USAToday, which has been doing more and more good work on climate change and climate science (ok, a pretty weak field..) – has a good piece on this summer’s heat, and what it indicates. Here’s a sample, worth reading the whole piece.
Here’s one way to think of it: The atmosphere is juiced like athletes on performance-enhancing drugs. During baseball’s steroid era, steroids didn’t turn singles into home runs. But what used to be fly balls to the warning track ended up over the fence.
Similarly, climate change and urbanization don’t cause heat waves and droughts so much as intensify them. So what used to be a 95-degree day can become a 100-degree day. Or what once was a 75-degree nighttime low can turn into an 80-degree night.
And, one might add, what once would have been a summer thunderstorm can turn into a gulley washing, basement flooding, tornado spawning monster. And what once might have been a hot spell turns into a drought of biblical intensity.
Some 98% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and is very likely caused primarily by human activity. The evidence continues to mount: Nine of history’s 10 hottest years have occurred in the past 13 years. In the USA, new high temperature records outnumbered low temperature records by more than 2-to-1 over the past decade. And the volume of Arctic sea ice reached record lows for July.
Too often, climate change is discussed as something to be worried about far off into the future, so far that it dims in importance compared with more pressing concerns. Both the latest global data and the USA’s sweltering summer suggest, however, that the future might be now.
I dunno, the steroids analogy only works with the addition of denial. Everyone SWEARS they are not using steroids but then flunk the test.
Eventually things will get so out of hand that we realize that it is a whole different ball game. A different game entirely.
Steroids and hits is a temporary, convenient metaphor. It is more like the entire ball field is changing shape and shaking.