My basement flooded last night. I blame global warming.
Living in Western NY we missed most of the big snow storms that hit south and east of us earlier this winter, until earlier this month when we got hit with a lot of wet heavy snow. Not as much as some of you folks in Pennsylvania, but enough. Well, we’ve had a recent heat wave (temps in mid 40’s to upper 50’s) the last week and all that snow vanished, or most of it.
This created a lake in our back yard (okay, a big pond) that wasn’t a problem until the electrical outlet to our sump pump shorted or stopped working, thus turning off the juice to said pump (which we had just installed about a month ago). Our basement then flooded (for those of you who don’t have basements or know anything about what I’m taking about these things happen when sump pumps don’t work for whatever reason).
The good news is we plugged the pump into a different electrical outlet and now our basement is slowly draining. We may have damage to our water heater, however, which could require we purchase and install a new one. The bad news is that 3 inches of standing water in a basement filled with lots of our stuff means — well it means we lost a lot of our stuff in all likelihood.
So why does my flooded basement prove global warming? Well, to be honest, it doesn’t.
Just like the big snow storms this year didn’t disprove global warming or changes to the earth’s climate as the result of human emissions of carbon dioxide from the use of fossil fuels and other human activities. The snow storm in early March where I live and the subsequent rapid melting of that snow due to warmer than usual temperatures for this region are too short term to be evidence of changing climactic conditions.
Which is why scientists who actually study climate look at long term trends in the climate data that span decades and centuries. The unusual weather we all experienced in the United States this year is not proof one way or another that our climate, globally or locally, is changing.
However, the data that has been collected regarding melting glaciers, the loss of arctic ice, the change in migratory patterns of birds, other animals and the invasion of new plant species to higher latitudes, and most of all the evidence that each decade since the 1980’s has been warmer than the last, and the most recent decade was the warmest on record.
Indeed, despite the recession, CO2 emissions are at an all time high.
OSLO (Reuters) – Levels of the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere have risen to new highs in 2010 despite an economic slowdown in many nations that braked industrial output, data showed on Monday.
Carbon dioxide, measured at Norway’s Zeppelin station on the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, rose to a median 393.71 parts per million of the atmosphere in the first two weeks of March from 393.17 in the same period of 2009, extending years of gains.
“Looking back at the data we have from Zeppelin since the end of the 1980s it seems like the increase is accelerating” Johan Stroem, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, said of the data compiled with Stockholm University. […]
Carbon concentrations have risen by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution ushered in wider use of fossil fuels. A 2009 study of the ocean off Africa indicated carbon levels in the atmosphere were at their highest in 2.1 million years.
Think about that for a moment. We have the highest CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere in the last 2.1 million years, and the amount of CO2 have in our atmosphere has increased by one third since we began burning fossil fuels like crazy at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And yes, those emissions of CO2, small as some may think they may be, have had a significant effect on the rise of global temperatures and global climate change.
According to radiative physics and decades of laboratory measurements, increased CO2 in the atmosphere is expected to absorb more infrared radiation as it escapes back out to space. In 1970, NASA launched the IRIS satellite measuring infrared spectra. In 1996, the Japanese Space Agency launched the IMG satellite which recorded similar observations. Both sets of data were compared to discern any changes in outgoing radiation over the 26 year period (Harries 2001). What they found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy. The change in outgoing radiation was consistent with theoretical expectations. Thus the paper found “direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect”. This result has been confirmed by subsequent papers using data from later satellites. […]
When greenhouse gases absorb infrared radiation, the energy heats the atmosphere which in turn re-radiates infrared radiation in all directions. Some makes its way back to the earth’s surface. Hence we expect to find more infrared radiation heading downwards. Surface measurements from 1973 to 2008 find an increasing trend of infrared radiation returning to earth (Wang 2009). A regional study over the central Alps found that downward infrared radiation is increasing due to the enhanced greenhouse effect (Philipona 2004). Taking this a step further, an analysis of high resolution spectral data allowed scientists to quantitatively attribute the increase in downward radiation to each of several greenhouse gases (Evans 2006). The results lead the authors to conclude that “this experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming.”
So while my basement flooding isn’t proof of global warming, neither are the arguments advanced by “skeptics” do not disprove that climate change is real and that it is caused by the increased emissions of greenhouse gases as a result of human activity. Certainly snowstorms or basement flooding don’t prove anything regarding climate change, much as “skeptics and deniers” such as Senator James Inhofe and his grandkids or proponents, such as I, might wish that such simplistic arguments could provide conclusive proof one way or the other.
But 97% of scientists who have studied climate change and its causes, and have published scientific papers regarding this global phenomenon, agree that humans are causing climate change:
That humans are causing global warming is the position of the Academies of Science from 19 countries plus many scientific organisations that study climate science. More specifically, 97% of climate scientists actively publishing climate papers endorse the consensus position.
Instead of listening to people who don’t know the science of climate change very well, we ought to give those people who do know what they are talking about a proper hearing. And then we ought to act to do something about this very real problem that will effect all of us and our descendants for years to come.
Now about my damn basement …