Today, a global warming progress report. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them. When I face questions about global
warming, it's usually a struggle to point out that the problem
must be kept in the scientific domain and out of politics. Any
of us can fall into the trap of naming whatever political figure
we like least, and taking the position opposite to his or hers.
With that in mind, let's look a a helpful summary article in
this week's Science magazine. It's by a group of climate experts
from NASA, the Scripps Institute, and institutes in Germany,
Australia, and France. What they've done is straightforward.
First, they graph the increase of CO2 concentration,
temperature, and sea level, since 1975. Each increases a bit
more strongly than a simple linear rise. Maybe they're rising
exponentially, maybe not. The changes might not seem extreme. In
thirty years, CO2 concentrations are