Bang!

Eric at The Hamster provides the link to an April 28 AP story revealing that climate scientists have found a "smoking gun" validating computer models forecasting global warming trends and, to continue the image, shooting big holes in the dodges of the nanny-nanny nay-sayers.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the latest to report growing certainty about global-warming projections. ...

More than 1,800 technology-packed floats, deployed in oceans worldwide beginning in 2000, are regularly diving as much as a mile undersea to take temperature and other readings. Their precise measurements are supplemented by better satellite gauging of ocean levels, which rise both from meltwater and as the sea warms and expands.

Researchers led by NASA's James Hansen used the improved data to calculate the oceans' heat content and the global "energy imbalance."

What they've found is that the Earth is absorbing more solar energy than it is radiating back to space as heat to a degree that is not only "historically large" but

corresponds well with the energy imbalance predicted by the researchers' modeling of climate change through a supercomputer, the report said. ...

"There can no longer be genuine doubt that human-made gases are the dominant cause of observed warming," said Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University's Earth Institute. "This energy imbalance is the 'smoking gun' that we have been looking for."

What's the significance? Well, global warming skeptics have harped on the fact that the predictions are based on computer models, which they say are subject to large uncertainties. "The predictions are only as good as the models," they say, a version of GIGO. But the models have now successfully predicted observations. That should serve to improve their credibility (and diminish that of the skeptics) by an order of magnitude or two - along with the level of concern about what those models are telling us.

And this isn't even the only example.

In February, scientists at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography said their research - not yet published - also showed a close correlation between climate models and the observed temperatures of oceans, further defusing skeptics' past criticism of uncertainties in modeling.

Current models predict an increase in mean global temperature of between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4^o-5.8^o C.) by 2100, depending on how well greenhouse-gas emissions are controlled. Ominously, the NASA-led study indicates that heat already stored in the ocean will generate a 1^o F. rise over that time even if there were no further emissions. That, too, is in agreement with US government climate model predictions reported last month.

So take that, Michael Crichton!

The blunt fact is, global warming, global climate change, is real, it's happening now, and it will continue to worsen. All we can do now is control how much worse it gets: Will it be difficult or disastrous?

Unhappily, some, even a few environmentalists (including, notably, James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis) are looking to nuclear power as the answer to global warming. (That, because nuclear power does not use fossil fuels, the burning of which adds additional amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.)

That's a foolish course for any number of reasons. First, consider that to replace current fossil fuel (coal, gas, and oil) power plants with nukes would involve quintupling the number of nuclear power plants - which not only drastically increases the risk of plant-driven nuclear weapons proliferation (exactly the present concern about Iran) but also means five times as much nuclear waste produced annually, waste for which there is still no known method of disposal that is both safe and practical.

And as Dr. Helen Caldicott pointed out last year,

the enrichment of uranium produces 93% per year of the C.F.C. [chlorofluorocarbon] gas in this country, which is currently banned under the Montreal Protocol because it produces destruction of the ozone layer. In Australia, we've got an epidemic of skin cancer because the ozone is so thin. C.F.C. gas, which is the refrigerant gas banned, is up to 20 times more potent global warmer than carbon dioxide, which accounts for 15% of global warming.

That is, the very act of creating the enriched fuel for these "global warming preventing" behemoths actually increases the production of an even more potent greenhouse gas than the one it replaces! Indeed,

the nuclear sector's CO2 emissions are far from negligible when the whole production chain is looked at, not just the plants themselves.

And tell the truth: If there are more nuclear plants built, do you think - considering who holds the reins of energy policy - that would to be used as a basis to reduce carbon emissions? Or just to justify more consumption?

All this to achieve a reduction in carbon emissions than can be achieved more easily, cheaply, safely, and with greater environmental soundness by increasing fuel efficiency and use of commercially-viable alternative energies.

Nuclear power remains what I called it more than 20 years ago: unsafe, uneconomical, and unnecessary.

Footnote: I will always have a soft spot for The Hamster: It was the first site to link to mine.

And as an update to that, Eric announced this morning that he's going dark the end of May. Too bad. On the upside, he's quitting that in order to take up a (paid!) job as a researcher/editor with the Al Franken show on Air America Radio. Best of luck to him.