A year ago, right wing writer James Delingpole wrote that we all ought to be happy about global warming because it would mean more heat waves, which Delingpole interpreted as an opportunity for people to have a good time sitting by a swimming pool drinking cold beer. It hasn’t just been Delingpole saying this sort of thing, of course.
Last year, Republican State Representative Joe Read of Montana introduced legislation declaring that “global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate” – just before an unprecedented surge of spring melt created immense floods that devastated communities across the northern plains. Extreme weather events have been growing in intensity and frequency, but it’s still the GOP standard line that climate change may not even exist, but if it does, it’s nothing to worry about.
This summer, in the real world where most people have to keep working regardless of the weather, and don’t have the option to spend the entire summer at posh resorts, the face of climate change doesn’t look so friendly. This week, the U.S. Drought Monitor, operated through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, showed that the only parts of the United States unaffected by extreme dry weather and drought are Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico. Elsewhere, a combination of extreme heat and lack of rainfall are combining to convert the United States into a crisp tinderbox.
The manifestations of this remarkable drought are not as comfortable as James Delingpole and his industry-aligned allies in the Republican Party would have us believe. They include wildfires in Utah, California, and the state of Washington, as well as the epic fires in Colorado. Agriculture states of disaster are beginning to pop up in places like Montana, Colorado, South Dakota, and Illinois. The agricultural disaster in the United States is combining with droughts in other countries to create the threat of increased food prices all over the world.
Claims that climate change is beneficial remind me of old commercials for cigarettes touting their health benefits (“More Doctors Smoke Camels!”).
Wait a minute. I thought spot extremes in either direction aren’t an indication of climate change. There are real indicators out there but using a single season in a single area of the globe is a poor tactic.
Jeff, if you read the article again, you’ll see that it never claims that this particular heat wave and this particular season of extreme drought are caused by human-created climate change in general or anthropogenic global warming in particular. It may well be that the probability for this particular event would have been much lower without human-created climate change, but because there always have been some extreme weather events, the causal linkage is a matter of chance, not certainty.
What the article does state is that the frequency and length of such heat waves and seasons of extreme drought are increasing. That’s a fact, and it’s a long term trend, and it’s a clear manifestation of climate change. See the difference?
Also, you’ll note that the article references other extreme droughts outside the USA that are taking place in concert with the ones in this country. Food shortages due to extreme weather are another global manifestation of climate change that’s taking place over the long term, not just in isolated, local short-lived problems.
The larger point of the article is that, given the disastrous consequences of the increased extreme weather events we’ve seen over recent years, it’s ridiculous for right wing pollution apologists to assert that we ought to be grateful that global warming is taking place.
Well, of course any single weather event does not prove or disprove climate change. But there has been an increase not just in average temperatures, but in extreme weather events, and an increase in variability. This is exactly what climate science predicts. More storms, more drought, more extreme snowfalls, higher sea levels, etc.
Local ecosystems have been known to quickly change to new states. Ecologist call this phenomenon a “tipping point”, the analogy being that of a boat. Think of a boat right side up representing a forest state, and the same boat upside down representing the same terrain but as a grassland. This boat can suffer a bit of “rocking”; for instance, a string of big droughts, temperature rises or humidity drops. However, if that strain is of sufficient magnitude, the “boat” can very quickly flip over, transforming what was a forest into a grassland, or what was the Sonora desert, say, with its biodiversity, into rolling sand dunes like the Sahara.
Yes, the effects may be localized, but when areas of the country which haven’t been known to experience forest fires suddenly experience them frequently, it is great cause for alarm.