Well, it rained tonight over Philadelphia, temperature dropped.
Time to open the windows, set fans in the window frames and recycle the hot air in the house with fresh cool air from outside.
During the past 3 days I worked in my home office, door closed, with a small A/C unit cooling the air and the airflow from one small fan directed at me. The rest of the house was in a dark hot stupor with the first floor and the basement at decreasing layers of temperature.
I am trying to limit electricity use to the fridge, one laptop, one fan and the A/C window unit in my office. Even though I have a green job (I work from home using remote collaboration tools) for a group which mission in life is to invite, incite, motivate consumers to pay their bills electronically – that means less paper which means less carbon; I figured that I might be well inspired to work in relative comfort as I reflect my level of comfort or discomfort in my interactions with my peers.
What puzzles and annoys me is that with few exceptions, most weather reports limit themselves to the obvious facts. Not too many weather reporters link extreme weather such as the intensity of this heat wave to global warming. Considering that Global Warming seems to have been accepted as a fact by most of the media and by the main stream, still no one is linking localized extreme weather events to Global Warming. Linking Global Warming to localized extreme weather events is critical because without that link there is nothing that materializes Global Warming into the daily life of a middle class family.
So, yes as you can see on the website pulled together by Kelly O’Day from data accumulated by various scientific organizations, the global warming trends are here, have been here since the start of the industrial revolution and accelerated since the 1960s. And yes, we do not have solid data that can prove beyond a doubt that we are already experiencing extreme weather events that are a consequence of Global Warming.
I think it is time to name the elephant in the room: My point is this: there are plenty of anecdotal evidence that we are already experiencing more frequent extreme weather events. I am attributing the increased frequency and severity of those weather events to Global Warming. I am noticing that for at least the past 10 years, every summer there are “heat waves” in several parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
The challenge for the scientific community is to prove me wrong. I am asking that scientists take the pain of collecting data from around the world on heat waves or sudden extremely strong wind storms, or other extreme weather event and start looking for patterns in the data and try to link the frequency of these events to other known factors such as the increased quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The question is: how long until the polar ice caps melt?
20 years or less ?
Kelly O'Day
June 16, 2008
Three points on your post:
1. Concern about Green Noise – Alex Williams wrote an article on Green Noise in the New York Times?
Dot Earth has a summary of it.
Having people “tune out” because of “green noise” is just as bad as people not being aware of climate change.
2. Link between storms and climate change – After Katrina, many people jumped to the conclusion that global warming was the cause. The jury is still out on the link between global warming and hurricanes, see Real Climate for detailed discussion.
Tamino at Open Mind has an interesting analysis of tornadoes. He originally found a link between tornadoes and temperature only to have a reader point out that there was a change in tornado classifications in the 1990s which made his analysis findings invalid.
3. Global Warming and daily life of a middle class family – There are many impacts of global warming that will impact middle class families, including sea level rise, adverse agricultural impacts, changes in vegetation and insects, as well as changes in precipitation patterns.