Global warming: Stop worrying, start panicking?

Abstract

In their excellent Perspectives article in this issue (1), Ramanathan and Feng (R&F) sound a harsh wake-up call for those concerned about anthropogenic climate change: the authors maintain that the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the past have already loaded the Earth System sufficiently to bring about disastrous global warming. In other words, the ultimate goal of climate protection policy, as stipulated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (2), appears to be a delusion. So should we stop worrying and rather start panicking now? The scientific evidence about climate change comes in thousands of parcels, yet the monumental reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (3) are the guideposts for both experts and stakeholders. The IPCC format, perfected by the late Bert Bolin, is a painstaking self-interrogation process of the pertinent scientific community. In this process, virtually every stone in the cognitive landscape is turned and the findings, however mundane or ugly, are synthesized into encyclopedic accounts. Unfortunately, such an approach is inherently tuned for burying crucial insights under heaps of facts, figures, and error bars. Therefore, R&F must be commended for dredging up one of the most inconvenient truths hidden in the IPCC tangle, namely the aerosol masking of global warming (AMGW). Also, by construction, the IPCC vessel tends to steer clear of value judgments that might be easily converted into “policy-prescriptive” statements. The downside of this well-meaning attitude is that the 2007 report does not, for instance, make a systematic attempt to characterize what dangerous anthropogenic interference (DAI) with the natural climate system is all about. Again, all of the relevant information is implicitly contained in the IPCC tomes, most notably in chapter 19 of the Working Group II report (3) (see also ref. 4). Yet even that chapter shies away from …