New Year's Resolution?

In our personal lives, we often use the end of one year and the beginning of the next to take stock of where we’ve been and where we’re heading. Scientists do, too.

According to findings released this week by Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Study, last year’s global mean temperature kept up the current trend of being about 0.6º C (1º F) warmer than the 1951-1980 mean.

What makes 2007 especially noteworthy, however, is that this warmth occurred in spite of natural cycles that periodically cool off Earth.

Solar irradiance was at its lowest point in an approximately 10-year cycle, and the Pacific Ocean entered the La Niña phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. In other words, last year less solar radiation reached the earth and the waters of our planet’s largest ocean basin got a little colder--but the Earth got warmer anyway.

Nothing we’ve done lately alters these natural cycles. Rather, the problem is that now our activities are adding to the mix as well: human-caused warming from greenhouse gases has become so significant that it too can exert a mighty force—so much so that for the first time in Earth’s history, our behavior can actually override nature.

The reality is that in the past 100 years La Niña has come and gone and solar activity has risen and fallen many times, but the top five warmest years on record have all occurred in the last decade.

Indeed, if those naturally occurring cooling cycles were not happening it’s possible that 2007 would have turned out to be even warmer than it was.

Of course, although deeply disturbing, this latest news isn’t anything like a genuine surprise. Rather it’s just more evidence of what has already been detailed in countless studies.

The cascade of effects following from the Earth’s “fever”, such as rising sea levels, melting ice, changing weather patterns and habitat disruption, while scary and sad, isn’t particularly mystifying or astounding to scientists either. It’s simply the expected consequence of that temperature rise: the basic laws of nature virtually demand that if you warm up the planet, these things will occur.

Not to oversimplify too egregiously, but scientifically, this all pretty much just makes sense, in a 2+2=4, night-follows-day, sort of way. And while the accelerating pace of these changes may startle us, even this ever-quickening tempo—faster than anything predicted—doesn’t actually bewilder experts now that it’s happening.

So the truly grim take-home message abiding just beneath all these recent scientific findings is this: given how humanity barrels on, blindly conducting business as usual, perhaps the only thing that really would confuse and confound most scientists at this point is if current trends suddenly, somehow, reversed themselves.