Column by Barbara Hirsch
The climate is changing, NO ONE COULD DENY THIS. CO2 levels in the air and oceans, which for millennia were locked under the planet’s surface, are the highest ever. And as long as coal, oil and gas are priced as they are, their extraction subsidized by and controlling our governments (and being well supported by our way of life) these changes will keep having tragic consequences for all creatures.
Here are a few of the many recent weather records broken and extreme weather events:
The first decade of this millennium was the warmest on record, 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year.
Australia – 2010 was close to the wettest year on record and 2011 began with flooding of an area the size of France and Germany combined.
Brazil – Heavy rainfall in the southeast caused the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s history. Last year, northern Brazil suffered one if its worst droughts.
Heavy monsoonal rains in eastern Sri Lanka the first two weeks of 2010 were the heaviest on record, causing widespread flooding across the island nation.
Pakistan recorded its warmest temperature (over 128F in May). In the summer, 20% of the country was submerged by heavy rains.
Last winter was Canada’s driest and warmest on record.
In the U.S., summers were the hottest on record in 11 states, snowfall records were broken in D.C. Philadelphia and Atlantic City and Minneapolis, massive flooding occurred in several southern states, and most of us, regardless of our politics, felt…something different.
Perhaps we will reach a tipping point….before the planet does.
Climate change will occur over a long period of time, just as it always has. What is your basis for this “sudden” climate change theory… It rained a lot in Brazil, there was a monsoon in Sri Lanka? More so than since records were taken. which is less than two hundred years. So isn’t it safe to assume unusual weather records will be recorded over a longer period of time without this sudden change in our environment. I thought we went through this with global warming!
Every time we have a record cold snap, the weather preachers tell us “weather is not climate”, yet this article is making exactly that argument. I guess that goes right along with the change from Global Warming to Global Climate Change once the fudged numbers were revealed?
BTW, the climate has been changing for the history of the earth. Please tell us the “correct” temperature that the planet is supposed to be before accusing us of ruining it. I’m sure changing climate and CO2 levels will have “tragic consequences” for some creatures, but they will have equally positive consequences for others. Thinking man can control or even mildly influence the earth’s climate is simply the hubris of a modern secular religion.
The point is that the changes have been happening very rapidly, not, as in the past, in geologic time. The speed of the change is such that animals and plants can not keep up. There’s a delicate balance of migration connected for many species when plants bloom or seed; when there is a change such as has been happening, animals are either stranded in the north or arrive too soon, before there is food.
There’s simply no reasonable argument contradicting that there are changes happening rapidly. The arguments seem to be about the causation. And that is unfortunate since it distracts from anything useful being done.
CO2 the gas I exhale and that is a requirement of plants for life and the waste gas they produce is oxygen also necessary for our life are symbiotic, not evil and do not create climate change. I DENY IT! Wait a minute you wrote that no one could deny it and I just did…
El Smurfo, rising CO2 level will benefit some? Name them.
Dan,
I would think someone in your business would know, that plants breathe that horrible pollutant, CO2. I don’t want to hurt your feelings as you’ve strayed pretty far away from the protective hug of your Nanny but, that breath you just exhaled…gasp!, horror!…was actually a planet killing belch of toxic CO2! The fact is, and NO ONE COULD DENY THIS, ice core samples show that atmospheric rise in CO2 actually often lags warming periods. The only reason for our fixation on this natural product of all human activity is that it is easy to understand, tax and ultimately use to control our lives. As Bob has shown, just a few short decades ago it was The Coming Ice Age…once the Global Warming fallacy was revealed, it morphed into Global Climate Change and pretty much everything you do in your day can be linked to the death of the planet. If five years, we’ll all be fretting away at some other First World only problem such as the toxic chemicals leeching out of our State mandated Priuses and all of this nonsense will be tossed away like an old Time Magazine cover story.
Hey Dan … I’d like to reply for El Smurfo if I may.
Our forests are currently growing at twice the rate as they were prior to the major increase in CO2. Phyto-plankton, the basis for all of the oceanic food-chains, is likewise growing much faster than at lower CO2 levels. Crustaceans are growing thicker, stronger shells thanks to the increased availability of carbon in the oceans as well as thanks to the slight decrease in the causticity of the oceans. Our food crops are also growing much better, with significantly increased global food-crop yields since the increase in CO2. Remember that greenhouses often artificially maintain CO2 levels above 1000ppm in order to maximize yields.
