Your Daily Dose of Climate Change

Today's news has two articles related to global warming:

• From Discovery News, "Snow Now Melts In Wyoming Two Weeks Early"
• From Reuters, "Study Shows Acceleration In Decline Of Antarctic Ice Shelves"

Of course, the first article is not necessarily related to global warming. Any one climatic observation or weather event may or may not be a part of the overall suite of climate mechanisms that we call "global climate change" or "global warming". But Wyoming is not the only place that's warming earlier in the spring or cooling later in the fall. Many years ago, when Kathleen and I went to our kids' Saturday morning YMCA soccer games, we usually had to wear a jacket. Nowadays, Saturday mornings in Houston during soccer season are rarely that cool.

The second article is most definitely related to climate change. The disappearance of floating ice sheets does not, in itself raise sea levels. But this disappearance has two consequences: First, as the article mentions, the missing sea ice provides less resistance to the advance of Antarctic glaciers, which can now move faster, dumping into the ocean vast quantities of ice that is not already floating. That will indeed raise sea levels. Additionally, the missing ice is replaced by open water, which is an amazingly good absorber of solar heat. That heat warms the water, reducing the opportunity to form new sea ice. It also raises the temperature of the air, delivering energy to melt Antarctic glaciers.

This is one of the situations that has climate scientists very apprehensive. It's exactly the sort of positive feedback mechanism that can, without warning, begin a runaway change that happens far too fast to react to in any useful way. If we cross one of these tipping points, the human race will have little ability to move the climate back toward what it had been, regardless of whether we actually try.

At present, many of our political leaders are actively avoiding any belief in the existence of climate change and resisting all efforts to spend any money to do anything about it.