ReCalentamiento Global

Seguimos con el "calentamiento global", o el "cambio climático" como está de moda decirle ahora. Resulta que el 2005 va a ser récord absoluto en temperaturas altas. Bueno, por lo menos depende de quien lo dice:

So, what else is new? We already know that the world is warming and that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (with or without any greenhouse gas emission controls). Record temperatures will continue to be set every couple of years or so. In fact, if it weren't for the 1998 El Niño, a new record high global average temperature would have been established in 4 of the last 5 years (including 2005). The big news is that 2005 will further establish that the rate at which temperatures have been rising during the past 30 years or so has been remarkably constant with a value of about 0.17ºC per decade, and it shows no sign of speeding up. Climate models share this constancy of warming; they just predict different rates. Unless that behavior is wrong, the additional warming until 2100 will be about 1.6°C, near the low end of projections made by our friends at the United Nations, and, frankly, too small to worry about, given that the energy structure of our society is likely to change dramatically in 100 years' time. We'll bet that no one points that out in December, when the warmth-of-2005 stories will proliferate like Santas.