Carbon, claims and climate change

For climatologists like Dr. James Hansen, global warming is a time-stamped threat that’s chillingly imminent. It isn’t just about accepting that global climate change is a reality, but accepting that those drastic changes will occur in our lifetime.

There’s certainly no shortage of dates circulating in the climate change ether — for example, the Kyoto Protocol calls for a reduction of overall emissions five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, and in Canada the federal government has called for emission reductions of half by 2050, though cuts wouldn’t have to begin until 2010. For Hansen specifically, who most famously raised the issue during a sweltering Washington, DC heat wave, a critical year would be 2030, marking the end of coal-powered electricity and eventually returning carbon emissions to 1988 levels.

Like all predictions on climate change, Hansen’s depend on climate models that predict the likely effects of increased greenhouse gases.

But according to a recent article published in the scientific journal Nature, common assumptions about greenhouse gases may not hold true.

Taken at the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory measurements of tropospheric ozone demonstrated that the gas was being destroyed at a 50 per cent higher rate than expected. This means one large wrinkle in many climate change equations.

But as the observatory’s researchers point out in a recent article in The Globe and Mail, this hardly means it’s time to begin mass incinerations and other CO2-spewing party tricks. After all, if greenhouse gases are being destroyed at a higher rate than previously thought, that could mean that existing greenhouse gas measurements are drastically underestimating the total amount being emitted. While this new revelation may mean that the dire predictions of existing climate models are working from dated assumptions, it certainly doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook just yet.