate datasets are integrated with a climate model to reconstruct global surface temperature since the Last Glacial Maximum, showing sustained warming until the mid-Holocene.
Journal Article