“It’s been a long cold lonely winter . . .” - George Harrison, “Here Comes the Sun”, Abbey
Road Album.
Anyone who lives in New England (me included) will tell you
that last winter sucked. Heck, anyone north of Florida and East of the
Mississippi River will tell you that.
It’s also been, so far, a very pleasant summer. No brutal
heatwaves or sustained, soul- sucking humidity.
We are all familiar with the acronym “NIMBY”, for Not in My
Backyard, but I read a new term the other day “Not out my window”. Doesn’t lend
itself to a catch phrase. NomWin? Nah.
“Not out my window” means, “We had a record breaking winter,
what’s all this talk about global warming”. It’s easy to confuse weather with
climate. It lets presidential candidates dismiss the idea of climate change and
makes it easy for senators to throw snowballs on the senate floor.
Weather is what we see when we look out the window. Climate
is the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long
period. My cousin lives in Tucson, Arizona, which has a desert climate. We live
in Massachusetts, which has a temperate climate, with no extremes in
temperature, and four definite seasons.
But what we see out the window does not represent what is
going on in the world at large and it doesn’t even represent what we would have
seen had we looked out the window 50 years ago.
The last couple of years notwithstanding, average yearly
temperature in Eastern Massachusetts have increased almost 2 degrees centigrade
since the beginning of the 20th century, based on records from the
Blue Hills Observatory. Average annual precipitation has increased from 43
inches per year to over 50 inches per year during the same period.
These two numbers represent long term trends. These two
numbers represent changes to the prevailing weather conditions. These two
numbers tell us the climate is changing where we live, right now. Not in the
future, not down the road. NOW.
Two degrees temperature change does not seem like much when
the temperature can change 30 degrees in one day. But we are not talking about
daily temperature, we are talking about average annual temperatures. To give
you some perspective, 25,000 years ago, the average annual temperature here in
New England was 8 degrees lower than it was at the beginning of the 20th
Century. At that time, Westborough was sitting under a continental glacier two
miles thick. Please take some time to wrap your head around that. Go ahead, I
will wait.
So, think about what the world would look like if the
opposite occurred – average global temperatures 8 degrees higher than they were
150 years ago. Again, take some time to think about what that means. If you
cannot think of what that means, I will tell you. Sea levels will be much
higher because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will have substantially
melted. The climate here in New England will be more like it currently is in
the tropics. You don’t want to consider what the conditions in the tropics
would be like.
The interesting thing is that when you look at trends
globally, the Eastern United States has been an outlier relative to the rest of
the planet. The weather has been cooler than normal for the last couple of
years. Where has it been warmer than normal? Everywhere else. In fact, so far, 2015
is the warmest year on record, from a global perspective. Temperatures in the
Arctic are almost 5 degrees above normal. We had something like four times as
much snow as Anchorage, Alaska last winter.
The American West, that is, everywhere west of the eastern
side of the Rocky Mountains, is seeing record drought and high temperatures.
Forests are drying out, dying, and now burning from Alaska to Arizona. What we
are seeing now is unprecedented in the instrumental record. Lake Mead is at
something like 50 percent capacity and reservoirs are emptying out all over the
Western US.
What is occurring now is in fact a predictable outcome and
has in fact, been a predicted outcome of the increasing carbon dioxide (CO2)
in our atmosphere to our industrial activities and our energy-intensive way of
life. These predictions are nothing new. Scientists studying and modeling Earth’s
atmosphere started making these predictions at the end of the 19th
century. Warnings about what the burning of fossil fuels could do to Earth’s
climate can be found in government reports as far back as the 1950’s.
These
warnings were always put on the back burner because the effects would be felt
in the future, down the road, in another few generations.
Well folks, I got news for you. We are at the end of the
road, the future is now the present and this is the generation.
What’s the good news? New England is perhaps not a bad place
to be as the climate warms, at least if you live away from the coast. We are
not likely to see the kind of droughts afflicting the western US. We will see more rainfall, which may be a
mixed blessing as a good chunk of it will come as large storm events, but I’d
rather be here than in Southern California right now.
In future columns I will discuss why the climate is
changing, how we know it is caused by us, what the geologic record says, and
perhaps what we can do about it.
Originally published 08/15/2016 Westborough News.
Originally published 08/15/2016 Westborough News.
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