Is Weather Becoming More Extreme?
Those who would like to see massive cuts in energy use associate bad weather with global warming in an effort to promote their cause. One popular doomsayer, Ross Gelbspan, author of The Heat is On, recently wrote a letter to the New York Times (August 28, 1999) claiming that “The most likely cause of the intense downpour on Thursday in New York was global climate change.”
But is the weather really changing for the worse? An article in the USA Weekend (August 29, 1999) by two Weather Channel meteorologists, Colin Marquis and Stu Ostro, argues that the weather is pretty much the same as it has always been, only that our perceptions have changed.
One of the reasons why we may think the weather is wilder is the massive growth in media coverage. “Today, real-time multimedia communication means gripping images get beamed instantly from tornado alley into our living rooms or PCs. Its as if were all experiencing the bad weather, albeit vicariously,” say Marquis and Ostro.
The authors admit that it is getting warmer. But the change has been small, only 1 degree Fahrenheit this century. Moreover, they say, “it is important to remember that specific temperature records over land date back only about 120 years, and data over the oceans (70 percent of the globe) was quite sparse until about 25 years ago, when satellites became more versatile.” They go on to say, “precise measurements of temperature do not extend far into the past, a mere drop in the bucket when considering the realm of global climate change.”
The authors also believe that it is getting wetter. They cite a study by Tom Karl at the National Climate Data Center that found a 20 percent increase in heavy precipitation events for much of the U.S., Canada and Europe in the last century. (The increase may seem large but the paper actually found that there is only one additional day every two years that experiences rainfall of over 2 inches).
The number of land-falling hurricanes has fallen, according to the authors. There were 23 from 1940-69, but there have been only 14 since 1970. Damage from hurricanes has increased dramatically, however, from $36.8 billion from 1940-69 to $74.9 billion from 1970-96. This can be attributed entirely to the “nearly uninhibited growth continuing along the nations coasts.”
It is uncertain whether there has been an increase in tornadoes, say the authors. A dramatic increase in the number of reported tornadoes doesnt necessarily mean that there are more tornadoes. The authors believe that the numbers have increased due to more reporting, not more tornadoes. “Simply put,” they say, “there are more people to witness tornadoes.” Moreover, there are now storm chasers who were nearly nonexistent in the 1950s. There are literally hundreds of people who search out tornadoes and document them with palm-held camcorders.
Finally, Marquis and Ostro discuss the work of Richard Alley from Penn State University. He has shown “that global temperatures and precipitation in the last few thousand years have been as steady as any time during the last 100 millennia.” Long before man exerted any influence on the climate there were severe swings in both temperature and precipitation in periods as short as 10 years. “This evidence raises an interesting and provocative idea,” say Marquis and Ostro: “Perhaps wilder weather is actually more typical than benign weather. Whether humans are contributing to climate change or not, maybe the pendulum is beginning to swing back toward the wild side.”
More Benefits of CO2
We all learned in grade school that plants need CO2 to survive. Scientific research has confirmed this many times over. A new study by the Greening Earth Society argues that to feed the earths growing human population, CO2 must continue to increase. According to the authors, Keith and Craig Idso, at the Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, to meet the dietary demands of the projected world population of 8.9 billion people by 2050, we will need to depend on both enhanced crop production technologies as well as enhanced ambient CO2 levels. The study can be found at www.greeningearthsociety.org.