Global Warming

Well it exists! Contrary to many pundits, talking heads and conservative wags, global climate change is with us. Ice caps are melting away, actually downsizing. Jet stream pathways have altered radically over the past 24 months and weather norms have shifted accordingly in many locations throughout the world. Warming air and water masses have that effect.

Those effects include hurricane patterns and formations, tornado emergence, severity of all such storms including thunderstorms, snow falls, thunder-snows, and many more examples of oddity in the world of weather.

With changing storm patterns come weird temperatures as well. High heat zones pop up in unusual places. Very cold temps are produced in other places.

We know that shifting temperature centers – both in the atmosphere and oceans – cause milder or more severe winters. Chicago had several years of mild winters in stark relief to its normal severe cold, ice and snow totals. For many years snow falls were minor and the accumulated totals far below normal. Then for many years we got warm gloppy snowfalls that melted in one or two days. Lots of water content as opposed to dry snows.

The weather experts can track the data on all of these conditions and most likely are. However, the global scene is interlaced with weather everywhere. That is what needs to be studied.

Will warmer weather at the poles be permanent? How do we measure permanence on a global basis? We need to face the reality that weather cycles we track are short lived from a few years to 50 years, or maybe even 100 years. In global terms that is a blink of the eye. Billions of years make up Earth’s history. A million years is a short time in geological terms. Recall the Ice Age ended 11,000 or 12,000 years ago. Man’s history tracks through a few thousand years of that time span, not all of it. And certainly practically none of the billions of years prior!

The scale of what we are witnessing on the weather front is the important thing. No one for certain can tell us the effects – lasting or otherwise – of current global warming conditions. But we humans ought to be aware of what is happening, how long it is likely to last, what changing conditions can we expect, and how severe an effect on our lives will it be.  Those are common sense things to consider.

The next step is to determine what effects human life has had on the global weather scene and whether we can change our behavior to alter the consequences we are witnessing now. Can we change our behavior is just one question. Another question is will the behavior change have the desired effect? Only time and experience will help us understand this complex issue.

Meanwhile denying the existence of the phenomena of global warming is pure childishness. Denial may make the present more palatable, but the future?

There’s always that question, isn't there?

September 11, 2014