Category Archives: Climate Change

More on those Siberian methane seeps

Posted on by
5

Last week I made a post about a new paper on methane seeping from the Arctic seafloor.  Since then, there have been several new posts on other sites about the work, putting it into a broader perspective and also taking somewhat contradictory views of the implications of the finding. The fear is that rapid methane release is considered one plausible mechanism that could lead to abrupt climate change via various positive feedbacks in the climate system.  As Nick Sundt points out (here)

A report released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Abrupt Climate Change, said in December 2008 (during the Bush Administration) that warming in the Arctic could cause sea levels to rise substantially beyond scientists’ previous predictions and could result in massive releases of methane.  The report said that the “rapid release to the atmosphere of methane trapped in permafrost and on continental margins” was among “four types of abrupt change in the paleoclimatic record that stand out as being so rapid and large in their impact that if they were to recur, they would pose clear risks to society in terms of our ability to adapt.”

Also see lead author, Natalia Shakhova, explain the work in this video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD8hU-lbqpE&w=425&h=344]

First, Skeptical Science has a brief but clear explanation of the study (here).

Second, Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a long and very nice post putting the study into the broader context of methane-AGW research and also nicely summarizing the related issue of terrestrial Arctic permafrost thawing.

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane.  Methane is  is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“).  Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below).  No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

Third, David Archer made a post at Real Climate about the work, poking at the idea that rapidly increasing methane concentration could be a game changer, arguing that CO2 is still the big kahuna.

Methane is like the radical wing of the carbon cycle, in today’s atmosphere a stronger greenhouse gas per molecule than CO2, and an atmospheric concentration that can change more quickly than CO2 can. There has been a lot of press coverage of a new paper in Science this week called “Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, which comes on the heels of a handful of interrelated methane papers in the last year or so. Is now the time to get frightened?

No. CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the broken brake pedal. Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story, nor does it look to be a game changer to the big story, which is CO2.

All three posts point out correctly that lacking time series data, there is no way to know whether the this methane flux is new and/or a result of global warming:

What’s missing from these studies themselves is evidence that the Siberian shelf degassing is new, a climate feedback, rather than simply nature-as-usual, driven by the retreat of submerged permafrost left over from the last ice age. However, other recent papers speak to this question. – David Archer

Finally, the National Science Foundation issued a press release and a fact sheet on the paper.

“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”

Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova’s research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.

“Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” she said. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During the Earth’s coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.

“It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen,” Shakhova said. “Nobody considered this huge area.”

The fact sheet is a nice intro to the role of methane in global warming;

What is methane?

Methane is a naturally-occurring compound that is created when organic material, such as the remains of plants and animals, rot or otherwise break down. Bacteria and other microbes play a large role in processes that produce methane. These methane-producing processes may, for example, occur in landfills as their contents age. And some animals release methane as their bodies digest their food.

Vast stores of methane are trapped in the permafrost of the Arctic–large swaths of land where the ground stays frozen. Because of climate change, some Arctic permafrost is showing signs of thawing. This thawed Arctic permafrost may release methane into the atmosphere.

Why does methane cause so much concern?

Like carbon dioxide, methane is a greenhouse gas. The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere inhibits the Earth’s heat from being released into space. Therefore, increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may cause the Earth’s temperature to increase over time.

Methane may be “stored” underground or under the seafloor as methane gas or methane hydrate; methane hydrate is a crystalline solid combining methane and water, which is stable at low temperatures and high pressure–conditions commonly found in marine sediments. When methane stores are released relatively quickly into the atmosphere, levels of atmospheric methane may rapidly spike.

As a greenhouse gas, methane is 30 times more potent (gram for gram) than carbon dioxide. This means that adding relatively modest amounts of methane to the atmosphere may yield relatively large impacts on climate.

How much methane does it take to increase warming?

There’s no clear answer to that question. However, the Earth’s geologic record indicates that atmospheric concentrations of methane have varied from about 0.3 to 0.4 parts per million during cold periods to about 0.6 to 0.7 parts per million during warm periods.

No Andrew, the Arctic is still melting.

Posted on by
Reply

Professor David Karoly (one of Australia’s esteemed ARC Federation Fellows) wrote to several of us recently in frustration over the recent misinformation in the Courier Mail and on Andrew Bolt’s blog. As usual, Andrew and the News Ltd papers have cherry-picked their way through the truth. Here is what David wrote:

“I don’t like responding to all, and saturating others’ email inboxes, but the misinformation in John’s emails and the Andrew Bolt’s blog is as bad as ever.

Yes, there is more ice in winter than in summer (no surprise).
The long term trend of decreasing Artic sea ice amounts in winter and in summer, as described in the Wilkinson documentary, is continuing (see image below from NSIDC).”

