Humans Are Making it Hotter
Partisanship in Washington has been extreme lately. So has the weather. Might there be a connection? It certainly looks that way.
Let’s talk about heat. As anyone living in Washington—or in about three-fourths of the nation for that matter—has surely noticed, this summer has been unusually hot. In fact, July's heat was unrivaled in 140 years of Washington, D.C. weather record-keeping.
This year's record heat across much of the country is not the only sign that something is amiss with our climate. This year, we have also experienced record-breaking droughts, flooding, and storms.
A word of caution: Reputable climatologists don't ascribe individual weather episodes to the buildup of heat energy trapped by greenhouse gases. Weather is short-term, climate is long-term. One heat wave does not prove that the climate is warming, nor does a mid-winter cold snap prove that it isn't.
However, the more heat energy that is trapped in the lower atmosphere, scientists tell us, the greater the odds that what we think of as extreme weather will no longer be extreme. It will be the new normal.
Or, to put it another way, there is no way to link a case of lung cancer to a particular cigarette. Yet the more one smokes, the greater the odds that the smoker will contract lung cancer.
Let's talk about science. Conservative climate researcher Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University says that the buildup of heat energy is "loading the dice" for climate extremes. A National Research Council report that she had a hand in writing projected global warming impacts by degrees of temperature increase – if temperatures rise 2 degrees, X will happen. If temperatures rise 3 degrees, even more of X will happen.
One of the projected impacts of rising temperatures is more incidence of what we now call extremes. Dry areas getting drier. More intense precipitation. Longer, hotter heat waves.
The higher temperatures increase, the more extreme the extremes. Example: Boost temperatures by 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F), and in most places, nine out of 10 summers would be hotter than the hottest summer experienced during the last decades of the 20th century.
Now, what do temperature extremes have to do with political extremes?
The politics of environmental stewardship, and climate stewardship in particular, is as polarized as it has ever been. The sober warnings of climate scientists are attacked and ridiculed by radicals who know a lot less about climate science than they think they do. As then-Congressman Bob Inglis quipped at a House hearing last year: "They slept at a Holiday Inn Express last night and they're experts on climate change."
In the 1980s, when some of these same radicals similarly pooh-poohed warnings from scientists about the link between depletion of our stratospheric ozone layer and certain industrial chemicals, we had a conservative president who chose prudence over radicalism and addressed the problem forthrightly.
In siding with the experts and pushing through the Montreal Protocol, Ronald Reagan was being a true conservative and a no-nonsense leader. He was wise enough to separate ill-informed opinion from reliable, science-based information. As he once said, "Facts are stubborn things."
So, as you walk around stewing and sweating in this summer's record heat, you might consider getting steamed up a bit at the radical pundits and politicians who are increasing the likelihood that you will be doing more of the same in future summers.
