Climate Change Indeed
You couldn’t tell from our unusually pleasant St. Louis Summer, but the planet is slowly warming. It is this overall warming of the planet – mostly covered by water — that produced jacket weather in August. No heat, no humidity. I’ve seen numerous comments on Facebook and elsewhere saying Al Gore was wrong. ‘See, it is cool in August, Global Warming isn’t real.’ Cool temperatures with little to no humidity should send off alarms. The world climate is changing, no doubt in my mind.
Below is a chart showing our averages:
Note that July is typically warmer than August but as we know it is August that usually has the suffocating humidity.
The USA’s summer was cooler than average in 2009, for only the second time this decade, according to data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Several Midwest states — including Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota— recorded one of their 10 coldest summers on record. Northwestern Pennsylvania recorded its coldest summer ever. Climate records date to 1895.
The chill continued into August, as temperatures were below normal across the Midwest, Plains and parts of the South. More than 300 low-temperature records were set across the Midwest during the last two days of August.
On the other end of the spectrum, it was one of the hottest, driest summers on record in parts of south Texas, according to the climate center.
“They’ve been fighting a really bad drought situation there,” Arndt said. McAllen, Texas, broke its all-time record for highest-average summer temperature.
Overall, the South, Southeast and Southwest regions were drier than average this summer. Arizona had its third-driest summer, while both South Carolina and Georgia had their sixth-driest. (Source: USA Today)
Some may still argue the climate change we are experiencing is natural and that man is not the cause. I’ll concede that man’s pollution may not be the sole cause but in my mind it is a major contributor. While we have been fortunate in St. Louis — I had my windows open much of August — other areas had above normal temperatures. Just because we had a fantastic summer doesn’t mean we can dismiss the reality of the changing climate.
The Farmers’ Almanac is predicting a cold winter for many of you.
The venerable almanac’s 2010 edition says numbing cold will predominate in the country’s midsection, from the Rocky Mountains in the West to the Appalachians in the East.
Managing Editor Sandi Duncan says it’s going to be an “ice cold sandwich.”
“We feel the middle part of the country’s really going to be cold — very, very cold, very, very frigid, with a lot of snow,” she said. “On the East and West coasts, it’s going to be a little milder. Not to say it’s going to be a mild short winter, but it’ll be milder compared to the middle of the country.”
The almanac’s forecast, however, is at odds with the National Weather Service, which is calling for warmer-than-normal temperatures across much of the country because of an El Nino system in the tropical Pacific Ocean, said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the NOAA Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Md. (Source: AP)
A December 2008 article, What’s in a Name? Global Warming vs. Climate Change, from the NASA website clarifies the terms. Below is an excerpt:
To a scientist, global warming describes the average global surface temperature increase from human emissions of greenhouse gases. Its first use was in a 1975 Science article by geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory: “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”1
Broecker’s term was a break with tradition. Earlier studies of human impact on climate had called it “inadvertent climate modification.”2 This was because while many scientists accepted that human activities could cause climate change, they did not know what the direction of change might be. Industrial emissions of tiny airborne particles called aerosols might cause cooling, while greenhouse gas emissions would cause warming. Which effect would dominate?
For most of the 1970s, nobody knew. So “inadvertent climate modification,” while clunky and dull, was an accurate reflection of the state of knowledge.
The first decisive National Academy of Science study of carbon dioxide’s impact on climate, published in 1979, abandoned “inadvertent climate modification.” Often called the Charney Report for its chairman, Jule Charney of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, declared: “if carbon dioxide continues to increase, [we find] no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”3
In place of inadvertent climate modification, Charney adopted Broecker’s usage. When referring to surface temperature change, Charney used “global warming.” When discussing the many other changes that would be induced by increasing carbon dioxide, Charney used “climate change.”
Within scientific journals, this is still how the two terms are used. Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect.