You really should know these things as CO2 is seriously important to all carbon-based life forms. yours included. As a for-instance, Do you know that below 165ppm, all plant life dies as photosynthesis ceases? And without plant life, the rest of us are all doomed too. For CO2 levels to become toxic, the levels would have to exceed 5000ppm, and we will never have enough fossil fuels available to burn to generate anything approaching those levels.
As far as I can tell, Global Warming is the only real whine that exists about increasing levels of CO2 … and the simple fact is that the levels of warming that the models predicted just simply are not happening. The scientists have not been able to find the heat that the models called for.
It just isn’t happening.
Time Magazine Cover April 8, 1977 How to Survive the Coming Ice Age
51 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference
The same argument – It’s our fault – using the same data but exact opposite conclusion. Our Scientists were pretty smart then too… putting us on the moon and inventing virtually everything you take for granted now…
Computer modeling of the weather is garbage in… garbage out…
From the London Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3563532/The-world-has-never-seen-such-freezing-heat.html
Not a good idea to quote the Telegraph, a once proud newspaper that’s now an object of ridicule here in the UK for its notoriously lax standards of journalism and poor fact checking.
The same marketing techniques that were used to sell the idea that smoking cigarettes was not harmful and might actually be good for us are being used to sell skepticism on climate change, and the same people are falling for it.
Such is life.
The overwhelming paleoclimate evidence from around the globe is that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), the Roman Warm Period and the Minoan Warming were synchronous, world wide and about as warm as our most hospitable and gentle current warming period which began at the end of the Little Ice Age, during Victorian times.
However, the MWP deniers, such as the IPCC, US EPA, CSIRO and the UK’s MET Office, will never admit the similarity of current global climate to the MWP because it means that their religious-like belief in AGW is exposed for the steaming pile of junk science that it truly is.
In total, climate change is complex and not well understood.
But this part is simple.
Since the world was just as warm in the past when CO2 levels were significantly lower, CO2 cannot be the earth’s sole temperature regulator. There must be other factors.
This wonderful warming period has powered the social and industrial advances that have made modern people the healthiest and most prosperous in history. MWP deniers want us to believe that plant friendly and life giving CO2 is a bad thing to better advance their meglomanical desire to both boss around the developed world and further impoverish the poor while pocketing a lot of taxpayer money along the way.
Useless, misguided attempts to control carbon are not the answer to the ever changing climate. There is only one answer to changes in climate that has ever worked for humanity.
That is adaptation.
One of the many links to the overwhelming Paleoclimate evidence of the global nature of the MWP is below.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
More information
http://www.intechopen.com/articles/show/title/a-regional-approach-to-the-medieval-warm-period-and-the-little-ice-age
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CO2 at highest levels ever? Not hardly The Carbonaceous and Coniferous eras both saw levels of CO2 well above 1000ppm … Today’s 390ppm are nothing unprecedented nor unique in comparison. As for warming as a causation of today’s weather … Today’s atmospheric temperatures are neither unprecedented nor unique either as they are certainly no higher than they were during the Medieval Warming and the Roman Warming and probably the Minoan Warm period too. In order for the Anthropogenic Carbon-forced Global Warming hypothesis to be real, we MUST experience not only a unique and unprecedented level of warmth, but a correlated unique and unprecedented RATE of warming to coincide with the rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Else … It’s just the weather folks … Nothing to see here … Move along.
The public always lags behind the scientists, because they know less! And in this case it is convenient to be a denier and hence not take any responsibility…
From the Pew Research Center: ” clear differences in perception between scientists and the public. According to its survey, 49% of the public believe that global warming is due to human activity, whereas 84% of all scientists do.
Another similar poll by Gallup from January of last year found that 77% of non-publishing, non-climatological Earth Scientists and 97% of publishing Climatologists believed in human-driven climate change.”
“No scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion” Wikipedia
And 100% of all scientists must conform to the politically generated GW hysteria or risk having their funding, however unrelated, pulled.
I take plenty of responsibility for my own actions, often at great inconvenience to myself. I walk to work, recycle, compost, garden, buy local products, drive an efficient automobile. It’s only when the zealots tell me that I’m not “doing enough” that I start to get nervous.
So much research to disprove is funded by the oil companies, I’m afraid you are incorrect there. Sadly, the political mainstream is not hysterical about global warming. Glad to hear that you take responsibility for your actions though, el smurf.
More than you can say about your hero Al Gore Barbara says…