The news stories about drought, record temperatures, wilting crops, and
freak storms – seriously, who ever heard of a derecho before the past few weeks – are piling up.
The stories raise, or should raise, questions about how these events tie in
with climate change, yet many of them don’t. I’m beginning to share the
frustrations of environmentalists and scientists who say the media are doing a
poor job of connecting the dots.
This morning’s Democrat and Chronicle features an article with the headline:
“Overheated cows in the region are producing less milk.” In
short, the article says that the oppressive heat wave that’s affected most of
the country is causing cows discomfort, which is causing them to eat less and
produce less milk. And that may make dairy products more expensive for
consumers at some point.
This same heat wave, and accompanying drought, is causing large crop losses
in the Midwest. Some local farmers are starting to worry
about their crops, too. The hot, dry weather is also fueling wildfires in the
west.
And as for the storms, New York City
got nailed with a sudden, intense one yesterday. The New York Daily News put up
a photo essay of sorts and you can find it here.
Weather happens. So does bad weather and drought. And to say that climate
change is the definitive cause of any single weather event is a reach. But
climate researchers have identified trends in temperature, precipitation, storm
intensity and frequency, and drought that show long-term changes. They project
that heat waves will become hotter, longer, and more frequent; that short-term
droughts will become drier, will last longer than in previous years, and will
happen more often. And about those freak rain and wind storms? They’ll be more
common and more destructive.
There’s a climate adaptation consultant, Michael Cote,
that I follow on Tumblr. Yesterday, he had his own brief post on derechos. It included an analogy I liked that,
while perhaps oversimplified, neatly explains the ties between climate change
and weather:
“Bottom line, think of a baseball player on steroids.
You don’t know which homer is attributable to the ‘roids, but you know that 20%
or so of his stats are from the juice.”
“Same with climate change,” Cote wrote. “You don’t
know which storms are due to the juiced up atmosphere.”
When Syracuse broke 100 degrees
the other day, the Post-Standard reached out to Cornell University Professor
David Wolfe. The result: an article that does connect some dots. The piece is premised
on a single, basic question: what did the record temperature mean to a climate
scientist?
Wolfe’s answer: “What we are seeing today is the kind of thing we will see
more frequently in the future. There’s very little doubt about that.”
This article appears in Jul 18-24, 2012.