During the late 1980s one more term entered the lexicon, “global change.†This term encompassed many other kinds of change in addition to climate change. When it was approved in 1989, the U.S. climate research program was embedded as a theme area within the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
But global warming became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming. He said: “global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming.”4 Hansen’s testimony was very widely reported in popular and business media, and after that popular use of the term global warming exploded. Global change never gained traction in either the scientific literature or the popular media.
But temperature change itself isn’t the most severe effect of changing climate. Changes to precipitation patterns and sea level are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone. For this reason, scientific research on climate change encompasses far more than surface temperature change. So “global climate change” is the more scientifically accurate term. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we’ve chosen to emphasize global climate change on this website, and not global warming.
Here is a great UK Climate Change TV ad:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzjOcOcQ90U
Further Reading:
- EPA site on Climate Change; http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/
- EPA Climate Change site for kids; http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/index.html
The critics might be right, our climate change may have nothing to do with man’s pollution. But why chance it?
– Steve Patterson
The weather in St Louis and the midsection of the country is determined by the jet stream. This summer, it curved down and fell below us for most the summer. We had the cooler, drier canadien air. It had nothing to do with global warming, global cooling or any other issue. I’m fairly skeptical about global warming. But I can think of a thousand other reasons to develop renewable energy.
Bingo Tony. Scare tactics are not the way to ensure that people adopt good long term public policy regarding the environment.
And blaming one years weather fluctuations on global warming is bad science at its best and fear mongering at its worst.
Making judgments on the validity of climate change based on one summer in St Louis is just silly. There are always aberrations to a trend. In this case, much of the difference has been pinned on this being an El Nino year.
There are many very good ways to tell the temperature of the planet over long periods. Snow in the Antarctic tells us the temperature at which the flakes were formed. Tree rings give great historical data. So many ways to look at the bigger picture rather than anecdotal weather seasons.
To Tony’s point on alternative energy: I agree completely. I can think of lots of good reasons to develop renewable energy sources that have nothing to do with carbon or climate change. There are very good reasons that appeal to both neo-cons and to tree-huggers. Why politicians from across the aisle can’t come together on this issue is a testament to the partisan divide in this country. Damn shame our dollars have to keep going to people who hate us.
Valid points all around, but the same logic applies both ways. Global warming pushers use the same logic when we have a warm winter as evidence that the climate is warming. Its all BS logic. The principles behind global warming theory are sound and accurate, but the thing that bothers me is how all the sudden scientists are predicting doomsday in 50 years as if they know the what the temps will be like within half a degree. These same guys can’t predict the weather next week so I have a hard time swallowing their certainty. Heck, it was that long ago that we were talking about another ice age coming up.
That all being said, rather than going on about the actual affects of a hypothetical ecological situation, it is best to focus on another angle: our need for energy independence over the short and long term; the need for cheap clean energy if people what to keep their creature comforts as the population grows; controlling pollutants that cause cancer, asthma, allergies, etc; preserving wildlife habitat from pollution and sprawl; rethinking our farming practices which are destroying the Gulf of Mexico… I could go on forever. Nobody can deny these are important issues that are tied to the same root problem as global warming: POLLUTION! Why must we continue beating this opinionated global warming drum when there is so much common ground to use as a springboard top change? End rant.
Those who’ve decided that the issue of global warming is just some conspiracy to influence human behavior are equally guilty of obscuring other important matters because they’re happy to throw the bathwater out with the global warming baby. I see no scare tactics being used, but do see the usual hyperbole seen in [insert your favorite movement to ridicule], and so I’m certain readers of this blog are smart enough to know the bounds of what’s reasonable.
Don’t confuse climate and weather. They are vastly different.
And while I’m all in favor of renewable energy, we must remember that there is no way any single or combination of renewable energy sources – be it solar, ethanol, wind, or used french fry oil – will be able to replace the energy we get from fossil fuels.
Steve Patterson: “The critics might be right, our climate change may have nothing to do with man’s pollution.
But why chance it?”
Answer: How about wasting trillions of dollars to re-engineer our lives because of ‘what if it’s true?’ misguided thinking.