Was this drought caused by climate change? Yes.
FAIR has noted the tendency of corporate media to play down the connection of extreme weather to climate change. (See Neil deMause’s piece in Extra!, 8/11.) This summer, as the country is beset by another devastating wave of drought and fires, the approach seems to be to acknowledge climate change—in the 10th paragraph—but end up by concluding that it’s impossible to say whether there’s any connection between climate change and any particular weather phenomenon. As in this L.A. Times piece (7/2/12):
Since 2000, it has not been uncommon for wildfire seasons to end with a tally of 7 million to 9 million blackened acres nationally. Though total burned acreage dropped during a few years of milder weather, it spiraled again last year when flames galloped across parched Texas.
Researchers predict that rising temperatures associated with climate change will lead to more wildfires in much of the West. But it is hard to tease out the effects of global warming from natural climate cycles, which in past centuries have seized the region with long, severe droughts.
“We’ve had conditions like this in the past,” [Forest Service research ecologist Bob] Keane said. “So you can’t say with any degree of certainty…that this is climate change. But what you can say is that it certainly meets the model of climate change.”
On a conceptual level, this is just wrong: It’s not as though there are some weather events that are caused by climate change and some that just happened, and there’s some way to tell one from the other. Once you’ve altered the atmosphere, every single weather phenomenon—every storm, every dry spell, every unremarkably pleasant day—is a result of that altered atmosphere. If we had not changed the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide from 280 parts per million to almost 400 parts per million, in other words, we would have entirely different weather every day.
That’s not to say that we didn’t have storms and droughts and pleasant days before we changed the climate. But scientists can tell you whether we’d be more or less likely to have any given type of weather with an unaltered climate. And with droughts and forest fires, the answer is clear: We’d be having less of them. This is something reporters should be pointing out in every story on the extreme weather of the summer of 2012.
In a 1-week period last summer our area suffered from an earthquake, hurricane, tornado, and massive flooding. This past June, in a 1-week period, my sister-in-law’s family were floating around in west-coast Florida’s flood, my cousins’ city of Colorado Springs was on fire, my stepbrothers in Arizona were hit by haboob. Over 40,000 records of high temperatures were broken so far this year. And states like North Carolina and Virginia are making laws banning the discussion of climate change and sea levels? And Republicans and corporate-bought Democrats want to do away with regulations? Has this country gone insane or is it just stupid?
No Marie it is not stupid.What is happening is we are inundated with “stat” watchers now.All looking for changes and aberrations in the weather.Listing this correlation and that.That difference and this .News is to the minute.As if all is happening in an end of the world scenario.Rolling one upon the other.Storms in Singapore.Earthquakes in China, and tsunami’s in Japan.Hail falling on the capital and 6 foot snow drifts in moscow.Australia is flooding.New Orleans is sinking.Philadelphia is hot enough to cook eggs on a bald mans head!
Marie one of the top things pointing to global warming was the glaciers melting in the Himalayas.Remember in 10 years they would all be gone?Well ten years later they are right back to where they started.No melting at all.This is only one thing.But it proves that global warming did not know their asses from a hole in the ground over 10 minutes.Ten hours.Ten days..weeks ,OR years.So it may not be time to run for the bomb shelters yet.
Spoke to a farmer last month.God bless him he is 101 yrs old.Still vital.Asked him about Global warming and he laughed.He said(and I quote)”I ve seen it hotter…colder…stormier and as calm as a church.Sometimes it rains and sometimes it dont”.He told me with a sly smile that when he was a kid out in the midwest there were men that would come through preaching the world was nearing armageddon after a twister.They would be selling bibles.Now he said the government is selling the bibles.
The science on all this is new.And very little hard science it is contrary to what you may think.They never have their GW conventions in moscow during January do they?It is someplace like Arizona in August.As we speak there are studies all over the world being funded by governments to prove global warming.Or as they call it now ..man made weather change.Scientific funding.Funding that means to find proof that would allow Obama to move in and take over.For our own good of course.The baby step so far is that there is a consensus(not science)among those being funded to find this information, that the world is warming slightly .And the cause may be partially due to us.When asked if the world would be warming if we were not here, the answer they give is…Maybe yes…Maybe no.Because in the past(believe it or not)it has happened millions of times without any input from us..As I say the time to build a bomb shelter is a week from” no time soon.”.So don’t panic.And don’t believe that anyone who still owns a glacier park in the Himalayas is a crazy corporate owned denier.Maybe ten years ago when you called them that you had a basis.Now that you know you,were wrong just say your sorry and quietly slip away.Al Gore go home to your 5 million dollar beach house you said would be under water by now.Sometimes it rains.Sometimes it don’t.
