Image: NASA
"The most pervasive impact of global temperature change will be to increase the chances of extreme events... heat waves, droughts." "When the atmosphere warms, so does the temperature of the sea. As the seas warm, ... hurricanes, typhoons... tornadoes, heavy winds, untimely frosts, cold spells- these can strike one part of the country while others bask in sunshine." (pages 106-107, The Next 100 Years, 1990). These predictions were based on climate modeling from independent scientists in the 1980's such as Syukuro Manabe from Princeton, Kerry Emanuel of MIT and climate expert Stephen Schneider,
All-time record snowfalls in Washington D.C., Burlington, Vermont, incredible rains on the west coast, record cold in Florida, droughts in some places, and polar ice melts are all extreme weather events. Yet this is a time when climate change skeptics are having a field day trying to convince people that their local cold weather can't POSSIBLY be due to global warming. And no one, even the biggest climate change advocate, wants climate change to be true. My theory is that the American public, who now is beginning to believe that human-induced climate change is a hoax, is trying to will itself out of the reality.
The fact is, long before Al Gore polarized the country along political party lines on climate change with his Nobel Prize-winning video, An Inconvenient Truth the foremost independent climate scientists published juried papers describing data and computer models suggesting that carbon dioxide was producing accelerated warming worldwide. They also showed that the models predicted an increase in the El Nino phenomenon. El Nino of course is an abnormal heating of the surface of the Pacific Ocean, which in turn produces, large-scale rainfall on the west coast, abnormal snowstorms in some places, droughts in others, etc.
Scientists by nature are very conservative about going out on a limb and declaring causal links between events, for example, between humans actions and climate shifts. This has led some leaders and the public to believe that they are doubt their data is correct but this isn't so. They are simply leaving the door open to the possibility that climate change might not be happening because they cannot prove it, no more than they can prove the theory of plate tectonics, but it is widely accepted to be true. The fact is, these scientists are leaving the door open a crack, because they are scientists- and that's what scientists do. Since they are talking about unknown patterns in the future, they want to be extra careful. There is no hoax in the ice core record that dates back several hundred thousand years. The fact is, regardless of the bitter political battle over climate change now, there has been compelling scientific data that extreme weather is a pretty clear symptom of climate change.
Read interviews with independent scientists from back in the 1980's long before the conjecture on climate change was removed from science and became a political battle, pick up a book called "The Next 100 Years" by Jonathan Weiner. Read the research and interviews for yourself from back in the day. It is not a gloom and doom prophecy. It is a book that unravels what the scientists were finding about changes in the atmosphere, the complexities of modeling and what their research and models showed. Let me know what you think after you read it!
There are plenty of people who have good reasons to want to convince you that climate change is not real and it is usually in their best financial interests. Hopefully before thinking people make up their minds, they will stop listening to economists, physicists and politicians and instead learn as much as they can about ecosystems, weather and climate from unbiased science sources such as NASA and NOAA before jumping to conclusions. The stakes are too high to get shookered by vested interests.
