"Eye-Popping" Record Temperatures Soar: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like In The United States

[Better Believe It]

38. The View From the ‘Catio’

The following article may be posted in full on Democratic Underground with attribution. BBI

Week in Review
A Weekly Column by Bill Onasch
March 20, 2012

The View From the ‘Catio’

That’s the trendy name for a second-story covered front porch that a carpenter friend screened in so that my wife’s four cats can safely romp–or sleep–in fresh air. Since it is also a designated smoking area, weather permitting I spend a fair amount of time with the cats out there reflecting on the state of the world.

Over the past few weeks I couldn’t help noticing the first daffodils flowering, robins battling over this year’s turf--and grass already overdue for mowing. The only problem with these idyllic first signs of Spring–it was still Winter and I live in the Midwest. It was a Winter that required me to pick up the snow shovel only once. And, at a time when basketball tournaments are often accompanied by the season’s biggest snows, we basked in record-breaking high temperatures exceeding 80F last week.

These unseasonable conditions are, of course, not a fluke confined to Kansas City. So far in March, 1,757 new daily high temperature records have been set in the USA including new ones in 36 states just last Thursday.

Admittedly, most of us urban dwellers in these parts have not directly suffered from snow scarcity and warm temps. But these conditions are producing swollen numbers of insects that kill corn and trees and devour key structural parts of wood-framed houses.

Other regions have experienced different and less pleasant extremes. The first three months of 2012 have seen twice the normal number of tornadoes. Many of these have been of exceptional and deadly force.

States west of the Continental Divide got plenty of frigid Arctic air that evaded the rest of us. Snow too. While Kansas City got only a record paltry 3.9 inches of snow, the temperate port city of Anchorage, Alaska has so far seen eleven feet of the stuff–creating a load of a quarter of a million tons to be hauled away by overwhelmed street crews.

Now some readers may be saying, “there he goes again–complaining about weather.” I did indeed speak and write about extreme weather--last year. In a KC Labor Forum presentation entitled Climate Change Comes to the Ozarks last June I said,

“Unexpected freak weather incidents have always been a part of the human experience. Meteorologists will tell you that it’s difficult to prove a direct connection between any specific incident to climate. But when you start getting reports of unusual extreme events on a regular basis across the planet then it is time to give credibility to the predictions of climate scientists that climate change includes more common, more frequent, more intense weather related disaster. The top climate expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently told a reporter, ‘Looking at some of the modern trends, we've seen increases in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, drawing a direct link between what's happening in the Midwest and global warming.’”

Weather is one topic that is always thoroughly covered by the mass media. Since NBC acquired the Weather Channel, Brian Williams has a weather segment every evening on the national Nightly News. The meteorologists appearing still offer the same superficial explanations for extreme weather–el Nino, la Nina, jet stream, etc--usually leading to circular restatements of effect rather than explanation of cause.

As years of unfamiliar weather patterns pass they can no longer be called “unseasonable.” The quantitative accumulation of weather statistics reveals a qualitative change in seasons–climate–has begun. The only thing we can count on is instability. More and faster change is coming.

The fundamental force altering el Nino, la Nina, the jet stream, and other weather engines throughout the world, is global warming resulting from greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the warming term refers to the global average temperature. Within the range leading to the average will be places getting at least temporarily colder. While much of North America had a much warmer winter most of Europe suffered unusually brutal cold and snow.

There’s an old saw: weather–everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it. Except for such ethically questionable practices as cloud seeding, there’s nothing much we can do to control day-to-day weather. But climate shapes weather and we can do something about the destructive human practices that are changing the climate and weather patterns that are vital to sustaining human civilization.

Unlike the USA and Canada, most of the governments of the European Union have acknowledged climate science findings on global warming and have adopted goals to reduce emissions. They have even created a new post of Chief Scientific Adviser tasked to regularly report to the EU President on progress.

The first appointee to this position–Scottish molecular biologist Anne Glover–has made a less than inspiring initial report. “It has been extremely disappointing to see many member states cut back on their emission reduction efforts because they say 'we're going through a recession',” she said.

She continues, “Make no mistake, if we had unabated man-made climate change, we would go through an absolutely horrible period of conflict and migration, until the world's population started diminishing very rapidly.”

This plain-speaking scientist deserves our applause. In the short term, however, the “dismal science” of market economics will likely trump climate science within EU governments–as in North America. The scientists need some mass opinion and action on their side.

When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced they were awarding the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry to the team of F. Sherwood Rowland, Mario Molina and Paul Crutzen, they said the three “contributed to our salvation from a global environmental problem that could have catastrophic consequences.” This was not just hype. They had discovered that CFCs, once widely used in aerosols and refrigeration systems, were creating a hole in the ozone layer that protects us from UV radiation. Like today’s climate scientists, they were viciously attacked by corporate interests. But, after eventually winning not only scientific consensus but also broad popular support, nearly every country agreed to phase out CFCs. Today the ozone layer is largely restored.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published a book that is generally credited with launching the environmental movement in the USA. It was certainly an eye-opener for me. It exposed the collateral damage of agricultural pesticides and stirred an outcry that eventually led to the ban of DDT in the United States. Referring to the mass kills of birds, she entitled it The Silent Spring.

Perhaps we can utilize the palpable transformation of our seasons to begin to ignite a sense of urgency about the issue of climate change and expose what’s behind The Early Spring.

http://www.kclabor.org/wir3202012.htm

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