This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard blog.
More than 400,000 people are still without power in the Washington, D.C. area after one of the region’s most bizarre and damaging storms in history.
I am one of them.
The lights and air conditioning went out at my place around 10 p.m. three days ago, just as a half-dozen little girls were settling down in sleeping bags as part of my 7-year-old daughter’s sleepover birthday party. Cleanup from the storms that toppled 50-foot oak trees and ripped down power lines throughout my neighborhood will keep us without electricity perhaps for a week, we’re told, while the region continues to swelter in near 100-degree heat – about 10 degrees higher than average for this time of year and hovering around historical records.
Those of us in Washington, however, are lucky compared to the people of Colorado, where at least 350 families have lost their homes so far to the state’s worst wildfires on record. About 100,000 acres of some of our nation’s prettiest forests have already gone up in smoke, and the state is still on fire.
The effects of climate change, once viewed as some far-off abstraction that could be denied or debated, are beginning to be felt here and now.
According to meteorologists, it is a historic record-setting heat wave in Washington that caused the powerful storm known as a “derecho” that left at least 18 people dead and our nation’s capital battered, bruised and sweltering in the dark.
Out in Colorado, climate change has led to drought, abnormally low snowfall and warmer winters. These events are far reaching: Warmer winters, for example, have resulted in an explosion in white pine bark beetles that kill trees and turn them in to ready-to-burn tinder.
There’s not always a direct link between weather disasters, a warming planet and the heat-trapping carbon emissions that have been rising since the advent of the Industrial Age and our dependence on burning fossil fuels.
But increasingly, there is a connection between climate change and extreme weather. Those who want to deny it – or irresponsibly try to convince the public that they too should deny it – should do some research and some reading before they turn their heads the other way.
As the Washington Post puts it in a piece about the Colorado fires:
Lightning and suspected arson ignited them four weeks ago, but scientists and federal officials say the table was set by a culprit that will probably contribute to bigger and more frequent wildfires for years to come: climate change.
And then there’s this from the Atlantic, which asks the prescient question, “Is the Colorado Wildfire the Future Norm?”
As UC-Berkeley fire ecologist Max Moritz puts it in the Atlantic piece, the Colorado fire features "a lot of the characteristics we would expect under climate change," including plentiful, dry fuel as a result of low precipitation.
Experts are still analyzing the storm that slammed into Washington. But just like the equally bizarre blizzards that greeted me with a record six feet of snow upon my arrival to Washington in 2010, it’s clear, as you can read in this piece, that global warming plays a role in severe weather.
Think the Washington storms and Colorado wildfires are isolated incidents? Talk to the people still recovering from tornadoes in Joplin, Mo. or Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf of Mexico or the 2011 Mississippi River floods that killed nearly 400 people.
Or look at your own area, on this extreme weather map produced by NRDC. In 2011, there were 3,251 monthly weather records shattered by extreme events across the United States.
Still, there are deniers.
One of them is my mother-in-law, who is stuck in a Lancaster, Penn. hotel with me right now while we’re waiting for the power and the air conditioning to come back on at my home outside Washington. She and my sister-in-law were in town to celebrate my daughter’s birthday when the big storm hit.
My mother-in-law doesn’t think that climate change has anything to do with the wildfires in the west or the storms in the east. The Colorado fires, she says, are “God’s way of clearing out the forests.”
Maybe so.
But other God-fearing folks, myself included, also believe what members of the Evangelical Environmental Network believe, which is that it’s not God, but a warming planet caused by what we have done to it, that is resulting in fires, floods and severe weather that is hurting all of us.
There will always be those who deny that climate change is happening. And, unfortunately, there will always be those who say we don’t need to do something about it, because it’s too hard, because it impacts profits or because it’s not politically advantageous.
But it looks like we can expect that there will always be those affected by climate change, too.
Whether they believe it or not.
(Photo courtesy NOAA)
Follow Bob Keefe on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nrdc_press
90% Humidity!!!
in 1964 when Ken Venturi won the OPEN
hey FUMES..
speaking of your relentless science denial..
when are you going to stop denying basic science..
such as for example your repeated, patently absurd denial that downward infrared radiation exists?
you'll never understand even basic climate science..
until you stop denying science!
A. Because they are science deniers, of course.
http://youtu.be/e0vj-0imOLw
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SkepticsvRealistsv3.gif
How many millions do they spend on that lie..in hopes to make it the truth..?..
Rain in the east, fire in the west, heat wave in the Midwest (and elsewhere), hurricanes in the oceans. Where it rains, they say it disproves that things are dryer. Where it's hot, they say it's just summer. Where it's on fire, they say we've always had fires. When there is a hurricane, they say we've always had hurricanes.
There isn't any "new" weather, just more severe weather, and matters of degrees (literally) just don't motivate people to appreciate the changes as part of a pattern.
I wonder what it would take for some deniers to see climate change for what it is. I note that rising sea levels on the east coast are being renamed "recurrent flooding."
Didn't the disaster in the Gulf demonstrate that some prices may be too high to pay?
We can frack and drill all we want and sooner or later we will deplete those resources. Further, the Chinese are eating our lunch when it comes to producing jobs thru producing solar panels. This is an industry that could provide jobs in the U.S. if we were to take a conversion seriiously and if we were to support it to the extent (or even close) that the they are.
You don't have to believe in the law of gravity either. Just don't jump off a cliff.
Wowzers. High bar for proof you've got there.
>> "This is alarmist reporting backed up with facts from scientists desperate for funding."
Well, at least we agree it's backed up with facts from scientists. (And now that we've established your "if you need funding, your facts can be discounted" theory, we can disregard facts from just about any source.)
Iwillhaveyouknow is not a scientist. He's probably not even technically proficient. Who actually cares if AGW passes his bar of proof?
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The Earth's climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming. Many components of the climate system—including the temperatures of the atmosphere, land and ocean, the extent of sea ice and mountain glaciers, the sea level, the distribution of precipitation, and the length of seasons—are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural and are best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century...
In the next 50 years, even the lower limit of impending climate change—an additional global mean warming of 1°C above the last decade—is far beyond the range of climate variability experienced during the past thousand years and poses global problems in planning for and adapting to it. Warming greater than 2°C above 19th century levels is projected to be disruptive, reducing global agricultural productivity, causing widespread loss of biodiversity, and—if sustained over centuries—melting much of the Greenland ice sheet with ensuing rise in sea level of several meters. If this 2°C warming is to be avoided, then our net annual emissions of CO2 must be reduced by more than 50 percent within this century.
http://www.agu.org/sci_pol/positions/climate_change2008.shtml
Neither has any scientific theory to explain the bulk of said recent warming other than anthropogenic global warming survived scientific scrutiny.
What's different this time is WHY it's changing. None of the usual natural causes can explain it. Only the change in the composition of our atmosphere can, and we're completely responsible for that.
"Climate science Crock of the Week: 'In the 70s, They said there was going to be an Ice Age,"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB3S0fnOr0M
In fact, even in the 1970s papers supporting global warming were far more prevalent in the scientific literature.
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"[By the year 2000] the much-advertised heating of the earth by the man-made carbon-dioxide 'greenhouse' fails to occur."
-- Global warming denier (then, as now) Nigel Calder, 1980
No, "they" weren't. There are essentially no such predictions anywhere in the scientific literature, which has not yet been burned.