Climate change: Making your life worse
Tuesday June 16, 2009
Categories: Climate change
White House released today a new report on how climate change is going to affect the US. It's well worth reading. For instance, sometime this century, Illinois will have the climate of Texas. Let me tell you what you're in...
Filed Under: climate change
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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If we can get the climate of Dallas and get rid of our winters? We want our climate change and we want it NOW!
We can handled 100 degrees but those damned snow things and below zero are a nuisance.
Here in the NY metro area we have had almost non stop rain for two months. Very strange. Makes me think of the little ice age which afflicted northern Europe during the 13th C - wet chilly springs.
This post relates to the prior posts about barbarians and partisan politics. Given the evidence and given the consequences if the climate scientists are correct - it would be best if we made some serious changes yet we see little being done by government.
One of the things that shocks me is how soil moisture changes as temp rises - 100 degress in Illinois means only about a 20% moisture retention - can't grow crops with that.
Are these the same climatologists who were predicting a new Ice Age 30 years ago?
Given the success that economists and mathematicians had in predicting the worldwide financial collapse. I'm not going to hold my breath. The math behind modeling the climate is orders of magnitude more complex than modeling derivatives and other complex financial instruments, and we couldn't even get that right.
Until a prediction made by climate scientists is proven correct, I'm not giving up my liberty because some years are hotter, wetter or drier than others.
"Dale, you giblet-head, we live in Texas! It's already 110 in the summer, and if it gets one degree hotter, I'm going to kick your ass!" Hank Hill on global warming. Not sure that's fair use, but the post reminded me of it.
Until a prediction made by climate scientists is proven correct, I'm not giving up my liberty because some years are hotter, wetter or drier than others.
Uh, the temp has been going pretty steadily for some time now, and the computer modeling is getting better. You remind me of that old curmudgeon Harry Truman (not the President!)who lived at the base of Mt St Helens with his cats.
http://www.seattlepi.com/mountsthelens/hary11.shtml
He didn't want to give up anything either, especially not with those pesky geophysicists and volcanologists telling him that the mountain was going to blow sky high...
The temperature at his place reached about 660 degrees F, which cooked him just before his remains, along with his cats and lodge were buried under 150 feet of debris from the collapsed flank of the mountain and pyroclastic flows.
One of the last known voices from the mountain was famed volcanologist, (and a hero of mine) David Johnston.
He was killed while manning an observation post about 6 miles (10 km) from the volcano on the morning of May 18, 1980. He was the first to report the eruption, transmitting the famous message "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!" before being swept away by the lateral blast created by the collapse of the mountain's north flank. Ham radio operator Jerry Martin observed the lateral blast overtaking Johnston's camp before he, too, was killed. Though Johnston's remains have never been found, remnants of his USGS trailer were found by state highway workers in 1993.
"100 degress in Illinois means only about a 20% moisture retention - can't grow crops with that."
Sure you can: out here in the lower Gila River valley in Arizona I pass several corn and wheat fields everyday. It's been wonderfully cool this June, but 110s aren't uncommon and spring is always extremely dry.
Growing season starts in February out here though; if they still except May frost in Illinois, that could be trouble.
I find it interesting that the most radical of the radical individualists are now on the far right.
Heaven forbid that one might give up anything for a chance at a better society........(sarcasm)
About 3 hours north of me, they had overnight freeze warnings within the last two weeks. For those geographically curious, that area is the upper penisula of Michigan near and west of Escanaba. We are experiencing one of our latest springs here. The last two winters have been record and near record setting. I'm not saying this to be a smart aleck. I'm merely suggesting we might not know what we claim to know.
Hmm, a report from the WHITE HOUSE during the time when Congress is debating a CLIMATE CHANGE bill meant to fund universal health care and you're taking it at face value?
You *are* a journalist, right? Does any of this smell even remotely fishy to you?
Geesh.
I'm all for promoting sustainability and taking care of our national resources, but taking White House propoganda at face value is the province of the left.
Re: One of the academics who spoke to us in Cambridge said that when he talks to climate scientists, they uniformly say the projections they're working with are worse than what they say publicly.
Those projections need to be taken with at least a small grain of salt. Climate models, if run for the last twenty years, predict a much warmer work than in fact we have, overstating our historical warming by at least a factor of two. That is NOT cause to doubt global warming is happening, but it does strongly indicate that there are other factors not accounted for in the models that are dampening the warming, and we should be a bit dubious about the more extreme future projections too.
