Global Warming Is Here to Stay
WASHINGTON — Excuse me, folks, but the weather is trying to tell us something. Listen carefully, and you can almost hear a parched, raspy voice whispering, “What part of ‘hottest month ever’ do you people not understand?”
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July was indeed the hottest month in the contiguous United States since record-keeping began more than a century ago. That distinction was previously held by July 1936, which came at the height of the Dust Bowl calamity that devastated the American heartland.
The average temperature last month was 77.6 degrees — a full 3.3 degrees warmer than the 20th-century norm for July. This follows the warmest 12-month period ever recorded in the United States, and it continues a long-term trend that is obvious to all except those who stubbornly close their eyes: Of the 10 hottest years on record, nine have occurred since 2000.
James E. Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, summed it up in a piece he wrote for The Washington Post last week: “The future is now. And it is hot.”
Hansen wrote that when he testified before Congress in 1988 and painted a “grim picture” of the consequences of climate change, he was actually being too optimistic. His projections of how rapidly temperatures would rise were accurate, he wrote, but he “failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.”
Yes, scientists are finally asserting a direct connection between long-term climate trends and short-term weather events. This was always a convenient dodge for climate change deniers. There might be a warming trend over decades or centuries, they would say, but no specific heat wave, hurricane or hailstorm could definitively be attributed to climate change.
“To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change,” Hansen wrote. “The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change.”
Hansen went on, “The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.”
If you won the lottery yesterday, feel free to stop reading. If you didn’t, stick with me a bit longer.
The other escape hatch for deniers is the question of why the Earth’s atmosphere is warming. Yes, there may be climate change, this argument goes, but we know there have been Ice Ages in the past and other big temperature variations. What we’re witnessing is due to natural processes — perhaps some long-term cycle we are too feeble to comprehend. You can’t prove that human activity, specifically the burning of fossil fuels, is to blame.
A Gallup poll last year found that this view — essentially, “You can’t pin it on our SUVs” — has been gaining traction in this country, even as it has become discredited elsewhere. Between 2007 and 2010, the percentage of U.S. adults who believed human activity contributed to warming declined from 60 percent to 48 percent.
I wrote a column last fall when University of California at Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, one of the leading skeptics on climate change, reversed field and announced that his own careful research indicated the atmosphere is, indeed, warming rapidly. Last week, Muller announced in The New York Times that “I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”
Muller, who heads the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, wrote that he and his team tried correlating the observed warming with phenomena such as solar activity and volcanic eruptions. “By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide,” he wrote.
The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising because of human activity — the burning of fossil fuels. The more we burn, Muller wrote, the faster the atmosphere will warm.
And the crazier the weather will get.
We can’t do anything about the greenhouse gases we’ve already spewed into the atmosphere, but we can minimize the damage we do in the future. We can launch a serious initiative to develop and deploy alternative sources of energy. We can decide what kind of environment we leave to our grandchildren.
I’d like to hear President Obama and Mitt Romney talk about the future of the planet. What about you?
Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com. (c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group
LEGAL NOTICE ON CARTOON: The copyrighted cartoon above by Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News, is licensed to run on TMV. Reproduction elsewhere without licensing is strictly prohibited. See great cartoons by all the top political cartoonists at http://cagle.com. To license this cartoon for your own site, visit http://politicalcartoons.com
Share This
Oooh, this article doesn’t do the issue adequate justice.
It’s not just this hottest summer on record, it’s the fact that every year temperatures are going up, both as an average and as indicated by more “highest temperature” records are broken than “lowest records”. So it can no longer be dismissed as “the weather”. http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
Also, they can prove the direct corelation between CO2 and temperatures. http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-temperature-correlation.htm
And you can prove it’s CO2 from petrochemicals: http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-temperature-correlation.htm
(lots of science in that last link, suffice it to say that petrochemical CO2 has different & detectable molecular differences than CO2 fro respiration or vulcanism).
It is real and it is our fault. The only question that remains is “are we too late”.
I think we are …
The United Nations has adopted a target of limiting global warming to 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) by 2050. (We’ve already hit 3.3F here in the US).
Scientists think this is feasible as long as cumulative CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2050 do not exceed 1,000 to 1,500 billion tonnes.
Since 2000, human activities have led to about 420 billion tonnes of CO2 being sent into the atmosphere, and on current trends the ceiling will be breached “within the next two decades”, the report warned.
In volume terms, China and the United States are the number one and two world emitters, accounting for 29 and 16 percent of global CO2, it said. They are followed by the EU (11%), India (6%), Russia (5%) and Japan (4%).
It’s even a little more insidious since we are outsourcing our CO2 production to China and India.
[The United States and other developed countries are effectively "outsourcing" their greenhouse gas pollution to developing countries. One-third of carbon dioxide emissions associated with the goods and services consumed in First World countries is actually being emitted outside the borders of those nations, mostly in the developing world, a new study finds.
...
By looking at emissions in terms of imports and exports, and placing the burden of reduction on the people ultimately responsible for them – the first world consumers of all those goods and services made elsewhere – the debate over who should be reducing emissions could be reframed, Caldeira and Davis suggest.]
http://www.livescience.com/6177-europe-outsource-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html
I thought Richard Muller’s switch on global warming was pretty compelling, but Robinson apparently missed Muller’s other comments:
Muller said that he did not believe that the recent heat waves or Hurricane Katrina were caused by global warming
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/29/richard-muller-climate-change-humans-koch_n_1715887.html
I remember the days when rightwingers could rarely discuss global warming without dismissing it with some crack about Al Gore. As if global warming was somehow in cahoots with the VP. That kind of nonsense seems to have gone by the wayside, but I still don’t seem much in the way of serious action about how to deal with it. Maybe we aren’t capable of serious action anymore when dealing with great challenges. God forbid any sacrifices might be required!!
The Wingnuts deny ALL science and then trump the meme with a War on Christmas and GOD.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/40723_Mitt_Romney_Panders_to_the_Religious_Right_With_Phony_War_on_Religion_Ad
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/40724_Video-_Inside_the_Disastrous_Louisiana_Science_Education_Act
The second link shows how the new Republicans view science. They backdoor Creationism into Louisiana science education.
“Between 2007 and 2010, the percentage of U.S. adults who believed human activity contributed to warming declined from 60 percent to 48 percent.”
Could this decrease be tied to the politicalization of the warming and the decline in the reputation of all politicians.
I believe in global warming. I believe that human activity is helping cause the problem. However, I do not believe that all global warming is caused by humans alone, that cyclical warming over thousands of years has occurred and I do not believe that the USA is the sole cause of global warming as many would be led to believe.
Not until the policians get out of the way and let scientist discuss the issue and make recommendations without the political influence will the issue begin to be addressed appropriately in the USA. One can not keep attacking SUV’s that mothers want to drive their kids in because they think they are safer and they can take a vacation with two or three kids without attaching a trailer to a car to place the suitcases.
Not until the moderates take the reigns and begin discussing this issue and making recommendations will anything get done. Until that time, the left will continue ranty about the subject and it will just result in the right digging in its heals and nothing will happen, the same as anything that the far left and far right disagree on.
But should we expect anything different in a country divided in everything down political lines.
What happened to the
margins??????
RP, scientists have already given their opinions and they are overwhelmingly saying that we are the problem. The only reason anyone still doubts this fact is because of politicians and lobbyists. The debate is over…of course now it is too late. But hey, it will only be the poor people that will die because of our actions.
What Shannon said.