Enough said. The data speak for themselves.

NOW he tells us: Andrew Bolt, changes position, admits planet is indeed warming

Posted on by
6

No, it isn’t yet April 1.  See here.  You gotta love the bit about this all being a “long post-mini-ice-age warming”. But still, I admire his (partial) intellectual honesty. Well, maybe that is overly generous since there never actually was a “break” in the warming.

The post includes this figure (from here):

A few things are worth noting:

1) Even accepting the faulty logic of a short-term lack of change in the global temperature measurements being a “break in the warming”, looking at the graphic above, it doesn’t look like a decade-long break to me.  As even Bolt admits, 98 was really warm due to a strong El Nino.  The only recent cool period, is 2008.

2) I also noted that the figure helpfully labels excessively warming periods driven by a volcanic eruption and EL Nino, but fails to point out that the cooling in 2008 was caused by a strong La Nina.  Hence Hermits question (see below).

3) Finally, this exercise of tracking monthly temperatures is silly and unscientific.  I am ashamed to have partaken. It is like following daily polls in a election race. I need to be more rationale about all this!

Anything else?

As usual, the comments on Bolt’s blog are telling:

How can El Nino be a warming event? My understanding of El Nino is that it is the re-distribution of head from one part of the globe to another. Surely the net effect of El Nino should be zero globally!

I’ve always thought it was a grave tactical error for AGW skeptics to continually point to an apparent arrest in the temperature’s upwards trend.  It is always going to fluctuate up and down into the future.  Climate has always changed and will continue to do so.  This sort of data will be used by alarmists to shout “we wuz right all along yah yah”.

Sketics would be better advised to continue to chip away at the total lack of evidence that is it is increased CO2 in the atmosphere that is causing climate to change.

So what ,they cant change it ,and warm is way better than cold ,take a look at the march figures ,looks like its down again.

Very interesting. The question which comes to mind is why is the pattern so erratic.

Is there something inherently random in what the satellites are measuring? Are the satellites measuring the same part of the atmosphere each time?

If a known el nino and the mt pinataubo eruption produced displacements from the norm, then what has happening on the globe in the last year and a bit?

Hermit of Hermit Park
Sat 06 Mar 10 (08:23am)

Anybody want to tackle some of these?  Maybe someone with nothing better to do this weekend?  I love the ones about El Nino and the measured variability.

It is also telling that, so far, not one of the Boltites has questioned the new position their leader has handed down to the clan. Where are the free thinkers and radicals in this rebellion!

Update 1

I am proven wrong; several clan members are rebelling and blaming it all on El Nino. (see Bolts updates)

Update 2

See this comment from Marrcus of Perth:

How can it be warming with record amounts of snow and ice? Something odd is going on here. Has there been tampering with the data? Just wondering. It doesn’t add up.

Just amazing…

Even more:

I thought the the US, Canada, and Europe just had their coldest winters in 30 years.  Maybe temperature measuring devices were not working because they were frozen. Has this data been fudged?

Mike of Charters Towers (Reply)
Sat 06 Mar 10 (09:34am)

The Earth is doing what it normally does, we have had years of no change, then we have had years of a slight cooling, now we are seeing a bit of warming. It’s all natural.

LH of Brisbane (Reply)
Sat 06 Mar 10 (09:34am)

The Climate Change Gamble – or what happened to the precautionary principle?

Posted on by
1

The words “climate change” are now on the lips of almost every Australian. Plug these words into Google and you get 3.3 million hits for Australian pages, nearly a million more hits than for “health care”.  Australians talk about climate change, but for a variety of reasons. Some of us are concerned, some are skeptical, some of us don’t care and some don’t know what information to believe. The issue is enormous and the challenge seems insurmountable. To make a bad thing worse, the topic has recently been blurred by email scandals involving a tricky scientist and anti-science campaigns. As a result, most Australians are left feeling confused and helpless on the topic of climate change. And I don’t blame you.  Rather than being a real environmental issue, global climate change has become something most Australians have chosen to either believe in or not believe in, almost as if it were a new religion. Taking appropriate action on climate change is hard given the conflicting information.