100 degrees in Illinois, not good enough for you who gave us Obama. Maybe the global warming peaked in 1980, it was over a hundred for 3 months. Or maybe it peaked in 1950 through 1955. Climate Scientology is a make work profession. Just read today that Mt. St. Helens is turning into a super volcano, if she blows global warming would be a blessing. Amazing, I have been on this old earth for over 70 years and I haven't froze or burned up yet. Looks like to me that Obama is worse than all the above.
They're assuming, of course, that our atmosphere is even going to last that long, given the rate we're killing off our oceans....
It is fascinating to read the claims that the anti-science creationists, er, climate-change deniers have to make. Just like the anti-science creationists, they feel quite comfortable putting their ignorance up against the discoveries of highly educated specialists and they feel arrogant enough to claim that the specialists are wrong.
Until people begin to think being ignorant is a bad thing, America will suffer. So far, we have been lucky, we have had a lot of immigrants who are proud to be educated and want their children to be truly educated. What happens if people stop immigrating? Really, there is no reason at all to be proud to have an ignorant opinion about something that the experts tell you is wrong. It's almost as if the proudly ignorant never managed to read the Parable of the Talents.
The data concerning global warming are not nearly as conclusive as those politicians citing the "consensus" opinion suggest. The scientific process, hijacked by politics, has not been truly or fairly applied. Worse than the many pitfalls associated with using models that cannot be properly history-matched to forecast global climate change, the underlying data have been used selectively (as with the hockey stick graph) to yield desired conclusions. From a scientific perspective the whole affair is a travesty.
This is not to say that conservation of energy is undesirable, but imposing draconian regulations on the remnants of our industrial sector to fix a problem that likely does not exist is foolish.
Wouldn't it be fantastic if it turned out all the deniers were right?
Your Name posting at June 17, 2009 11:30 AM:
Could you tell me your qualifications to dismiss the scientists who have been working on this? What evidence do you have to accuse them of professional misconduct?
The data concerning global warming are not nearly as conclusive as those politicians citing the "consensus" opinion suggest. The scientific process, hijacked by politics, has not been truly or fairly applied. Worse than the many pitfalls associated with using models that cannot be properly history-matched to forecast global climate change, the underlying data have been used selectively (as with the hockey stick graph) to yield desired conclusions. From a scientific perspective the whole affair is a travesty.
You think that because you read political commentors and pundits on this issue, instead of the work of actual scientists. The evidence for climate change is far more vast than just climate modeling or the stupid hockey stick graph. We have evidence from geologists, biologists (studying species migration and patterns of extinction, and so forth), atmosphere sciences, glacier sciences, oceanography, and on and on. When scientists from multiple disciplines are all coming to the same conclusion, you had better believe we have a real problem. From an ACTUAL scientific perspective (and I am an ACTUAL scientist), climate change denial is the travesty.
And by the way, there are always going to be cranks out there, like Steve Milloy, who refuse to accept the weight of evidence.. who pretend that debunking a couple of studies means that the other several hundred showing the same thing are incorrect. That guy doesn't even believe that tobacco smoke causes cancer. He is a joke, and so is his junk science website.
I don't rely on pundits and politicians for my information on climate change - I read the science - and frankly - it is not good news. While we debate computer models and oh scientists get it wrong all the time- the ice shelves have broken off - some 30 years before the early models predicted - so if anything - the error in the models was too optimistic. That desertification and rapidly disapearing ice shelves and melting glaciers aren't fantasies - they are happening and do not bode well for our future.
Climate change deniers are like the peak oil deniers - and all this denial wil cost us.
It is a warped notion of freedom or liberty which asserts you can squander the planets resources - and call that liberty.
I find it hard to imagine that these more dire predictions could have any bearing in reality, given that the existing IPCC predictions rely on us burning several times more coal and oil than there actually exists. See http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2697#more and http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5084 That said, running out of coal and oil won't be any picnic either.
It's getting to the point, in global warming, where it doesn't really matter what the models say...the actual changes that have actually happened as of this moment in time are enough to cause problems in the future.
For example, it appears that many species of polar bears are going to be extinct soon. Not 'if the rate of melting continues'. The current amount of melted ice has reduced the habitat enough that their survival is questionable even if it stopped right now.
Likewise, hurricanes have become...weird. As have a lot of local weather patterns, all over the place. We seem to have lost some of the 'buffering' that used to moderate extreme temperatures and precipitation or lack thereof. (At least, used to moderate it where people chose to live.) All over the world, places are setting new records in every direction.
