Climate change 'paused'? Uh, deniers, just listen to the warm

JAMES J. MCCARTHY
POSTED: Thursday, October 10, 2013, 3:01 AM


WHAT IS IT about the hottest decade in recorded history that's so hard to understand?

The first decade of this millennium - 2001 to 2010 - was the warmest since measurements began 160 years ago. The earlier hottest decade was during the 1990s. And the record-breaker before that? The 1980s. These are undisputed facts.

Nothing about this steady rise suggests that our planet is doing anything but warming. Yet some people who have long resisted the consistency of this trend are now saying that climate change has "paused." In doing so, they ignore the longer trend, miss the big picture and distort the public conversation about the strength of the evidence for climate change.

The new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was explicit and voluminously documented on this point: Climate change is happening now, and if we do not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, future climate disruption will be very costly.

As an ocean scientist and a veteran of former IPCC and other climate assessments, I have seen the scientific evidence for climate change become increasingly solid. Science rarely gets more clear than this.


Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20131010_Climate_change__paused___Uh__deniers__just_listen_to_the_warm.html