Jammu, December 22: The confusion over the climate change and its effects on the world environment besides the methods of calculation has been subject of a never ending debate around the globe with new findings being unraveled every now and then.
While scientists had warned of grave consequences of climate change over the years many a times varied theories have been floated by another group of scientists saying that world was being unnecessarily bullied on climate issues while it were the big powers who were actually playing the game.
Well! Whatever be the politics behind it the climate pact has finally been inked while NASA has floated yet another theory of temperature calculating saying the calculations till date might have differed in actual measurements.
According to a report by NASA, the “Nasa scientists have calculated the temperature impact of different climate drivers such as greenhouse gases, ozone concentrations and land use changes based on historical observations over 150 years.
To quantify climate change, researchers need to know the Transient Climate Response (TCR) and Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) of Earth.
Both values are projected global mean surface temperature changes in response to doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations but on different timescales.
There have been many attempts to determine TCR and ECS values based on the history of temperature changes over the last 150 years and the measurements of important climate drivers, such as carbon dioxide, researchers said.
As part of that calculation, researchers have relied on simplifying assumptions when accounting for the temperature impacts of climate drivers other than carbon dioxide, such as tiny particles in the atmosphere known as aerosols, for example.
It is well known that aerosols such as those emitted in volcanic eruptions act to cool Earth, at least temporarily, by reflecting solar radiation away from the planet.
In a similar way, land use changes such as deforestation in northern latitudes result in bare land that increases reflected sunlight.
However, assumptions made to account for these drivers are too simplistic and result in incorrect estimates of TCR and ECS, said study co-author Gavin Schmidt, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.
“The problem with that approach is that it falls way short of capturing the individual regional impacts of each of those variables,” he said, adding that only within the last ten years has there been enough available data on aerosols to abandon the simple assumption and instead attempt detailed calculations.
In a Nasa first, researchers at GISS accomplished such a feat as they calculated the temperature impact of each of these variables – greenhouse gases, natural and manmade aerosols, ozone concentrations, and land use changes – based
on historical observations from 1850 to 2005 using a massive ensemble of computer simulations.
Analysis of the results showed that these climate drivers do not necessarily behave like carbon dioxide, which is uniformly spread throughout the globe and produces a consistent temperature response; rather, each climate driver has a particular set of conditions that affects the temperature response of Earth.
Since earlier studies do not account for what amounts to a net cooling effect for parts of the northern hemisphere, TCR and ECS predictions have been lower than they should be.
This means that Earth’s climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide – or atmospheric carbon dioxide’s capacity to affect temperature change – has been underestimated, researchers said.
The study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change”.
This is yet another twist to the already confusing climate on the climate issue and one wonders whether the world needs more to do on climate front or it may still be another underestimated statement on climate change.
The confusion over climate change and actual temperature rise is due to the rapid changes in technology to predict accurately different aspects of human life and the world we live in which is negating the earlier theories in such a rapid scale that nothing is final on changing climate as yet.
However one believes that the new climate pact may still be a good step in the right direction till final studies predict the actual damage to environment and the steps to be taken.