Prof. Walter Wolfe, horticulture, like many scientists who study climate change, thought there would be more time. “I always thought it would be more toward the end of my career that we saw signs of global warming,” he said. But as the science of climate change becomes increasingly complex, these early signs may raise more questions than they answer.

President Barack Obama diagnosed the social and biophysical climate during his January 20 Inauguration speech to three million onlookers huddled in the freezing cold. “Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet,” he said. Though the government supports the theory of warming, critics believe this theory represents a gross misrepresentation of data, and that the world may instead be at the start of an extended period of global cooling.

On January 28, former Vice President Al Gore warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about “the dangerous and growing threat of the climate crisis,” amidst an unexpected blizzard. Just days before the inauguration, on Jan. 13, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs hosted a scientific debate on his cable program. Scientists from NASA and other government institutions defended the theory of global warming against its opponents in the scientific minority.

Proponents of global cooling challenge the common assessment that increasing levels of atmospheric carbon fuel a trend of global warming, suggesting instead that temperatures will decrease in the coming decades. A vocal minority even suggests that the Earth may be headed for a new ice age.

Supporters of the cooling theory attribute temperature changes in recent years not to carbon dioxide, but rather to natural variations in the earth’s axial tilt, orbital shape (eccentricity) and axial direction (precession). The Milankovitch cycles, as they are known, create successions of warm and cool periods that may last for 100,000 years. Within these larger trends, other variations cause shorter climate shifts, producing “little ice ages” that may last 15,000 years.

“It just seems silly to not recognize that the earth’s climate is driven by the Sun,” said Jay Lehr, science director of conservative public policy think tank The Heartland Institute. “It’s really arrogant to think that man controls the climate.”

According to Lehr, the Sun’s output relies greatly upon the presence or absence of sunspots — areas of lower temperature on the Sun’s surface that emerge due to magnetic fluctuations. Sunspot activity ebbs and flows in periods of 11 years. For the past decade, the Sun has had few sunspots. As a result, Lehr believes, the Sun produced higher temperature radiation and higher global temperature.

Supporters of cooling cite historical observations from the last century — a time when, according to warming theory, global temperatures continually rose due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases. Lehr and others suggest that skewed data sets created false indications of warming.

“Those global data sets are contaminated by the fact that two-thirds of the globe’s [climate data] stations dropped out in 1990. Most of them rural, and [the remaining stations] performed no urban adjustment,” explained Joseph D’Aleo, co-founder of the Weather Channel. “It’s a lot colder in rural areas than in the city,” he said — D’Aleo believes this bias could have exaggerated the trend of global warming.

In fact, 2008 was the coolest year of the 21st century so far.

Conflicting Models

Proponents of warming believe that the emission of greenhouse gases — most notably carbon dioxide — contribute substantially to the warming of Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases absorb and emit the Sun’s thermal infrared radiation. When the Sun’s radiation enters the Earth’s atmosphere, the gases either reflect it back to earth or into space. However, as gas emission increased during the past century, the gases reflected increasing amounts of radiation toward Earth — this is known as the Greenhouse Effect.

Most scientists continue to support the Greenhouse Model of global warming. According to Gavin Schmidt of NASA, “The long term trend is clearly toward warming, and those trends completely dwarf any changes due to the solar cycle.”

But debate still exists as to the extent of this trend. A 2008 article in Nature, titled “Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector,” examined the possibility of a cooling trend by studying recent oceanic activity.

“The Pacific Ocean is telling us — as it has told us 10 times in the past 400 years — you’re going to get cooler,” said Dennis Avery, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.

For the study, a team of German scientists created a new model of oceanic activity by compensating for oceanic variations in temperature, hurricane activity and general precipitation. Like solar activity, oceanic activity varies in 10-year cycles. As warmer water moves into cooler regions, it causes variations in regional climates. By accounting for these variations, the team created a new forecast model.

“Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming,” the team said in a 2008 Nature article. The report suggests that global temperatures may remain constant or even decrease over the next decade.

“I think it’s important that people realize what this [article] says,” added Prof. Natalie Mahowald, earth and atmospheric sciences. “This doesn’t mean global warming is gone.”

The experiment suggests only a natural fluctuation, Mahowald explained, but global warming will remain a definite issue due to the presence of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.

However, the next decade will represent a cooler period within a much larger warming trend.

Prof. Arthur DeGaetano, earth and atmospheric sciences, explained how such trends hide the full effect of global climate change. “Superimposed upon global warming are all these other things,” he said.

DeGaetano said that global warming will inevitably “dominate” the cooling trend, but other scientists are not so sure.

“This is the issue — we can’t run experiments,” Mahowald insisted. “The first thing you do is lots of observation, but that can only give hypotheses … Then, you have to argue that your model is an accurate representation of the world.”

A model, DeGaetano explained, is “a bunch of calculus … [we use] to replicate the physics of the atmosphere to the best of our abilities.”

Mahowald, DeGaetano and others attempt to construct realistic representations of the global climate, but the strength of their theories ultimately rests on the strength of their models. Climate modeling demands the integration of vast amounts of data, including temperatures, precipitation patterns, greenhouse gas concentrations, volcanic activity and solar emissions, DeGaetano said. To judge the effectiveness of a model, he added, is to judge the relevancy of data.

DeGaetano directs the federally funded Northeast Regional Climate Center, which actively circulates climate information to policy-makers and practitioners throughout the Northeast.

Scientists expect this warming trend will have dire consequences. In October 2006, DeGaetano and Wolfe contributed to an article for the Union of Concerned Scientists, titled, “A Report of the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment.” The report predicted — contrary to cooling theories — an increase in temperatures throughout the Northeast over the next century, using three different climate models.

The report states that global models “are able to reproduce key features of climate and regional change already observed across the Northeast.”

“Most of our models suggest we will raise the global temperature by 10 degrees in the next 100 years,” Wolfe said. The report suggests temperatures will rise anywhere from 3.5 to 12.5 degrees in the Northeast by 2100.

What this means, according to the report, is a drastic rise in sea level and more extreme weather events, including bigger, more intense storms. However, it suggested only minor changes in the amount of precipitation. With rising temperatures, this means that the regularity of drought will most likely increase during the century.

A Day of Reckoning

“All the analyses seem to point to the developing world as the ones who are going to get hit the hardest,” Wolfe explained. But, he added, “We aren’t isolated from the effects of global warming.”

According to Wolfe, the interruption of ecosystem by species migration, flooding and drought will greatly impact all people, creating “environmental refugees and wars of water.” In some regions, flooding may become commonplace. Elsewhere, the landscape may dry up entirely. Such a scenario would aggravate already massive problems for both agriculture and biodiversity conservation.

If droughts and extreme weather events become severe enough, Mahowald mused, an ice age might be a relief. “The new ice age will come, but not soon enough to save us,” she said. Mahowald added, “There’s a lot of inertia in the system, and the carbon dioxide we’re producing will stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.”

“This cooling is only going to last a few years, and then we’re going to have the same problem [of global warming],” asserted DeGaetano. “We’re due for another ice age, but not in our lifetime.”

According to Wolfe, warming is a foregone conclusion. “We’re beyond the point of no return for significant warming, even if were to make significant changes,” he said, adding, “but it’s the difference, you know, between a climate change we can manage and a ‘draconian’ change.”

Wolfe alludes to the brutal Greek legislator, Draco, who scribed the first constitution of law onto wooden tablets. He displayed his model of law in public forums, informing all the citizens about the deadly consequences of their crimes. Draco allowed each person to determine his or her own future with a simple — and dire — choice: to fear the possible death penalty or to risk the consequences of their crime.