Almost Official: The Climate Crisis

Apart from skewed statistics and creatively dissembling charts and graphs, the argument against the reality of global heating has largely rested on a discrepancy between temperatures at the earth's surface (which are rising) and satellite reports of temperatures in the lower atmosphere (which didn't seem to be.) Now that's over.

"This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected," researchers said in the first of 21 assessment reports planned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.

What does this mean in the political scheme of things? As the Washington Post reports, A government study released yesterday undermines one of the key arguments of climate change skeptics, concluding there is no statistically significant conflict between measures of global warming on the earth's surface and in the atmosphere.

Yesterday, in a different report, the government affirmed that greenhouse gases are still building up in the atmosphere. This report also asserted that data on surface, low, middle and upper atmosphere (which have all warmed) and the upper stratosphere (which has cooled) all conform to computer[models which support the global heating scenario.

And the observed patterns of change over the past fifty years cannot be explained by natural processes alone.

Perhaps the most telling part of this story was the White House response. A statement by the White House Council on Environmental Quality said only that the purpose of the climate change program was to reduce scientific uncertainties, and "we welcome today's report because it represents success in doing so with respect to temperature trends."

The Post story quotes Rafe Pomerance, chairman of the Climate Policy Center, saying--as other have said in response to previous reports--that"This puts the nail in the coffin of [the skeptics'] argument as much as anything I've seen," Pomerance said. "It may not be the first time it's been said, but it's the clearest I've seen it stated coming out of a government agency. Game over."

A separate study released Wednesday says that global heating is weakening a major wind circulation pattern over the Pacific Ocean, which could alter climate and affect the marine food chain. The effects on weather could be similiar to those associated with the El Nino/La Nina phenomena, which are manifested coast to coast in North America. This phenomenon could also lead to drought in Malaysia and the western Pacific, and exacerbate the already critical condition of many species of fish and ocean creatures, that we either eat or that otherwise contribute to human life as well as the health of these vital waters.

You can add this report to those suggesting global heating has warmed ocean waters in the Atlantic and Carribean, affecting the strength and number of hurricanes, and to disapearing glaciers and icepack in the Arctic and Antarctic. Put it all together, and there's an increasingly obvious Climate Crisis that no phony science paid for by oil and gas companies can deny.