Excitable Bill McKibben is being excitable. It wasn’t all that long ago that Warmists were proclaiming that the threat from anthropogenic climate change was something that would be coming in the next 50-100 years. They also used to say that weather events were not climate. Now, though, they are switching to say with Absolute Moral Certainty!!!!!! that every bad weather event is due to you driving a fossil fueled vehicle. Interestingly, one has to wonder why ‘climate change’ can’t be responsible for Good Weather
Stop talking right now about the threat of climate change. It’s here; it’s happening
For the sake of keeping things manageable, let’s confine the discussion to a single continent and a single week: North America over the last seven days.
In Houston they got down to the hard and unromantic work of recovery from what economists announced was probably the most expensive storm in US history, and which weather analysts confirmed was certainly the greatest rainfall event ever measured in the country – across much of its spread it was a once-in-25,000-years storm, meaning 12 times past the birth of Christ; in isolated spots it was a once-in-500,000-years storm, which means back when we lived in trees. Meanwhile, San Francisco not only beat its all-time high temperature record, it crushed it by 3C, which should be pretty much statistically impossible in a place with 150 years (that’s 55,000 days) of record-keeping.
How about we compare it to previous warm periods? How about during the Holocene?
Oh, and while Irma spun, Hurricane Jose followed in its wake as a major hurricane, while in the Gulf of Mexico, Katia spun up into a frightening storm of her own, before crashing into the Mexican mainland almost directly across the peninsula from the spot where the strongest earthquake in 100 years had taken dozens of lives.
Did Bill just link the earthquake with Hotcoldwetdry?
Leaving aside the earthquake, every one of these events jibes with what scientists and environmentalists have spent 30 fruitless years telling us to expect from global warming. (There’s actually fairly convincing evidence that climate change is triggering more seismic activity, but there’s no need to egg the pudding.)
Yes, yes he did. BTW, why no mention of the fact that the climaweenies models failed for over 18 years, fail when applied to the past, and that there was extremely low landfalling hurricane activity for almost 12 years? If Bill want to talk 150 years, well, the major hurricane landfalling dearth record shattered that from the Civil War era years.
Maybe it was too much to expect that scientists’ warnings would really move people. (I mean, I wrote The End of Nature, the first book about all this 28 years ago this week, when I was 28 – and when my theory was still: “People will read my book, and then they will change.â€) Maybe it’s like all the health warnings that you should eat fewer chips and drink less soda, which, to judge by belt-size, not many of us pay much mind. Until, maybe, you go to the doctor and he says: “Whoa, you’re in trouble.†Not “keep eating junk and some day you’ll be in troubleâ€, but: “You’re in trouble right now, today. As in, it looks to me like you’ve already had a small stroke or two.†Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are the equivalent of one of those transient ischaemic attacks – yeah, your face is drooping oddly on the left, but you can continue. Maybe. If you start taking your pills, eating right, exercising, getting your act together.
That’s the stage we’re at now – not the warning on the side of the pack, but the hacking cough that brings up blood. But what happens if you keep smoking? You get worse, till past a certain point you’re not continuing. We’ve increased the temperature of the Earth a little more than 1C so far, which has been enough extra heat to account for the horrors we’re currently witnessing. And with the momentum built into the system, we’re going to go somewhere near 2C, no matter what we do. That will be considerably worse than where we are now, but maybe it will be expensively endurable.
And that’s why people tune out: over-wrought hysterics pushing apocalyptic doom, just like the mentally disturbed people on street corners screeching about the end of the world. And, just like the wackos on the street corners, the Warmists cannot prove their assertions. Just because there has been warming does not mean it is primarily/solely caused by Mankind.
