(Dobbs) Are We Playing Chicken With Climate Change?
If this summer doesn't convince you, nothing will.
Those who deny climate change, let alone man’s role in it, would revel in a story early this week from The Associated Press. It’s the two lead paragraphs they’d like.
The first one says, “The North Platte River in southern Wyoming has been so low in places lately that a toddler could easily wade across, and thick mats of olive-green algae grow in the lazy current.”
In other words, evidently the river’s drying up.
But then, the second: “Just more than two years ago, workers stacked sandbags to protect homes and fishing cabins from raging brown floodwaters, the highest on record.”
So evidently nothing’s drying up after all, it’s just the shifting state of the weather.
What such weather proves, deniers would argue despite this summer’s fires and floods, is that climate change is a political myth, a cunning campaign to force us off fossil fuels and waste our money curtailing emissions in everything from smokestacks to SUVs.
Their bad. Because weather and climate are two different things. Not mutually exclusive, but markedly different measurements. Meteorologist Sam Collentine of the website OpenSnow.com describes the differences this way: “Weather tells you what to wear each day. Climate tells you what types of clothes to have in your closet.”
Or to put it differently, weather is what’s happening now. It can change in mere moments. It is today’s heat and tomorrow’s freeze. Climate is what’s happening over time. It changes over the years. It is this year’s storms and next year’s droughts.
And here’s what that means. While weather is only a point in time, climate is a collection of calculations— rain, heat, sunshine, clouds, humidity, wind, and other influential elements— measured scientifically in different climate zones around the world and sometimes averaged out over as long as three decades. The American South for example, closer to the equator and to the Gulf of Mexico with its own clear-cut patterns of heat and humidity, sunshine and storms, is a distinctly different climate zone than the North.
Yet early this summer, it was the North— specifically, the typically cool and wet Pacific Northwest— that sweltered in unprecedented waves of heat. I mean, 108 in Seattle? 116 in Portland?? Throughout the northwest, including British Columbia where it was 121, temperatures set records more than 30 degrees above average. Roughly 600 more people died there during that last week of June than normal.
You can dismiss that as an “extreme weather event” if you like, but that doesn’t tell the whole story, because we are seeing more extreme weather events than we’ve ever seen before. The fires in the West, the heat waves in Europe, last week’s floods in New Jersey and New York. And hurricanes? We had so many last year, we ran out of names.
The climate is changing. The averages are going up.
In an editorial published this week by roughly 200 of the world’s most credible medical and health journals— including the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet— scientists say our world’s on track to see temperatures rise across the globe by more than five degrees in the years since industry replaced agriculture as society’s main business. That might not sound like much until you count up what it means. Not just the fires, not just the floods, not just the devastating impact on people’s homes or on crops or water supplies or melting glaciers or expanding expanses of desert, but according to the editorial, it threatens “catastrophic harm to health.”
"Higher temperatures,” these journals point out, “have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality. Harms disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including children, older populations, ethnic minorities, poorer communities, and those with underlying health problems.”
These harms can’t be turned around.
What’s more, researchers see a small rise in global temperatures— which are documented— triggering a big spike in extreme heat, which is precisely what we’ve seen this summer. Yet some citizens, fearful of the cost of fighting climate change, still will ask, “What if they’re wrong?” The prudent will ask, “What if they’re right?”
The answer, if they are right, is that we don’t have time to waste. Renewable energy— mainly solar, wind, hydroelectric— is coming on strong, but it still contributes only a fraction to our energy grids, and changing that equation won’t be cheap. Government and industry alike will have to contribute both legislation and funding to accelerate the transition. Bigger better batteries will have to evolve. And it all comes with a cost. But failing to act comes with a bigger one.
The North Platte drying up one year, breaking its banks the next. No one can deny that the weather is changing. The question is, are these “extreme weather events” part of a perpetual pattern that does not, over the long span of time, actually reflect changes in our climate? Or, if the climate incrementally but consistently is going in the wrong direction, are these extreme events a portent of life-changing, even existential problems for our nation and our planet?
If we don’t want to risk more deadly heat waves and mushrooming fires and killer storms and fatal floods… if we don’t want to lose more water and more crops… if we don’t want to suffer the ravages of health that scientists connect to climate change… we dare not wait to find out.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.