Also, Stuart Buck is right. Any predictions about 100 years from now are nonsense, as no one can predict how much CO2 we'll be putting out then.
Incidentally, I can see no more evidence of the hand of God in the creation of the world than the amount of oil here. If we had no oil or coal at all, we'd never develop modern society, and we'd end up deforesting the planet. OTOH, can you imagine the nightmare if we'd had 100 times as much oil? Where we'd be in global warming if oil was 1/100ths as hard to find?
Alaskan don't fear global warming. We will have a longer growing season! We have plenty of water too. Move here! I think in times past people have migrated in response to global climate change (ex: ice age)
There will be places with better climate as climate changes, but Alaska, Siberia, and the Canadian Shield are not places that will be agriculturally productive just because the weather gets better.
In the long run, climate change doesn't matter to life on earth. Life has always adapted. The problem is that we cannot see a realistic way to continue to support the expected human population and expectations of adequate food with the expected dramatic change in the climate.
Cecilia,
Precisely.
Global warming was first predicted about a hundred years ago, and it's really irresponsible of people to only start waking up to the fact of climate change now- or worse, to continue denying it.
It is fascinating to read the claims that the anti-science creationists, er, climate-change deniers have to make. Just like the anti-science creationists, they feel quite comfortable putting their ignorance up against the discoveries of highly educated specialists and they feel arrogant enough to claim that the specialists are wrong.
Freelunch, if one peruses the titles of articles in many science journals one notices a large percentage with some climate change reference in the title, now this could be evidence of the importance and prevalence of climate change research within academia...or it could just be a case of some poor sap who just wants to catalog the microfossils and deposition environments of some section of some offshore body of water but can't seem to find the grant funding unless it's somehow tied to climate change.
Climate change deniers are like the peak oil deniers - and all this denial wil cost us.
It is a warped notion of freedom or liberty which asserts you can squander the planets resources - and call that liberty
Nicely put, Cecelia.
To Z:
What is your field of science? I am finishing a degree in geology at Guilford College.
uh, that was weird...
I'm not going to complain if we get a little of that global warming up here in Western Washington. The last two winters have been the coldest I can remember and I have lived here all my life. Many normally hardy plants were killed both winters. And the summers were chilly and wet. Enough to make a person want to move to Texas. Couldn't we just spread some of this climate change around?
AML,
No one gets promised better weather. It is likely to be more inconsistent, though. Western Washington gets much more moderate winters and summers than it would be expected to if it didn't have the Pacific currents going past. If there are changes in ocean currents, who knows what your climate will be like. Maybe you'll move to Minneapolis for the winter warmth.
Climet change is enevitable and has happend before it is an everlasting cycle that man cannot stop. there is proof that the poles have thawed and at some point the earth will restore balance (Another ice age)
However i do belive that man has speeded things up and governments are more concerned with money and business than being responsible.
the fact is what would the energy companies do if we all went solar?
what would the oil companies do if we all went Hydrogen?
we have the technology but governments will not force us to use it. if government was commited all new houses and commercial developments would have to use solar for both heat and electricity. they would tell car MFRS to produce cars powered by hydrogen by a defined date or not sell cars in this country!!
can the masses take the pain?
To think. I, a former fellow traveler of the Republicans, used to think of myself as "conservative.." Now despise the whole lot.
I so hate them.
All the babbling by Limbaugh and the rest, about how climate change is a left wing conspiracy.. And they're still at it. Most of them on the oil companies' payroll, too. Such B*****rds. So very "pro - life." So pro- tradition. Hypocrites. Yeah. I wish I could go back in time now, and vote for Gore. We probably still would have ended up in Iraq, but at least we may have done it more gracefully, without all the idiotic, graceless xenophobic ranting.. Whatever's wrong, it's all thanks to them librils n' frogs, right, Rush? Yeah. Right. Keep on babbling.
Anyway, We so deserve what we're getting. Burn, Baby Burn.
Texas has played in the world a major if not the preeminent role in stalling all advances in climate negociations. This is supported by the voting record of its people in office, public opinion polls, records and tracking of lobbying from a certain Texan oil company, its former governor and former president, etc... It is legitimate to ask for future generations whether at some point a kind "Nuernberg Process" should not at some point be started either against some individuals or the State of Texas as a whole. As soon as global warming in its effect will be clearly be identified (as a signal vs. noise), legal procedures should start. Maybe Texas should be given to people from Pacific Islands as a compensation (Palau and other are already looking at relocating) by around the year 2060 to 2100.
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