Can humans really change nature's mechanisms and cause the earth to continue heating up?
Right now, humans cannot break the laws of nature. These laws dictate that in 80,000 years, global temperatures will drop about 10oC, glaciers around the world will expand greatly and the climate will enter another ice age. But that is another 80,000 years.
For the moment, the earth is in a warming period between these ice ages. This is not even the hottest period in the last 80,000 years, although current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are higher than they've been in more than 600,000 years. The Earth would need to break away from the sun, or its volcanoes would have to undergo massive simultaneous eruptions in order to halt the temperature increase. The greenhouse effect caused by greenhouse gas emissions can only be checked by a reduction of the solar radiation.
Atmospheric science says, the correct explanation for rising temperatures over the past and the next 100 years, global warming, cannot be explained if we ignore the impact of manmade factors. In other words, the current record temperatures are the result of the combined impact of natural weather and large quantities of greenhouse gases released by humans, and not merely the result of human activity.
Reports from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have mainly emphasized the importance of the influence of humans over the past and the next 100 years, not the next 1,000 or 10,000 years. A report this year modeled a scenario in which the whole world worked together after the year 2050 to control greenhouse gas emissions, which is hoped could reduce interference in the climate and return it to its natural state.
Extensive media coverage of the issue has made environmentalists look similar to those depicted in Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear, in which scientists intentionally hype up concern over global warming to serve their own ends. But that is science fiction. Although Crichton brings up examples in which scientists misinterpreted data in the 1940s and 1950s, Crichton himself is not a scientist. There was a slight drop in global temperature between 1945 and 1975, but scientific models and discussion have since confirmed that this was just a short episode in the long-running interaction between the atmosphere and oceans.
The current record-breaking atmospheric temperatures might one day also be adjusted and corrected by slower-rising ocean temperatures and currents, but that won't do much to stop the trend over the next 100 years.
Global climate change will continue to be a hot topic throughout the year. The IPCC will discuss its economic impact in Bangkok at the end of this month and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will meet in Bonn, Germany next month. The G8 summit will discuss the next targets for greenhouse gas reductions when it meets in Heiligendamm, Germany at the beginning of June. The UN announced it will convene a ministerial-level meeting in September as a precursor to the 13th UNFCCC treaty signing in December in Indonesia.
All of Taiwan's major newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television networks have noticed this phenomenon, and have been rushing to run series of special reports and productions. The meeting in Indonesia will be extremely busy. Taiwan's candidates for next year's presidential election must also state their strategy for Taiwan's response to global warming. After all, temperatures may be following a cycle that spans thousands of years, but humans must help plot their own course for the next few hundred.
Liu Chung-ming is director of the Global Change Research Center at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Marc Langer
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