The purpose of this column is to look beyond the climate change debate and help you appreciate the problem at its core, and to let you draw some conclusions yourself independently of the confusion. First, let’s take a quick look at the evidence, and although I am a scientist I will not need to use science predictions, just three simple facts.  Fact 1 – we are currently pumping 8-9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere per year. This is an accounting exercise – not science.  Fact 2 – since 1960, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by more than 30%. Again, this is a simple observation. Fact 3 – the recent decade is the warmest ever measured by instruments from more than a thousand stations around the globe. Note, simple measurements with thermometers – not complicated science that can be argued with. So, based on these three facts, I pose the question:  is it likely that the activity of people is changing the world’s atmosphere?  And perhaps a more important question – if we are likely to be the cause of this trend do we have a responsibility to do something about it?  Even if there is some doubt about just how much our carbon dioxide emissions will heat up the atmosphere and how that will affect weather, bush fires and sea level rise (the science of climate change predictions I have spared you here), should we choose to listen to the climate-change skeptics and deniers when they tell us to go pump that oil, mine that coal, drive that big car and crank up that air con?  Or should we adopt the precautionary principle?  We are good at taking precautions at the scale of individuals, families or small communities but less so on global environmental issues. Say there‘s a chance your kids will get sun burnt on a trip to the beach, you slip slap slop them with +30 and buy them hats. It’s an expense, but a good investment in the kid’s future health. If the sparky says an electrical installation needs to be repaired or else your house might burn down, you’re likely to get it fixed or you’ll be deemed irresponsible. Responsible mums and dads would not choose to listen to people who say that slip-slap-slopping is a waste of time and that the science of sun-related skin cancer may have uncertainties. We don’t gamble with our kid’s health and future. Since there’s no aggressive anti-sunscreen movement out there keeping the sunscreen experts on their toes, then why all this deep passion for defaming the climate change science?  The reason is big $$. I am not asking you to pick a side in this so-called debate, but consider another simple fact:  There is far more short-term profit to be gained from climate-change denial than from climate-change science and acceptance. Human-made climate change has its roots in the burning of fossil fuels, and multi-billion dollar industries would benefit from the continued burning of oil and coal. If individuals and governments are to adopt the precautionary principle on global climate change and not gamble with our future, then we need to be more critical about our sources and quality of information. The scientific evidence pointing to likely severe climate change during this century is overwhelming. Although there is uncertainty in the predictions of just how bad things are going to get if we don’t cut emissions, that uncertainty is not greater than the uncertainty of the health risks associated with smoking. In this analogy the World is a chain smoker. As the body of climate change evidence grows stronger, so does the ferocity and intensity of the anti-science smear campaigns. Their purpose is to prevent a clear and unanimous call for action that would result in the rapid phasing out of fossil-fuel dependent industries. As long as the climate change issue is something we can choose to believe in or not believe in, it is as real as Santa Clause, UFOs and Fairies, and people are unable to make informed choices or take guided actions. We listen to doctors when we get sick, go to dentists when our teeth fall out, take our car to the mechanic when it breaks down and call lawyers when we need legal help. Some doctors and lawyers might be dodgy, but we don’t dismiss the medical and legal systems on that account. When the global climate is showing signs of trouble, responsible governments and individuals should adopt the precautionary principle as they do at home and be guided by the clear evidence and the odds rather than by the she’ll-be-right skepticism.

Methane seeps rise from Siberian sea shelves

Posted on by
Reply

From today’s LA Times, by Margot Roosevelt, original story is posted here

Carbon dioxide (C02) is the most prevalent greenhouse gas that is trapping heat in the atmosphere, warming the planet to what most climate scientists consider dangerous levels. But methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more powerful than CO2, has also been growing at an alarming rate, with concentrations more than doubling since pre-industrial times.

A paper published Thursday in the journal Science reveals that parts of the East Siberian continental shelf, which extends up to 1000 miles out into Arctic waters, show concentrations of methane in surface waters that are 100 times higher than expected. And in the air, more than 5,000 measurements taken by scientists on Russian icebreakers and on helicopters document methane levels more than four times higher than elsewhere in the Arctic basin.

The researchers, led by Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska, along with Swedish and Russian colleagues, found that the amount of methane seeping into the atmosphere from below the Arctic Ocean is comparable to previous emissions estimates for all the world’s oceans. The Arctic is warming faster than any other part of the planet, and scientists fear that methane emissions could rise even more dramatically in a feedback loop: As the atmosphere warms, the permafrost that has locked in methane gas in wetlands and beneath continental shelves melts, releasing more methane, which then warms the planet more.

“Wetlands and permafrost soils, including the subsea permafrost under the Arctic Ocean, contain at least twice the amount of carbon that is currently in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide,” Martin Heimann wrote in an article accompanying the paper. “Release of a sizeable fraction of this carbon as carbon dioxide and/or methane would lead to warmer atmospheric temperatures, causing yet more methane to be released.” The researchers recommend that their data be immediately incorporated into current assessments of how fast the Arctic is likely to warm in the near future.

