Climate emails inquiry: Fossil fuel industry consultant linked to physics body’s submission

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Evidence from Institute of Physics drawn from energy industry consultant who argues global warming is a religion
David Adams, Guardian , Thursday 4 March 2010 21.00 GMT

Evidence from a respected scientific body to a parliamentary inquiry examining the behaviour of climate-change scientists, was drawn from an energy industry consultant who argues that global warming is a religion, the Guardian can reveal.

The submission, from the Institute of Physics (IOP), suggested that scientists at the University of East Anglia had cherry-picked data to support conclusions and that key reconstructions of past temperature could not be relied upon.

The evidence was given to the select committee on science and technology, which is investigating emails from climate experts at the University of East Anglia that were released online last year.

The committee interviewed witnesses on Monday, including Phil Jones, the scientist from the university’s climatic research unit (CRU), who is at the heart of the controversy.

The Guardian has established that the institute prepared its evidence, which was highly critical of the CRU scientists, after inviting views from Peter Gill, an IOP official who is head of a company in Surrey called Crestport Services.

According to Gill, Crestport offers “consultancy and management support services … particularly within the energy and energy intensive industries worldwide”, and says that it has worked with “oil and gas production companies including Shell, British Gas, and Petroleum Development Oman”.

In an article in the newsletter of the IOP south central branch in April 2008, which attempted to downplay the role carbon dioxide plays in global warming, Gill wrote: “If you don’t ‘believe’ in anthropogenic climate change, you risk at best ridicule, but more likely vitriolic comments or even character assassination. Unfortunately, for many people the subject has become a religion, so facts and analysis have become largely irrelevant.”

In November Gill commented, on the Times Higher Education website: “Poor old CRU have been seriously hacked. The emails and other files are all over the internet and include how to hide atmospheric cooling.”

The institute submission accused the East Anglia university scientists of “apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements”. This appears to refer to an email sent by Jones in which he said he had used a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a temperature series derived from tree-ring data, but which refers to a widely known feature of that data.

The IOP evidence concluded that the emails had “worrying implications for the integrity of scientific research in this field”. That was used by climate sceptics to bolster claims that the email affair, dubbed “climategate”, showed the scientists did not behave properly and that the problem of global warming was exaggerated.

The IOP has already been forced to issue a clarification that the evidence does not undermine the scientific basis for climate change. But many experts think this does not go far enough.

In an open letter to the institute, Andy Russell, an IOP member who works on climate at the University of Manchester, says: “If the IOP continues to stand by this statement then I will have no other option but to reconsider my membership.” He says the allegation of data suppression is “incorrect and irresponsible”.

The institute says its evidence was based on suggestions from the energy subcommittee of its science board. It would not reveal who sat on this sub-commitee, but confirmed that Gill was a member.

A spokeswoman for the institute said Gill was not the main source of information nor did the evidence primarily reflect his views; other members of the sub-commitee were also critical of CRU. However the IOP would not reveal names because they would get “dragged into a very public and highly politicised debate”.

Gill told the Guardian he helped prepare the submission but many of his suggestions were not in the final document.

The IOP added that the submission was approved by three members of its science board, but would not reveal their names. The Guardian contacted several members of the board, including its chairman, Denis Weaire, a physicist at Trinity College Dublin. All said that they had little direct role in the submission.

The institute supplied a statement from an anonymous member of its science board, which said: “The institute should feel relaxed about the process by which it generated what is, anyway, a statement of the obvious.” It added: “The points [the submission] makes are ones which we continue to support, that science should be practised openly and in an unbiased way. However much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information, we believe the case for openness remains just as strong.”

Evan Harris, a member of the science and technology select committee, said: “Members of the Institute of Physics … may be concerned that the IOP is not as transparent as those it wishes to criticise.”

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

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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?

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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

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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.


Why melting glaciers means cleaner, cheaper cars …

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By Paul Gilding | March 3rd, 2010, Cockatoo Chronicles 16

When we focus on news that reinforces our environmental challenges, of which there’s no shortage, we forget just how exciting the opportunities in fixing them are and how fast these solutions are now accelerating. Every story about melting icecaps or raging floods brings a smarter, cleaner world closer. My favourite example at the moment is electric cars. While they had a bad start, we are now on the verge of the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for, with around 30 models coming into the market from the major car companies and new start-ups over the next 3 years.

If we get this right, it’s hard to overstate the significance of the upside. This is a real game changer for our transport and energy systems. Forget any old ideas you have about niche markets, limited range and slow cars. There are some very exciting cars on the way and some business concepts that could change not just personal transport but the whole electricity sector. How will this unfold?

Imagine for example not charging your car overnight, but pulling into a “battery change station” where a machine simply takes out your battery pack and replaces it with a fully charged one, all in a few minutes, while you go and pick up a coffee. The batteries will have been charged by 100% renewable energy and you will have a contract that guarantees the price you pay, eliminating fears of petrol price rises. That’s the vision now being implemented across a number of countries by the very well funded Better Place and its founder Shai Aggasi as you can read here.

But it gets even better. You could also have a car that plugs into the grid when you’re not driving it. This means when the power is cheap because demand is low you will be able to charge your car and when there is high demand and power is expensive you can sell it back to the grid and make a profit. So your car effectively becomes a power station and you become a mini power company! An additional benefit of this is that the car fleet acts as a giant battery, enabling storage of intermittent renewables like solar PV and wind power.

By the way, they are also dramatically cheaper to run because electricity is so efficient at energy conversion. If you want some more details on the numbers take a look at this excellent summary by Andrew Simpson from Curtin University.

If you’re worried these electric cars will be boring to drive then take a look at Tesla Motors who are producing the Tesla Roadster that will go from 0 – 100kh/h in 4 seconds. Who said greenies don’t know how to have fun!

This is all in addition to the clean cites, no air pollution and countless new jobs created as we build the infrastructure for this transport and energy revolution.

Heard all this before and wondering if its real? Warren Buffet certainly thinks its is. He invested US$230 million in Chinese electric car company BYD in 2008 and his 10% stake is now worth close to $2 billion. China plans to put a million electric cars on the road by 2012 so BYD is looking like delivering on its name for its owners (BYD stands for Build Your Dream!).

As a transition this dramatic takes off in a market, it’s hard to tell where it will head but in any outcome the implications for consumers, business and markets are certainly profound. Alan Kohler makes an interesting argument in his investment newsletter The Eureka Report as to why all cars will be electric within 20 years. He points out that when people come to believe that the electric car is going to be the clear winner, they will suddenly realise their old petrol car will have close to zero resale value within a few years. At that point there will be a rush to go electric, to avoid the inevitable price collapse in second hand petrol cars. This will of course be self-reinforcing when it takes off.

Of course we can’t be sure which technologies, business models and companies will succeed. What we can now safely accept however is that with so many people and so much money focused on making this work, the time has clearly arrived when the internal combustion engine is heading for a rapid sunset.

Let you mind run over the implications of that for the oil industry and peak oil….

So next time you read about a melting glacier, remember how much fun driving into the future is going to be.

Whales Store Some Carbon, Oceans Store Loads of It

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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

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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.