SHADES OF GREEN: Climate disruption

There continues to be a good deal of casual skepticism about global warming among ordinary people and writers alike. I say “casual” because most of this skepticism is not all that well thought out. Rather, it’s largely knee-jerk comment of the moment, and generally uninformed.

“Global warming,” by the way, is not the term of choice anymore. Now naturalists and scientists are using language like “global climate disruption” and even “climate chaos” to characterize what is now going on and what they see coming.

Yes, we cannot ascribe a particular drought, flood, heat, cold, snowstorm, etc., to climate trends; but we should be able to take notice of all these as highly suggestive, given that the vast majority of (real) climatologists are telling us that this change is not only on, it is proceeding at a rate faster than they predicted.

Last winter we had a succession of big storm systems that marched across the North American continent, causing mayhem. Presently we have not only unheard of floods in Pakistan but unheard of heat in Russia, with the attendant fires. This spring and summer have been marked by “record everything” right here in North America: rain, heat and storms.

There is just more water vapor and heat in the planetary atmosphere now than before, and that means more extremes of all sorts.

Many climate chaos doubters are “conservatives,” and in the insane present world in which scientific information and bare fact is subject to political polarization, the general conservative worldview no doubt makes their skepticism all the more likely.

Another skeptical group is, of all things, TV weathermen. Twenty-six percent of TV weather forecasters not only believe climate chaos is doubtful, they believe it is a hoax. These weather people depend on computer models to predict weather three or so days out, and know to their chagrin how limited their models are. Therefore, they reason that the modeling methodology of climatologists, the authorities on climate disruption, has to be equally dubious.

Two things are wrong with this. Most of these people are not scientists; they are usually bachelor’s degree weather people, even though their TV stations expect them to pontificate on anything scientific, including in the classrooms they regularly visit. Second, and the main point, is that both disciplines, weather forecasting and climatology, deal with the atmosphere, yes, but they ask completely different questions of the atmosphere. – So the instinctive doubts of these weather folks, as a class, should be treated with more than a grain of salt.

Nuance and genuine inquiry is demanded in this climate matter. Bumper sticker-length pronouncements about this just won’t do. A nice lady from northern Wisconsin who is facing changing lake levels at her property was recently asked by a writer to give an opinion about whether global warming might be a factor, and replied that she “doesn’t begin to understand it,” but knows there was once a sheet of ice across much of Wisconsin a mile thick. So what? It is true that on the geological time scale it is perfectly OK to point out that we are in an interglacial era and that most likely the ice could resume advance in 8, 10 or so thousand years. So what? What does that have to do with the current situation we humans face?

For that matter, beneath the ground we stand on is a layer of Niagara (Silurian age) dolomite deposited in a shallow sea, 450 million years ago, when this piece of continental crust, our current home, was located south of the equator and rotated 90 degrees from its present orientation. So what?

We don’t know enough? I think we do. We know enough to make the changes we have to make in any case. We are running out of oil on this planet; and coal, still abundant, is deadly dirty to burn, even aside from the CO 2 problem.

A recent comment I saw in print claiming that climate change theory is “just too convenient” is typical of the inane talk out there. The tendency to deride the experts, to sneer at their considered alarm about our long-term prospects and to paper this issue over with irrelevant or just ignorant comment is something we ought to resist, out of a duty that comes with citizenship on this planet today.

In general we humans can respond wonderfully to a threat that is obvious and immediate, but don’t do well in confronting a longer-term crisis. Winston Churchill was almost alone in 1938, “telling it like it is” with respect to the Nazis, and the Nazi threat was much easier to see than the present convergence of ominous planetary trends.

Here is scientist E.O. Wilson:

“The great dilemma of environmental reasoning stems from this conflict between short-term and longterm values. To select for the near future of one’s own tribe or country is relatively easy. To select values for the distant future of the whole planet also is relatively easy – in theory at least. To combine the two visions to create a universal environmental ethic is, on the other hand very difficult. But combine them we must…”