Global Warming

This from the St. Petersberg Times, a paper I've been reading more & more. Good reporting, good editorials, just good. Here's an excerpt, emphasis added:


Current research shows that the waters in the Atlantic basin are as warm as they've been since scientists began recording temperatures more than 100 years ago. The average for the last decade was one-tenth of a degree centigrade higher than the previous high, recorded in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The increase doesn't sound like much. But researchers such as Trenberth have concluded that it is not a normal fluctuation in ocean temperatures, or the effect of El Nino, a current of warm ocean water. It's an increase in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, they say.

When researchers plug global warming data into their models, they can re-create the climate patterns of the past 30 years, Trenberth said. Without that data, the models fail to re-create the patterns.

"There is a man-made contribution," Trenberth said. "It's not outstanding at the moment. But it's there."

Hurricanes already may be dropping more rain as a result of the warming.

Trenberth pointed out that "very heavy" precipitation, the kind dropped during hurricanes, was up 20 percent over the previous century. And by 2080, the average rainfall near the center of hurricanes will increase by 18 percent, according to Knutson's models.

Such a trend would not be easily reversed, scientists say.