Maybe it's because we're at 9,600 feet in the Colorado Rockies that we can think with cool heads about the heat that has been boiling East Coast bodies and minds recently -- and the fact that we study the effects of global warming on subalpine ecosystems up here, summer, after summer, after summer. We listen in disbelief as everyone complains about the record heat, yet not one of the major newscasters -- NOT ONE -- mentions climate change as a factor when talking about it. An influential but unfortunately not mainstream newscaster, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, did make the connection. She announced a new analysis showing that current pledges made by nations to address global warming will not prevent a 4 degrees Celsius (about 8 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperature by 2100. Meanwhile, she notes, developing countries have long warned that temperatures should not rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid environmental catastrophe.
This illustrates the great disconnect, the one that drives our inadequate response to the largest environmental crisis that faces civilization's existence. We repeatedly fail to connect climate change daily to the news events of our lives, even when it's staring us in the face. We repeatedly miss opportunities to educate the body politic on why we must transition to clean energy as soon as possible. Yeah, the oil spill is really bad news. But that's a mosquito bite. Climate change is a cancer. Not convinced? The oil spill claimed nine human lives, rather flamboyantly. The unusually strong heat waves that our planet has been experiencing within the past decade are responsible for the quiet deaths of many thousands of people. And that's just the beginning, because it's getting worse.
And we're not even acknowledging this cancer's daily, spreading existence in our lives. Take the current heat waves, one of the most obvious manifestations. No, just like you can't pinpoint any one particular case of lung cancer to smoking, you can't pinpoint any one particular heat wave to the climate change resulting from global warming. But longer, stronger heat waves are predicted as a result of climate change. So, what's happening right now fits what we expect under climate change. But if no one says so, it's easy to act like a bunch of frogs in a pot of water slowly coming to a boil. Frogs? Are WE frogs? Is the US Congress a fracas of frogs? So far, they're acting like it, even as one of their beloved and venerated members, Robert Byrd, was pushed into the arms of the grim reaper by the extra heat recently.
What to do? This is a duh moment. Stop acting like a frog. Boycott fossil fuels. Write letters to the editors. Complain to your news outlets when they fail to mention the "C-C" phrase in the news, whether it's the unusual droughts, floods, blizzards, insect epidemics destroying our forests, wildfires, dying coral reefs, storms, spread of tropical diseases, acidifying oceans, or whatever scenario that is predicted to worsen under climate change. Climate change is bad for the economy, and a transition to clean energy is good for the economy. It's that simple.
As our free online book on addressing climate change describes in great detail, climate change is with us now, every day, and the newscasters and reporters should be acknowledging it daily in their stories. Email your representatives and President Obama to let them know that you'll vote them out before you let your family boil, sicken, or die from not transitioning to clean energy fast enough. The current heat wave might wane, but there will be more and worse to come, if we don't act soon.
That is also why climate equipment at airports tend to record higher temperatures than equipment in open fields.
Oh, wait.........Never mind.
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Astronomical Society
American Chemical Society
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Physics
American Meteorological Society
American Physical Society
Australian Coral Reef Society
Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the CISRO
British Antarctic Society
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanic Society
Environmental Protection Agency
European Federation of Geologists
European Geosciences Union
European Physical Society
Federation of American Scientists
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies
Geological Society of America
Geological Society of Australia
International Union for Quaternary Research
International Union for Geodesy and Geophysics
National Center for Atmospheric Research
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
and
The science academies of :
Canada
France
Germany
Italy
Japan
Russia
United States
Brazil
China
India
Mexico
Poland
South Africa
Deniers are definitely swimming upstream when it comes to support of their opinions. Could someone put up a list of the science bodies who have issued statements that disagree with the IPCC's findings? (hint:there aren't any)
By the way, not only is Los Angeles experiencing record breaking cold this week but Australia is having its coldest day in 100 years.
There are actually two issues in question. First that global warming is caused by human activity and second, that there is any global warming at all. There is actually good reason to believe the world is currently entering a cooling trend as it appeared to be in the 1970s when many scientists were making claims that we were on the verge of a new ice age.
See, there's another nonexistent "fact." There was essentially no support among scientists for a "new ice age" in any sort of near term. Surveys of the scientific literature from the period prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt. There are virtually no papers from back then that predict anything like that.
There was some noise in the media, but that was about it. And even there, most of it was about observed cooling, not predicted cooling. Here are the two famous articles from Time and Newsweek. Read them and look for any predictions of a new ice age, or even significant near term cooling. You won't find any, because there aren't any.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914-1,00.html
http://denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
"second, that there is any global warming at all."
How is that an open question? Every one of the global data sets shows a significant warming trend that began in 1980 or so and continues unabated.
"good reason to believe the world is currently entering a cooling trend "
"Skeptics" keep predicting this. It keeps not happening.
You're probably thinking of James Inhofe's list. He's the Republican senator from Oklahoma (a big oil state, as you might recall). His list is thoroughly useless. Few of the signers are climate scientists, and quite a few don't appear to be scientists at all. 80% of them have never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate science. Some of the signers appear not to even oppose the concept of AGW.
One of the real scientists who's on the list demanded that his name be removed because he believes AGW is very real; Inhofe's office refused, and his name remains on the list.
"scientific consensus thought the world was flat "
Nope. Scientists (well, proto-scientists, really) have known that the Earth is round since the ancient Greeks. They suspected it by 600 BCE and proved it by 300 BCE. It was the public and the political establishment they had trouble convincing.
"can scarce afford to question government edict"
If this is the only reason for their position, why did they have the same position during the Bush era? The Bush administration was not exactly a bunch of gung-ho global warming alarmists.
Thank you.
The amount of CO2 at 392 ppm has not been this high in 3.5 million years- in the Pliocene epoch- when there was no polar ice, global temperatures where 3 degrees higher (Celsius) sea levels where 25-50 meters higher then today.
That epoch- 3.5 million years is where we are headed - It was a very different North America- a vastly different coastline- and many parts of the agricultural heartland semi desert.
The media has chosen out of expediency to protect itself from the far right- which it fears- and afraid of losing advertising. Their failure to report the truth is tragic.
The media, however is not afraid to promote and either print- or give TV and cable coverage to every shady crackpot skeptic with the minimal credentials - the media poked fun at climate scientists as frauds with climate gate- in time the media will have to either begin showing the link to increasingly weird weather- and its havoc- or be blamed in the end with great hostility by a public tired of these corporations covering up the truth to keep their bottom lines fat.