Hot? Climate change. Wet? Climate change. Dry? Climate change. Snow? Cold? Yup, climate change.
Extreme Weather Exposes Serious City Flaws
Deespite the Patriots winning the Super Bowl, January and February were not kind months for the people of Boston and New England. By February 10th, more than 60 inches of snow in 30 days fell on the city and parts of the wider region, closing schools, shuttering businesses and offices, interrupting road, rail and air travel, paralyzing the region.
Across the Northeast and down highway I-95 as far as Philadelphia, the massive snowfalls caused disruption and damage totaling millions of dollars. Factor in the cost of all the lost business, and the tally reaches into the billions.
This is the new normal for weather in the US. Global climate change increases the chances that the once-a-century event is now a once-every-twenty-years occurrence. The country is now experiencing more severe weather events: long droughts in the Southwest, destructive wildfires in the West, and more intense hurricanes along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
Uh huh. The hurricane schtick is wonderful, since the US hasn’t experienced a major hurricane in over 9 years, a record for the nation of America. It has only experienced two hurricanes, one of which (Isaac) could be argued was below hurricane strength at landfall. Even tropical storm landfalls have fallen. Wildfires have not increased, and droughts are entirely within historical norms.
Here’s the photo they use for an article on “climate change”
I write from personal experience of this new normal. Living in the Washington, DC, region, I survived Snowmageddon, a three-foot snow dump, in February 2010. Two years later, I endured a one-week power outage in what was the hottest week in June on record after a derecho – a fast-moving wind rarely seen east of the Appalachians before the summer heat begins to intensify – moved in from the Midwest, felling trees and cutting off power.
See? No matter what the weather does, it’s “climate change”.
You would think that the new experiences would spawn a general debate about the need for new programs and policies for cities and municipalities. You would be wrong. It is not just the carbon corporate power structure at work funding climate change deniers. Many scientists and policymakers have failed to draw the connection between global changes and local events – something I’ve studied as a professor of public policy.
Since Boston is a big area for belief in Hotcoldwetdry, I recommend that they not be allowed to use fossil fueled machines to clean all the global warming from fossil fuels created snow.
Meanwhile
Few Show Up For Climate Change Demonstration (it was too cold and snowy)
It’s Too Cold To Protest Global Warming At Yale.
Duh.
The Earth’s surface is rapidly warming, but the warming is not uniform.
Climate Deniers (CDs) claim a 1 degree Centigrade increase in the mean surface temperature is trivial, but in reality we have exceeded the highest temperatures from the entire Holocene and are careening to even higher temperatures. So look for even wilder weather swings. Extreme variability will be the new normal.
Human action is adding unprecedented (for 100s of thousands of years) heat energy to the atmosphere and Earth’s surface. Buckle up – the ride will be bumpy. We can decide (as the CDs desire) to let it get much worse, and our children’s children’s children will ask, Why? Or we can decide to let it only get a little worse (as environmentalists recommend). The costs of interrupting the process today are little. The potential costs to our children’s children’s children will be great.
And don’t forget that climate change makes my job boring!
Jeffrey, the “climate change” theory is just internally wonderful: it doesn’t matter what actual results are obtained, some of you guys are going to blame it on climate change! If it’s too hot, that’s climate change, if it;s too cold, that’s climate change, if it’s just right, well, heck, that’s climate change.
Scientific method requires that there be a set of conditions which prove the theory, and sets of conditions which disprove it, but when it comes to climate change, the advocates claim that all sets of results prove the theory.
Dana,
As has been stated repeatedly, the theory of man-made global warming can be easily falsified.
Demonstrate experimentally that CO2 does not absorb infrared radiation and re-radiate it into the atmosphere.
Demonstrate that the Earth is not warming.
Demonstrate that atmospheric CO2 is not increasing.
Demonstrate that the increased CO2 is not from fossil fuels.
So, far, none of these facts have been falsified.
It would also support your cause to propose an alternate, scientifically plausible mechanism for the current warming period.
All the other dependent hypotheses such as weather extremes, glacial melt, sea level rise, ocean acidification all must be viewed in light of the above facts. Some of those secondary hypotheses have more supporting evidence than others. The Arctic ice is certainly in decline. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting. The sea level is rising. The oceans’ pH is dropping. Whether there are more frequent and/or more powerful storms is still an open question.
The theory that the Earth is warming from fossil-fuel derived carbon dioxide is supported by overwhelming evidence. Some of the results from this warming are more clearly defined than others.
Monday morning links
Some pics of Monhegan Dangerous Cold Grips Northeast; Buffalo Records Coldest Day in 21 Years It is chilly out – invigorating. Still, we pray for global warming Large Hadron Collider detects ‘Superparticles’ – A brighter vision of “dark matter†to