For millions of years we have had cycles of global warming, and they have even proven that co2 emissions peak 800 years after the warming, basically co2 levels are the RESULT of a natural warming cycle, not the CAUSE. Why is Mars going through global warming? Ours is manmade, because of all of the crap they can sell ignorant people that believe it is. If there were people on mars would we blame them for it’s warming too, and try to tax them for co2 emissions also?
Greg i dont argue what you state is right or wrong. But I would ask you to see that people who believe in this are not ignorant(in the pejorative sense).The tide;the push to believe in this that leads so many to ask the government to step in and save them is well funded and deeply rooted.Many good decent people believe this because they are told that is where the science now sits.How we got here is best put by Obamas defunkt green zsar.”We shall use the global warming/green planet movement to gain control.When enough scientists have obtained grants to prove this thesis,it will take on a momentum of its own, and be very hard to contain”…..what began as a simple power grab has in fact mushroomed.Slowly it has been contained as Americans recoiled from government over reach.Now the job is to let science work beyond politicizing forces.
Global warming means the average temperature of the earth is increasing due to increased trapping of solar energy. That part is not that complicated and not at all controversial.
The atmosphere is a fluid system and when fluids are heated they move around in complex ways. That part is very complicated. Most areas get warmer, but some can get colder.
not every glacier on the planet is going to disappear in our lifetime. This doesn’t mean that the entire body of evidence supporting global warming is wrong.
Tim the problem with the “movement”is that it see’s this warming(not the last 100 million years of course) as totally due to man.And so ….we needed a strong leader to take control.And control damn near everything .To right the wrong man is doing upon mother earth.And by extropulating this theory forward ,would by necessity mean controlling every other country, since without their acquiescence what good is it?The instantaneous moves to CONTROL the US economy were startling, and right out of Van Jones notebook.And yes it is a worrisome that so much is being based on bottoms up scientific theorie.Very little hard fact.Global warming models are often wrong.And saying wether it gets warm OR cold that it is still GW, does not really give one confidence in this theory.People yelling the science is closed ,give us the keys to your life….before the science has even begun.Al Gore saying a certain beachfront community will be under water in ten years.Then he buys a 6 million dollar house there 15 feet from high tide.The cooking of the books.
Your last line is correct.And furthermore we should be working on lessoning our polluting ways across the board.Actually America is doing a great job in that direction.China/India not so much.Government over reach sent this countries freedom loving people running for the hills.Obamas middle name should be “over reach”.Maybe Mitt will have a more sensible ,rational way of dealing with these matters.BAMS heavy fisted glove does not work well here.
the press is under no obligation to carry the water for the liberal agenda by yelling “the sky is falling please oh mighty FED step in and save us all”. –michael e
That is correct, michael e. The press is under no obligation to ANYONE other than their corporate masters. The public is permitted to “enjoy” whatever nasty droppings may occur after their slaughtering, slicing, and immolation of truth.
Your assumption here is that there is a “liberal” agenda that is being pushed by virtually every climate scientist in the world. Does this infer that virtually all the world’s scientists are “liberal” in their political philosophy?
Good science cannot be had where outside influences are permitted to have their say in the results of scientific research, such as in the case of michael e’s apologism for right-wing, 1% corporate protectionism of the Democratic and Republican party policy platforms.
The FED refers to the nation’s Federal Reserve System, not the FEDeral government. People who use the term “Fed” as a nickname for our national government are using it incorrectly. Please use standard, recognized terminology rather than your own self-styled and confusing memes. If you wish to refer to the federal government, you might say “Washington,” or “D.C.” or “inside the Beltway” or the like.
I’m all for berating the media for ignoring the effects of climate change, but it seems to me to be at least as urgent to berate them for not pointing out the relationship between extreme poverty and massive death tolls in this kind of event.
Whatever happens to the climate – and I’m not denying the importance of man-made change – natural disasters have always happened, and alas always will. What makes all the difference to the death toll is the wealth or otherwise of the communities affected, which in general determines the solidity of their buildings.
You can argue all night about whether climate change is man-made, but it’s extremely difficult to argue that poverty isn’t.