You Don’t Say!
Photo by Robert Caplin/Bloomberg News
From the Washington Post: “More frequent heat waves linked to global warming, U.S. and European researchers call long hot spells likely.”
Heat waves like those that have scorched Europe and the United States in recent weeks are becoming more frequent because of global warming, say scientists who have studied decades of weather records and computer models of past, present and future climate.
While it is impossible to attribute any one weather event to climate change, several recent studies suggest that human-generated emissions of heat-trapping gases have produced both higher overall temperatures and greater weather variability, which raise the odds of longer, more intense heat waves. …
Last week, Paul Della-Marta, a researcher at Switzerland’s Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, presented findings at an international conference on climate science in Gwatt, Switzerland, showing that since 1880 the duration of heat waves in Western Europe has doubled and the number of unusually hot days in the region has nearly tripled.
In a separate 2004 study, researchers at Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research produced computer models showing that greenhouse gas emissions had doubled the likelihood of events like the lethal 2003 European heat wave1, and that by 2040 it is likely such heat waves will take place there every other year.
And researchers at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., reported this week that nighttime summer temperatures across the country have been unusually high for the past eight years, a record streak. …
Scientists and public health officials said they are particularly worried about an increase in summer nighttime temperatures because people tend to recover from excessive heat exposure at night. Joel D. Scheraga, national program director for the U.S. Global Change Research Program of the Environmental Protection Agency, has delivered presentations indicating that with increasing temperatures and population growth, deaths from extreme heat or cold could as much as triple in major American cities from 1993 to 2050. …
A group of Swiss researchers including Mark A. Liniger, a senior researcher at the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, wrote in a 2004 paper in the journal Nature that if the increased temperature variability continued, “it would represent a serious challenge to adaptive response strategies designed to cope with climate change.”
(Emphasis is mine. Translation: We can still do something about it now, so get off your air-conditioned fannies and change a frickin’ light bulb.)
Hey, even conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson is buying it.
And you know, as some scientist types are saying, even on the barest sliver of a chance that global warming doesn’t exist, and that, as the coal companies would have us believe (HAH!), that this is some cyclical event, in light of how our planet is already bursting at the seams with an ever multiplying population, would it be SUCH A BAD THING to clean up our act? To conserve our resources for future generations so our descendants aren’t facing some kind of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome dystopia where two men enter but one man leaves? To use our “highly evolved” brains and opposable thumbs to be actual stewards of our planet? Plus, if you have the fear of God within you—I’m pretty sure that God is tee’d off, and not just because we forgot to water his Ficus.
1 During which 52,000 died. Yes, you read that number right.
