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Data From Space, Oceans Validate Global Warming Timeline

Associated Press
Friday, April 29, 2005

NEW YORK, April 28 -- Climate scientists armed with new data from the ocean depths and from space satellites have found that Earth is absorbing much more heat than it is giving off, which they say validates computer projections of global warming.

Lead scientist James E. Hansen, a prominent NASA climatologist, described the findings on the out-of-balance energy exchange as a "smoking gun" that should dispel doubts about forecasts of climate change. Hansen's team, reporting Thursday in the journal Science, said they also determined that global temperatures will rise 1 degree Fahrenheit this century even if greenhouse gases are capped tomorrow. If carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping emissions instead continue to grow, as expected, things could spin "out of our control," especially as ocean levels rise from melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the researchers said. International experts predict a 10-degree leap in such a worst-case scenario.

The NASA-led researchers were able to measure Earth's energy imbalance because of more precise ocean readings collected by 1,800 technology-packed floats deployed in seas worldwide beginning in 2000, in an international monitoring effort called Argo. Their measurements are supplemented by better satellite gauging of ocean levels, which rise both from meltwater and as the sea warms and expands.

With this data, the scientists calculated the oceans' heat content and the global energy imbalance. They found that for every square meter of surface area, the planet is absorbing almost one watt more of the sun's energy than it is radiating back to space as heat -- a historically large imbalance. Such absorbed energy will steadily warm the atmosphere.

The 0.85-watt figure corresponds well with the energy imbalance predicted by the researchers' supercomputer simulations of climate change, the report said. Those computer models factor in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, methane and other gases -- produced by automobiles and more esoteric sources, such as pig farms. Those gases keep heat from escaping into space. Significantly, greenhouse emissions have increased at a rate consistent with the detected energy imbalance, the researchers said. "There can no longer be genuine doubt that human-made gases are the dominant cause of observed warming," said Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University's Earth Institute. "This energy imbalance is the 'smoking gun' that we have been looking for."
Fourteen other specialists from NASA, Columbia and the Energy Department co-authored the study. Klaus Hasselmann, a leading German climatologist, praised the Hansen report for its innovative work. "This is valuable additional supporting evidence" of man-made climate change, he said.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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