EARTH - More on Climate Change

"Climate model predicts hot decade" by Dan Vergano, USA Today

The next decade will be a hot one, according to scientists unveiling the first 10-year projection of global warming.

The climate projection, published today in the journal Science, suggests that a natural cooling trend in eastern and southern Pacific ocean waters has kept a lid on warming in recent years.

And it will continue to do so, scientists say, but not for long.

The projection spans 2006 to 2015. "At least half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be warmer than 1998, the warmest year currently on record," the researchers say in their report.

Globally, that means a typical year will be about half a degree warmer than in the previous 10 years, a projection in line with findings this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel's report, the work of thousands of scientists, also predicts steadily rising temperatures.

The creators of older climate models are most confident about their projections for the years around 2040, making a new decade projection especially important to politicians and other decision-makers, agrees Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "If this works, it is a good step forward," he says, but cautions that ocean temperature measurements vital to the decadal model are limited. Such measures are now fairly low tech, usually involving boats and thermometers.

Improved ocean measurements should soon improve the reliability of the decadal forecast, Smith says. And he adds one caveat the model can't account for. "Any major volcanic eruptions would cool the climate compared with our forecast."

Climate models have critics, such as renowned Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson. But the Hadley Center projections have been run backwards, so-called "hindcasts" that closely reproduce climate in past decades to check accuracy.

Everyone needs to realize that the potential warming of our climate is very important, regardless of the argument over the cause.

Changes in the climate effect agriculture world wide, and all coastal countries. All countries need to evaluate just what would happen to their nation if their agriculture changes or their costs flood, and take action before it becomes very expensive to mitigate.