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A random tweet to Kirkrrt in the wee hours yesterday leads to NYTimes coverage, apparently:
Little did I realize this at the time I tweeted, frankly. I was just whining about the monsoon-like morning we were experiencing - again - up north.
But then I looked over Andrew's article:
For decades, scientists have predicted that disastrous weather, including heat, drought and deluges, would occur with increasing frequency in a world heated by the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. While some may be tempted to label this summer’s extremes the manifestation of our climate meddling, there’s just not a clear-cut link — yet.
True enough, I thought. My thought, long ago, was that warmer weather brings about more moisture in our atmosphere. That leads to wilder swings in temperature, at least according to my readings about studies of aged ice cores that had taken place as we were learning more and more about our earth in the late '70s and '80s. (Grandma passed along an extensive collection of National Geographics and I took advantage of them. Reading about science, not the pictures, dammit! Perverts!)
Of course, what did I know?
At least this makes sense to me:
In the end, there are two climate threats: one created by increasing human vulnerability to calamitous weather, the other by human actions, particularly emissions of warming gases, that relentlessly shift the odds toward making today’s weather extremes tomorrow’s norm. Without addressing both dangers, there’ll be lots of regrets. But conflating them is likely to add to confusion, not produce solutions.
And thinking that the tons of greenhouse emissions during our current period of industrialization has no effect, whatsoever, is simply foolish. The earth has been stable long enough for us to evolve to this point, random weather extremes and all, but it could change rapidly for a lot of people in this world...
