The Indus River: What global warming looks like

[Dardedar]

Art Hobson has another excellent article:

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MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
NWA Times, 22 August 2010

The Indus River: What global warming looks like

Global warming, with the unkind assistance of a powerful anti-scientific minority of Americans led by Senator James Inhofe and other Republicans, is striking again. The Pakistani flood, as well as the Russian forest fires, mudslides in China, and heat records from Finland to Kuwait, are freak events that fall right into the pattern predicted by global warming. It will probably always be impossible to confidently ascribe any single event to global warming, but these events fit the predicated pattern and can be expected to recur with increasing frequency.

Although scientists describe the flood as a once-in-a-century event, such floods could become common. Recently, a scientific team drilled down into the mud of the Indus floodplain in order to precisely date layers of flood-deposited material. Their results showed that, during a natural warm period 6,000 years ago, the Indus was even more monstrous than today. Then, 4,000 years ago, the climate cooled, much of the Indus dried up, and deserts appeared, perhaps triggering the collapse of the great Harappan civilization. The cause of this warming, flooding, and drying appears to have been changes in the strength of the monsoon caused by natural climate changes. Monsoon intensity is sensitive to the Indian Ocean's surface temperature. A warmer ocean means more evaporation, more water vapor and energy in the atmosphere, hence a stronger monsoon, while a cooler ocean means the opposite. So, as current global warming heats the Indian Ocean, the monsoon will be enhanced.

Reinsurer Munich Re said a natural catastrophe database it runs "shows that the number of extreme weather events like windstorm and floods has tripled since 1980." A professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research states that "Global warming is one reason" for the rare string of extremes. He pointed to the heatwave and forest fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, rains in China, and downpours in Europe. Russia's worst drought in decades has led to fires that have almost doubled Moscow death rates to 700 per day. One study concluded that global warming has doubled the chances of heatwaves similar to the scorching 2003 summer in Europe, when 35,000 died.

The director of the World Meteorological Organisation, Dr. Ghassem Asrar, declares "There's no doubt that clearly the climate change is …a major contributing factor" to the Indus flooding. A 2006 study published in the journal Science found the level of heavy rainfall in the monsoon over India has more than doubled in the past 50 years, and predicted increased flooding disasters. Climate experts at NASA say the Indus today is what global warming looks like.

Is global warming happening, and is it caused by humans? You figure it out: According to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 2009 tied for the second warmest year on record (since 1850), 2005 was the warmest year, 2000-2009 was the warmest decade, and 1990-1999 was the next warmest. Glaciers are melting everywhere: the last tropical glaciers are nearly gone; glacier national park had 150 named glaciers in 1850, 26 today, and will have none by 2030; the Arctic Ocean ice cap has lost half its area since 1978 and will be completely melted in the summers by 2037; the massive Greenland ice sheet is melting. Temperatures during the past 2000 years show a sudden, large, and unprecedented (during 2000 years) increase in temperature since 1900. At the same time, human fossil-fuel burning has created a sharp increase, a "spike," in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere after 1900. Carbon dioxide is known to contribute significantly to the natural greenhouse effect that warms the atmosphere by over 60 Fahrenheit degrees. We have increased this carbon dioxide blanket by 40 percent since 1900. Nobody has offered a plausible explanation of the temperature increase other than the carbon dioxide spike.

The sun usually goes through a "solar cycle" every 11 years. However, the quiet phase of the last cycle persisted an abnormally long 5 years, which slowed the global warming temperature increase. Now solar activity has re-awakened, and I predict that every year for the next five years, including this year, will be the hottest on record. This summer is only the beginning.

We'd better hope that James Inhofe and that hard-bitten American minority which refuses to accept even the most obvious scientific conclusions will get this message before we're all swept away by fires, floods, mudslides, hurricanes, heat waves, and rising oceans.

http://physics.uark.edu/hobson/NWAT/10.08.22.html