Scientists have rebuffed the claims made by a new climate study that said Earth's temperature escalated by 13 degrees Fahrenheit because of carbon volumes already dumped by humans into the atmosphere.
While the study's author asserted that there is little to wonder if the planet had warmed by 3 to 7 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit) because of global warming, critics called it a wrong conclusion.
The study was published in Nature. Study author Carolyn Snyder, a former postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, said it was not a detailed climate forecast.
Snyder's focus was on reinforcing the linkage between sea-surface temperatures of the past as a metric of the change in natural releases of carbon dioxide.
Critics said the results created anxiety because 13 degrees F was too big to accept.
The finding did not make sense as it defied the logic behind the Paris climate accord signed by 200 nations, seeking to control the rise of temperature within 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
Experts Challenge The Findings
Gavin Schmidt, chief of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies called the research findings "simply wrong."
Jeffrey Severinghaus, a paleoclimatologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, criticized the study as not being logical.
"It's based on a fundamental mistake," he said.
Schmidt said there is a likelihood of temperature rising an additional 0.5 degrees Celsius to 1 degree Celsius. He said no evidence suggested that temperature would rise 7 degrees Celsius.
Many scientists said what went wrong with Snyder's conclusion was that it overplayed the linkage between temperature and greenhouse gases as the data extrapolated the temperatures from past ice ages to the modern era.
"The number she gets is huge," said Eric Steig, an earth sciences professor at the University of Washington.
Broad Data And Exaggerated Findings
Synder was trying to show what is in store for the future by extrapolating the data on ocean temperatures. But the result shocked many as it predicted a 3- to 7-degree Celsius or 13-degree Fahrenheit hike in global temperatures even after nipping fossil fuel emissions.
"We do find this close relationship between temperature and greenhouse gases that is remarkably stable, and what the study is developing is the coupling factor between the two," said Snyder, who works for the Environmental Protection Agency.
However, some scientists applauded Synder's data that succeeded in creating the first temperature timeline for the globe.
Snyder used 59 ocean sediment cores - used by scientists to assess past sea-surface temperatures - and organized 20,000 reconstructions for building a timeline of global average surface temperatures. Snyder's timeline asserted a correlation between CO2 and temperature changes at the global scale for a period of more than 2 million years.
Jeremy Shakun, a geologist at Boston College, cheered the creation of a temperature timeline despite the exaggerated projections.
"It seems like an absolute must-do kind of study. It had to be done," Shakun said.
Synder can take solace in the fact that the record-setting temperatures experienced in 2015 analyzed by scientists pointed to the excessive heating of oceans.
Photo: Woody Hibbard | Flickr
