Climate guru warns of ‘trouble coming’
Scientists have a pretty good picture of global climate changes, but the snapshot for Hawaii is not clear, says one of the world's leading climate researchers.
Richard Alley, chairman of the Committee on Abrupt Climate Change for the National Research Council, is one of the authors of the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "The IPCC's output is probably not good enough about what Hawaii is going to do," he said in an interview here last week, suggesting serious work is needed on numerical models to forecast the impact of climate changes in Hawaii.
Many isle scientists are concerned about how global climate changes will affect Hawaii, said UH geologist Gregory Ravizza, accompanying Alley. They are studying climate history in corals and looking for other types of records, Ravizza said. But Hawaii does not have accumulated sediments or strong seasons for tree rings, he said.
"Corals have a wonderful record but they don't live 100,000 years," said Alley, who has studied more than 100,000 years of climate history in an ice core from Greenland.
A popular speaker on climate in the media, Alley said the IPCC scientists concluded that warming of the climate is "unequivocal."
"Scientifically, if we keep going (burning fossil fuels), 100 years from now you won't need to be a scientist to see this. It will become evident to people in most things they do."
But the climate and economy are like cruise ships that cannot be turned around instantly, he said. "If you see problems coming years ahead, the sooner you start addressing them, the easier they will be to fix."
Alley, the Pennsylvania State University Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, gave a public talk Tuesday night as part of the University of Hawaii at Manoa Distinguished Lecture Series.
While there are still skeptics about climate change, Alley said, scientific findings leave little room for argument. As a climate historian and ice sheet researcher, he said he looks at the best estimates for the future and that "there is trouble coming."
Earlier climate change projections about the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature are on target; however, sea level rise has been faster than expected, he said.
Scientists said in their latest report that they cannot put an upper limit on sea level rise because they have no scientific basis for assessing it, Alley said. It could rise inches, feet or tens of feet beyond the next century, he said. "Uncertainty is at that order of magnitude. We've got to do better."
Climate change is part of the bigger issue of energy and increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, Alley said.
Demands for oil and coal are increasing while supplies are being depleted, he said. "The real challenge here is to help ourselves and help other people while dealing with the climate issue." Solving one problem should help solve the other, he said.