Yes, It Is the Heat

The bad news of global warming just keeps on coming. Sydney, Australia, had an unpleasant wakeup call a couple of days ago. Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation issued a report about Sydney's future that didn't paint a very pretty picture. Average temperatures in the city will rise by about three degrees Fahrenheit in the next 23 years, and almost nine degrees Fahrenheit by 2070. Rainfall is going to dry up, and what rain does fall will evaporate more quickly. It'll effectively enter desert conditions.

Unfortunately, according to the researcher who wrote the report, there's nothing much we can do about it, either.

The problem there is that future climate change is already built into the system.

So the warming we've been experiencing in recent years is really a function of greenhouse gases we emitted a few decades ago.

Although there's a promise that large-scale reductions in future greenhouse gas emissions on the international basis will forestall ... large-scale warming by the end of the century, we've already sort of committed ourselves to additional warming and downstream climate change and consequences over the next few decades.

This is an aspect of global warming that often slips under the radar. Some environmental trends are already in place, and even if we change the way we do things tomorrow, these trends won't stop dead in their tracks and reverse themselves.

There's a global warming report due out from the UN on Friday, and The New York Times reveals that infighting over the nuances of the report continued up to the last minute. Different governments want to phrase things in ways that will not reflect badly on them. The United States, for example, wanted to underplay findings that human-caused global warming maybe responsible for the increased intensity of hurricanes. But in many ways, the specific details aren't as important as the big picture.

The panel also is expected to conclude that within decades, world temperatures are likely to surpass the warmest natural hot spells for thousands of years, triggering disruptive shifts in weather patterns and causing a largely irreversible rise in sea levels.

This report backs off from some of the more extreme predictions of previous UN materials, but the outlook is dire no matter how you spin it. We're getting past the time when talking about the problem is a constructive activity.