Bill McKibben: This is how the earth works now [View all]

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/13377-a-summer-of-extremes-signifies-the-new-normal

I could go on and on with accounts of this wildest of summers: "refugee camps" for livestock in arid India; the warmest rainstorm ever recorded in Mecca in early summer (109 degrees), a mark that lasted about six weeks until it was broken in the California desert in August (115 degrees); traffic on the Mississippi grinding to a halt as the water level fell and fell and fell; a record area of the continental U.S. burned by wildfires before the summer was even over. Ad infinitum.

But best to end with the words of our leading climatologist, James Hansen, who in August published a peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As he had at every stage of the global warming saga, Hansen laid out what was happening with devastating clarity. There's always been extreme heat, he showed - but the one-degree increase in global temperature we've seen so far has been enough to shift the bell curve sharply to the left. In the old summer, the one most of us grew up in, 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the surface area of the planet was dealing with "extreme heat anomalies" at any given moment. Now it was approaching 10 percent. The math, he said, was clear: It "allows us to infer that the area covered by extreme hot anomalies will continue to increase in coming decades and that even more extreme outliers will occur."

In other words, this is no freak summer. This is how the earth works now.