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   World swelters, cool spots defy global warming

By Alister Doyle

OSLO (Reuters) - With the world sweltering through one of the hottest years on record, some icy bastions have been getting frostier in defiance of global warming.

The rare cool spots, also from Canada to China, cause headaches for policy makers seeking to impose expensive measures to curb emissions from cars and factories blamed for blanketing the globe and driving up temperatures.

"We are disrupting the entire climate system," said Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N.'s main panel on climate change. "It's not as though there is going to be a uniform warming of the entire planet."

He said that signs of global warming are overwhelming, from a heat wave in India this year with temperatures up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit that killed 1,500 people, to prolonged drought in Australia.

"There are also many of these (cooling anomalies). But merely to cite one as evidence that there is no warming is not rational," he told Reuters of lingering skepticism to the broad consensus that human pollution is warming the planet.

And experts say that apparent anomalies, such as the growth of glaciers in Norway in the 1990s, can often be explained by a wider picture of global warming because of increased snowfall.

"When the oceans get warmer, you get more evaporation so you create more clouds. Then you can have more precipitation and in some areas it can be in the form of snow," said Josefino Comiso, a senior scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre.

He said that his research, for instance, indicated that snow was getting deeper over higher parts of Greenland. Ice and snow in some regions of Antarctica was also getting thicker. "Some climate models suggest these effects," he said.        

GLACIERS SHRINK

In other areas, global warming seems to be catching up with some of the icy exceptions.

The Briksdal glacier in west Norway, for instance, has receded about 426 feet since a peak in 2000 when it was splintering birch trees on ground that had been free of ice for decades.

"It's shrunk a lot, though in the middle of the 17th century is was 1.5 km (one mile) longer than now," said Frode Briksdal, a glacier guide whose family has long lived in the area.

Climate experts say that recent hotter summers are melting the ice despite more snowfall in winter that is adding to the overall mass of the glaciers.

The U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that 1998 was the hottest year since records began in 1860, followed by 2002 and 2001. It says the rise in global average surface temperatures since 1900 exceeds 0.6 Celsius.

So far this year, temperatures have also been high in many regions. The WMO says that average surface temperatures in May were the second highest on record. June temperatures in Switzerland, for instance, were the hottest in 250 years.

But some question the view of Pachauri's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that human activity is driving global warming. Many skeptics point out experts were predicting a new Ice Age in the 1970s after a long cold spell.

"There is an idea among the public that the 'science is settled'," said James Schlesinger, a Republican and former U.S. energy secretary. "We are in danger of prematurely embracing certitudes."        

SUN SPOTS

Schlesinger said in a recent speech that the IPCC focused too narrowly on factors like human emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide, volcanoes and an 11-year sunspot cycle. He said it played down other possible factors like long-term variations in solar activity.

U.S. President George W. Bush has pulled out of the international Kyoto pact, which aims to cut emissions of carbon dioxide by at least 5 percent by 2008-12, arguing it is too costly and unfairly excludes developing countries.

Jon Ove Hagen, professor of glaciology at Oslo University, said most glaciers from Alaska to the Himalayas were melting. "By contrast, in 100 years' time one expects that the Antarctic ice will increase in volume because of more snow," he said.

Lynn Rosentrater, Arctic climate scientist at the WWF environmental group, said sea levels were expected to rise this century more because water in the oceans would expand with higher temperatures. Secondarily, melting glaciers in Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia would add to water in the oceans.

Among anomalies in climate change, she said that a cooling over northeastern Canada in recent years also "now seems to be stabilizing and now looking more towards warming."
 
07/25/03 08:00 ET
   
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