Call it what you will. 'Global weirding' seems the best fit of the data (a term that my daughter picked up in her high-school chemistry class). Taken together, and regardless of how you interpret the extreme weather, there seems no doubt that our world's climate is behaving badly.
In all, 251 high temperature records were broken in the US on one day last week. Fergawdsakes, it was hotter in Kansas than in Death Valley! Some records were broken by several degrees fahrenheit. Nothing incremental about 3 degrees in excess of history when you're talking about numbers in the vicinity of 100. Three percent! That's an enormous jump. That's wrath of God type stuff [if you're into that sort of explanation]. It's happening on a grand scale. Well... 'grand' if you're into weather records, tornadoes, train wrecks, and such. Not so grand if you're talking about the biosphere.
There is an archaeological side to global warming. And you don't have to be a subversive to appreciate it. Everywhere there's a delta or an estuary, the flora and fauna will be affected first and worst there. As sea levels rise, and rise with increasing speed, our world will become a laboratory for what the human world looked like on the continental shelf at the end of the last ice age. The words 'human misery' will pale in the coming decades as metre by metre the sea encroaches on the most fertile, most densely populated regions in the world.
Wish us luck. I think we're gonna need it.
In all, 251 high temperature records were broken in the US on one day last week. Fergawdsakes, it was hotter in Kansas than in Death Valley! Some records were broken by several degrees fahrenheit. Nothing incremental about 3 degrees in excess of history when you're talking about numbers in the vicinity of 100. Three percent! That's an enormous jump. That's wrath of God type stuff [if you're into that sort of explanation]. It's happening on a grand scale. Well... 'grand' if you're into weather records, tornadoes, train wrecks, and such. Not so grand if you're talking about the biosphere.
There is an archaeological side to global warming. And you don't have to be a subversive to appreciate it. Everywhere there's a delta or an estuary, the flora and fauna will be affected first and worst there. As sea levels rise, and rise with increasing speed, our world will become a laboratory for what the human world looked like on the continental shelf at the end of the last ice age. The words 'human misery' will pale in the coming decades as metre by metre the sea encroaches on the most fertile, most densely populated regions in the world.
Wish us luck. I think we're gonna need it.
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OK. Now I want to see a graph of the number of these records that have been broken each year since records started. And an equivalent one for the cold or wet records. Without those we are struggling a bit to avoid the temptation to say, "but it was cold this year so GW must be wrong". In other words we have to go over the top to convince people that a) GW is real and not just an example of the normal pattern of climatic variation so that we can go to b) humans were responsible for this unusual change in climate.
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