And a  perspectives piece in Science by Martin Heimann us partially reprinted below:

Methane is, after water vapor and carbon dioxide, the third most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Its concentration in the atmosphere has more than doubled since preindustrial times. Human energy production and use, landfills and waste, cattle raising, rice agriculture, and biomass burning are considered responsible for this increase (1). However, 40% of current global methane sources are natural. Most natural emissions come from anaerobic decomposition of organic carbon in wetlands, with poorly known smaller contributions from the ocean, termites, wild animals, wildfires, and geological sources. Two observational studies now shed light on how these natural sources are changing in today’s changing climate (2, 3).

Ice core studies have shown that the natural methane sources must have changed substantially during the glacial cycles. How stable are they under global warming? Wetlands and permafrost soils, including the sub-sea permafrost under the Arctic Ocean, contain at least twice the amount of carbon that is currently in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Release of a sizable fraction of this carbon as carbon dioxide and/or methane would lead to warmer atmospheric temperatures, causing yet more methane to be released. It would thus create a positive feedback loop that amplifies global warming. However, observational evidence for such release on regional and global scales has been elusive.

On page 1246 of this issue, Shakhova et al. (2) report convincing evidence of methane outgassing from the Arctic continental shelf off northeastern Siberia (Laptev and East Siberian Sea), based on painstaking repeated surveys using Russian ice breakers between 2003 and 2008. In this region, the relatively shallow continental shelf extends up to 1000 km north of the coastline. The seabed consists of relict permafrost from the last glaciation (4), when sea levels were considerably lower than today. The permafrost layer contains substantial amounts of organic carbon and also traps methane seeping up from underneath. In the permafrost, the methane forms relatively stable methane hydrates, but warming of the seawater or a decrease in pressure by a reduction in sea level will destabilize the hydrates, releasing methane into the ocean waters (5).

Shakhova et al. now document large areas with surface waters that are highly supersaturated in methane; in some places, methane concentrations are more than 100 times as high as expected in equilibrium with the ambient atmosphere. Based on their extensive data set, the authors estimate an annual outgassing to the atmosphere of 8 x 1012 grams of carbon (8 Tg C) as methane from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf waters. Consistent with this, concurrent atmospheric concentration measurements on the ship and with a helicopter document methane levels up to four times as high as recorded elsewhere in the Arctic basin.


Whales Store Some Carbon, Oceans Store Loads of It

Posted on by
Reply

The is quite a bit of buzz today about recent research that quantifies how much whaling has – and is – contributing to atmospheric carbon. It appears that whales store significant amounts of carbon. I doubt, however, we will ever have a global breeding program to increase our whale populations, thereby offsetting our own carbon emissions. It’s just not feasible. (Besides, encouraging more people-whale interactions isn’t a popular idea at the moment.)

The focus needs to be broadened beyond whales. Ocean habitats are continually overlooked by the global community as viable sites of carbon sequestration. Blue carbon – as some call it – is a new concept being researched by the NGO community and receiving blog hits. The New York Times has even taken notice. Three months ago, Dan Laffoley of IUCN wrote a wonderful NYT op-ed entitled, To Save the Planet, Save the Seas. Read it.

In short, blue carbon emphasizes the key role of marine and coastal ecosystems. It places value on carbon-rich marine vegetation such as mangrove forests, seagrass, brackish marshes and salt marshes. Coastal and marine ecosystems are believed to be able to complement the role of forests  in taking up carbon emissions through sequestration.

See our related posts on this here, here and here.

This is a management area that was greatly overlooked in Copenhagen. It’s a concept to which the UN and coastal nations ought to give more attention. Island nations rich in blue carbon, like Indonesia, could benefit similarly to the way Brazil is predicted to benefit from “green carbon” sequestration programs, like REDD.

In my opinion, blue carbon sequestration programs will need new research, the right political advocates, and better governance. The question I pose to you marine scientists/environmental managers/policy makers: Where to start?

We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change: an op-ed by Al Gore

Posted on by
3

Former US Vice President Al Gore has a great op-ed in todays NYT here.  The  temperature anomaly map below perfectly illustrates this point he, us, and many, many other scientists have been trying to make about temperatures this January in Washington and globally:

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

If there is a god, she clearly has a cruel sense of humor:

Of all the places on earth to cool down this winter, did it have to Washington DC!  And this winter!  While the rest of the world is roasting?!  See the map source here. Thanks to Mark B’s comment on ClimateProgress. Also see this recent post on a new NOAA preliminary report (State of the Climate Global Analysis January 2010) indicates January 2010 was one of the warmest on record.

By AL GORE (see the full essay here in the NYT)

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach. The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up.

Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.

The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution.

And in spite of President Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an intention to act.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skepticsmay not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing — much less reduce them.