- (Reuters) -- A parcel of studies looking at the oceans
and melting Arctic ice leave no room for doubt that it is getting warmer,
people are to blame, and the weather is going to suffer, climate experts
said on Thursday.
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- New computer models that look at ocean temperatures instead
of the atmosphere show the clearest signal yet that global warming is well
underway, said Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
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- Speaking at an annual meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, Barnett said climate models based on air
temperatures are weak because most of the evidence for global warming is
not even there.
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- "The real place to look is in the ocean," Barnett
told a news conference.
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- His team used millions of temperature readings made by
the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to calculate steady
ocean warming.
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- "The debate over whether or not there is a global
warming signal is now over, at least for rational people," he said.
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- The report was published one day after the United Nations
Kyoto Protocol took effect, a 141-nation environmental pact the United
States government has spurned for several reasons, including stated doubts
about whether global warming is occurring and is caused by people.
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- Barnett urged U.S. officials to reconsider.
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- "Could a climate system simply do this on its own?
The answer is clearly no," Barnett said.
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- His team used U.S. government models of solar warming
and volcanic warming, just to see if they could account for the measurements
they made. "Not a chance," he said. And the effects will be felt
far and wide. "Anywhere that the major water source is fed by snow
... or glacial melt," he said. "The debate is what are we going
to do about it."
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- Other researchers found clear effects on climate and
animals.
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- Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
found that melting ice was changing the water cycle, which in turn affects
ocean currents and, ultimately, climate.
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- "As the Earth warms, its water cycle is changing,
being pushed out of kilter," she said. "Ice is in decline everywhere
on the planet."
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- A circulation system called the Ocean Conveyer Belt is
in danger of shutting down, she said. The last time that happened, northern
Europe suffered extremely cold winters.
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- She said the changes were already causing droughts in
the western United States.
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- Greenland's ice cap, which contains enough ice to raise
sea levels globally by 23 feet, is starting to melt and could collapse
suddenly, Curry said. Already freshwater is percolating down, lubricating
the base and making it more unstable.
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- Sharon Smith of the University of Miami found melting
Arctic ice was taking with it algae that formed an important base of the
food supply for a range of animals.
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- And the disappearing ice shelves meant big animals such
as walruses, polar bears and seals were losing their homes.
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- "In 1997 there was a mass die-off of a bird called
the short-tailed shearwater in the Bering Sea," Smith told the news
conference. The birds, which migrate from Australia, starved to death when
warmer waters caused a plankton called a coccolithophore to bloom in huge
numbers, turning the water an opaque turquoise color.
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- "The short-tailed shearwater couldn't see its prey,"
Smith said.
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