Smoking causes cancer. Carbon pollution causes extreme weather.
It really doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
We dump billions of tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere each year. As a result, the concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by 40 percent. Excess carbon dioxide traps excess heat in the atmosphere. Excess heat causes extreme heat waves, droughts and storms.
And that’s what we have been seeing. In June alone, 170 all-time high temperature records were broken or tied in the United States, and more than 24,000 daily high temperature records have been broke so far this year. If the climate weren’t changing, we would expect to see about the same number of record highs and record lows set each year due to random fluctuations. That’s what we were seeing 50 years ago, but during the last decade there were twice as many record highs as record lows. So far this year the ratio has been 10 to 1.
This year’s extreme weather follows last year’s. The last 12 months were the hottest on record for the United States. Texas saw its hottest and driest summer on record in 2011 by a wide margin, and research published this week shows that carbon pollution dramatically increased the probability of such extreme heat and drought.
Faced with similar information about the carcinogens in cigarette smoke, the mechanism by which these carcinogens cause genetic mutations, and the statistical relationship between smoking and cancer, the Surgeon General says that smoking causes cancer. Of course that doesn’t mean that every individual case of cancer experienced by a smoker can be definitively attributed to smoking. But the Surgeon General does not feel compelled to say that every time she says that smoking causes cancer. And journalists don’t feel compelled to include that caveat every time they write an article about the health toll of smoking.
The Surgeon General’s warning hasn’t always been this clear. In 1966, when cigarette packages were first required to carry a warning, the package said “Cigarette Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health.” A few years ago a similarly tepid warning may have been appropriate for carbon pollution. Not anymore.
The data are in. It’s time for scientists and journalists to just say it: Carbon pollution causes extreme weather.
This post was first published on NRDC's Switchboard blog.
John Tirman: Climate Change: As the World Burns, Part 2
Bob Keefe: On the Media: Finally Seeing the Link Between Climate Change, Disasters?
Bob Keefe: Effects of Climate Change Hit Home
Joyce Lashof,MD
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/18-made-in-china-our-toxic-imported-air-pollution/
They have not learned that, "There is no place called away!" it's a quote from the article.
We could cut our coal usage in the U.S. to zero and have these gains wiped out in less than 5 years!
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=4390
Watch the change in the EIA animation.
This comparison can not be made so easily. Smoking, breathing in smoke, is not the natural way for people to breath.
However, CO2 in the air is part of the circle of life. We breath in O2 and breath out CO2, plants use the CO2 in the air to grow and 'breath out' O2.
So, while it's obvious that breathing in smoke (something that makes you cough) is bad for you, it is not that obvious that putting more of a substance in the air that's naturally already there is bad for the earth's climate.
If climate scientists say the current warming must be caused by CO2, since we can not find any other reason for the current warming, than that's quite a weak way of reasoning. Of course, there's more behind the idea that CO2 is the cause, but it all seems a bit too much focussed on one possible cause.
The climate is such a complex system influenced by what happens on earth as well as inside the earth and in space around us. However great scientists we have, I think it's likely that the real cause of the current warming has not been found yet.
There's nothing in the least natural about the amount of carbon we're adding to the atmosphere. We're taking carbon that was accumulated over millions of years and releasing it in a century or two. It is overwhelming the planet's ability to deal with the stuff. That's not natural.
[If climate scientists say the current warming must be caused by CO2, since we can not find any other reason for the current warming, than that's quite a weak way of reasoning.]
It would be, if that were actually the reasoning. But it isn't. CO2-based warming was PREDICTED by physics long before the warming was actually observed. Subsequent observations supported the hypothesis. It was positive reasoning, not negative as you claim.
[it all seems a bit too much focussed on one possible cause]
There's plenty of research on other possible causes. They've been dismissed because the empirical evidence doesn't support them. The empirical evidence DOES support CO2-based warming in virtually every respect. This is precisely how science is supposed to work.
Here is the analogy (which I am not surprised you missed, because you guys NEVER get analogies).
Smoking is to your lungs and cancer as CO2 is to the planet's climate and AGW. Not, as you have put it, smoking is to your lungs and cancer as CO2 is to your lungs and breathing.
That is absurd. And pointless. From there, you construct a lovely straw man. I am here to tell you it got blown over.
So rather than blather about "real causes", why not propose what novel mechanism YOU think is to blame that SOMEHOW over a century of research has missed. You don't understand the research that has been done, so you're not asking the right questions.
Sure, the way you describe it the comparison can be made.
However, I wonder if you understand what I try to point out. And that is, smoking is NOT a natural thing to the breathing of human beings. However, CO2 in the air IS a natural thing (and to the plants using it).
Anyways, it's not really important whether the analogy is right or wrong. Any comparison is flawed in a way, so that doesn't really matter.
"So rather than blather about "real causes", why not propose what novel mechanism YOU think is to blame that SOMEHOW over a century of research has missed."
Glad you asked. My theory is that the earth's climate is influenced a lot by processes within the earth. These processes emit heat from within the earth and sometimes they emit more heat and sometimes less.
The heat coming from the sun alone can not explain the current temperatures on earth. If it was the sun alone that heated the earth's atmosphere then it should be much colder. Therefore, heat must be coming from within the earth to create the current climate.
Anyways, it's not because I don't believe the CO2-hype that I should have the complete answer/explanation. Some things we can just explain (yet).
The world is addicted to fossil fuels, and chooses to ignore the "warning on the pack", since quitting would be very uncomfortable for most people.
But just like the cancer diagnosis will produce hand-wringing regrets of "Why didn't I quit before this happened?" or "Why did I start smoking in the first place?" , people will be wringing their hands and crying "Why didn't we do something when we had the chance?", or "Why didn't we heed the warnings?"...but the damage will be done.
In this poor economy, with so many people out of work, we should have an environmental "New Deal", with a huge push to develop and implement alternative energies...a win/win for both the environment and the economy. It's now or never!
20 C = 68 F
30 C = 86 F
And recent peer reviewed studies confirm it was much warmer in the past, for example, the MWP, before CO2 was demonized.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/nature10929.html
"Past extreme warming events linked to massive carbon release from thawing permafrost"
That is NOT what the Esper paper said. It's what a British tabloid said. The tab was wrong.
She still got her PhD.
Orly Taitz got through dental school, too.