In case you missed it, over the weekend the AP issued a weather forecast, for this week, next month, and the rest of your life.
The AP likes to keep it factual and punchy, if not short and sweet. So here it is:
For the next week, much of the nation should expect more “extreme heat,” the National Weather Service predicts.
_In the month of August, most of the United States will see “above normal temperatures,” forecasters say.
_For the long-term future, the world will see more and worse killer heat waves because of global warming, scientists say.
After that, you might be inclined to look for stories about Scarlett Johansson, or American Idol (although given the above news, I can’t believe people find much comfort in the statistic the Idolateers are fond of spreading around, that more people voted for the current Idol winner than ever voted for a President of the U.S.) But some of the details might answer your questions about what’s really going on, which suggests what we really should be doing.
And since then, more hot news: More than 60 percent of the United States now has abnormally dry or drought conditions, stretching from Georgia to Arizona and across the north through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Today(Monday), power grid operators are predicting record-breaking power use in the Midwest as a result of the heat.
So what is going on? No, climatologists aren’t blaming this particular heat wave on global warming, at least not exactly.
Heat waves and global warming “are very strongly” connected, said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis branch chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. The immediate cause of the California heat wave — and other heat waves — is day-to-day weather, he said.
But what they can say is that global warming contributes to every heat wave, including this one, by changing general characteristics. For example, “what global warming has done is make the nights warmer in general and the days drier, which help turn merely uncomfortably hot days into killer heat waves, Trenberth said.”
And this is turning out to be a major lesson in what we need to do to cope with the Climate Crisis, because:
…recent studies in the past five years show that climate change is at its most dangerous during Extreme events, such as high temperatures, droughts and flooding, he said. “These (heat) events always occur. What global warming does is push it up another notch,” Trenberth said.
Which brings us to the longer term forecasts.
…the computer models show that soon, we’ll get many more — and hotter — heat waves that will leave the old Dust Bowl records of the 1930s in the dust, said Ken Kunkel, director of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Illinois State Water Survey.
This is today’s reason for why we have to get beyond Climate Crisis denial and get to work on both aspects of it. First, fix it: when you know what’s likely to happen, you can prepare for it (even if it doesn’t happen, wouldn’t that be better that getting caught unprepared?) Scientists are telling us to prepare for worse and more frequent heat waves. We need to use what we’re learning in this one and what we’ve learned in the past to prepare for the next ones, and to fix whatever can be fixed–in public health, in energy distribution,etc–that looks like a problem.
For example, many if not most of the 150+ people who’ve died due to this month’s heat wave were elderly, living alone. The Mayor of Fresno said the realization of this has turned his entire city “into one big Neighborhood Watch.” So fixes don’t have to be high tech or expensive or even all that complicated. Though some of them are going to be, like dealing with flooding problems in places like Bombay with the more frequent and much more intense rainstorms that overwhelm the infrastructure.
While we get serious and fix it, we simultaneously need to do what we need to do to stop it–to stop even worse heating, even worse heat waves, droughts, storms, and finally a runaway shift in the earth’s climate that could make the planet unrecognizeable. We can debate the means–is the alliance announced today between England and California on trading carbon emissions going to work? But at this point, addressing the problem is the necessary first step in responsible governance.
Is it too late? We’re going to try to fix it anyway, so why not try to get ahead of it and do it right? As for stopping it, if it isn’t too late it soon will be, so if we are going to have any chance, we’d better get on it.
Besides, what are you going to tell your grandchildren–we thought we couldn’t stop it, so we didn’t even try?
