Defusing the global warming time bomb.

This article discusses global warming. A paradox in the notion of human-made global warming became strikingly apparent to me one summer afternoon in 1976 on Jones Beach, Long Island. Our group had calculated that these human-made gases were heating the earth's surface at a rate of almost two watts per square meter. Because of the large capacity of the oceans to absorb heat, it takes the earth about a century to approach a new balance-that is, for it to once again receive the same amount of energy from the sun that it radiates to space. The current rate of ocean heat storage is a critical planetary metric: it not only determines the amount of additional global warming already in the pipeline, but it also equals the reduction in climate forcings needed to stabilize the earth's present climate. The Earth's energy is balanced when the outgoing heat from the earth equals the incoming energy from the sun. The goal the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change produced in Rio de Janeiro in 1989, is to stabilize atmospheric composition to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" and to achieve that goal in ways that do not disrupt the global economy.