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By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer
As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next,
new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the
And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the
heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in
Copenhagen:
• The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.
_Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from
the U.S. West to
_Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not
just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming,
but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North
American pine forests.
_Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer
than the dozen years leading up to 1997.
Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn't
forecast results quite this bad so fast.
"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than
we thought," Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon.
And here's why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution
was signed in
The last effort didn't quite get the anticipated results.
From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions
from the burning
of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent;
And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful
and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said.
"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were
underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia
Burkett, chief scientist for global
change research at the U.S. Geological Survey.
That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a
last-minute deal in
"By far the most serious differences that we've had is an
acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said in an interview this month
with The Associated Press.
In 1997, global
warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists
and policy wonks. Now biologists, lawyers, economists, engineers, insurance
analysts, risk managers, disaster professionals, commodity traders,
nutritionists, ethicists and even psychologists are working on global warming.
"We've come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract
problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in
everyone's face," said Andrew
Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.
The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most
alarmed are happening in the
Back in 1997 "nobody in their wildest expectations,"
would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the
While melting
Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than
1.5 trillion tons of ice, while
Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the
1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael
Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the
"Glaciers are a good climate indicator," Zemp said.
"What we see is an accelerated loss of ice."
Also, permafrost — the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are
built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane — is thawing
at an alarming rate, Burkett said.
Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very
concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon
dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That causes acidification,
an issue that didn't even merit a name until the past few years.
More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately
threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.
In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals"
and how they are hampered by climate
change, said
More than 37 million acres of Canadian and
The
Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global
warming is partly to blame. The number of major U.S. weather-related blackouts
from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993-1997, said Evan
Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
"The message on the science is that we know a lot more than
we did in 1997 and it's all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of
the