Is our planet warming up?

By Michael Johnson

BORDEAUX: In the past few years I have known some truly nasty winters around the world. I have been frost-bitten in Moscow, numbed in New York and frozen in France. This year, most of the northern hemisphere, except for Western Europe, is emerging from what scientists say has been the harshest winter in decades.

A search of available databases indicates that Malta, Israel, China and even New Delhi have been enduring record low temperatures the past four months. In Afghanistan, more than 900 people and 316,000 head of cattle have perished in the cold so far, Reuters reports from Kabul.

But hang on, I'm confused. I thought Al Gore said the debate was over. Where is his global warming when we need it? He's so earnest, so easy to believe, that I almost bought his book, the one with the inconvenient price tag of $23.

Is this planet warming up or not? Actually the experts have been at war over the issue for years, trading epithets worthy of the schoolyard. The debate is not over yet.

Trying to follow the public discourse, however, has been a giant frustration for us laypersons. Climate-change skeptics are denigrated as irresponsible right-wing "goofies" by climate-change activists, and the goofies have in turn accused the activists of "global fraud." Junkscience.com dismisses them as alarmists who think "the sky is falling."

On the other hand, the Australian climate expert Ross Garnaut created a stir at a recent government conference in Adelaide claiming his research shows dangerous climate change is coming "much more rapidly than has generally been understood." The window for corrective measures is between now and 2020, and after that, he said, get ready for real change. "The show will be over," he said.

Could this be a case of the philosopher Michel Foucault's view of the world: "There is no such thing as truth"? Or is it more appropriate to cite screenwriter William Goldman, who has written that "Nobody knows anything"? Woods Hole Climate Change Institute in Massachusetts is at least cautious, pointing out that climate fluctuations happen over millennia, whereas our data goes back only 150 years.

Something strange is happening, you can be sure. I have seen the erosion along the North Atlantic, all the way down to Portugal. My wife and I almost bought a house on the Ile de Ré, halfway down the French west coast, for its magnificent sea view. But we were frightened off when we noticed crumbling cliffsides at the property's ocean front. "Don't worry," the real estate agent said blithely. "You will lose only about a foot of your front yard every three years."

Well, there's a silver lining to this cloud. If my math is right, that's five feet less grass to mow every 15 years.

Next we looked at a house in Arcachon. The owner pointed out seashells embedded in the stone of the exterior walls - proof of Aquitaine's underwater past. I'm told that fossil evidence proves there have been three separate periods of the sea moving several miles inland in the area. We may have a few hundred thousand years' margin, but I still can't decide whether to worry or not.

Yet I now learn from www.surfacestations.org that the panic over melting icecaps may have been unfounded. Yes, polar bears were clinging to ice floes last year but the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says most of the ice has reformed. Ice surface that had dropped alarmingly is almost back to normal levels.

Sometimes the conflicting data comes from a single country. Australia's largest-selling daily, the Herald Sun, reported a couple of weeks ago that most of New South Wales had the coldest February in 50 years following the hottest January on record for the rest of the country.

Israel's Haaretz newspaper reports that Jerusalem has had three snowfalls this winter, but the signals are mixed. Says Nahum Malik of the Meteotech forecasting service: "While this is not something especially common - not something that happens every year - neither is it exceptional." In most of the country, it was the coldest January since 1992, and temperatures in some areas hit all-time lows.

Ordinarily I might step back, wait and see. Time will surely tell how the planet responds to our behavior. But what if the "show is over" in just 12 years, as the Australian professor predicts? For comfort, I like "Pascal's Wager" on the existence of God as a rational way forward. He said it's better to bet that there is a God (read climate change) in case there just might be one.

Michael Johnson is a former Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Rabu 19 Maret 2008)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)