Global Climate Issues: What do you think?

Reminder: the Sustainability Forum is taking July off. Next Forum is Wed. August 1st.
Meanwhile, take a few minutes to catch this video of Sen. Kerry's speech this week urging some action on global climate issues. Some of our leaders call it all 'bunk' but provide no scientific evidence to the contrary. Kerry calls them out. 
Let us know what you think.

Worth Reading (and Thinking)

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Storms Brewing

by Elizabeth Kolbert June 13, 2011

The New Yorker

When President Barack Obama arrived in Joplin, Missouri, on May 29th, the sun was shining. He toured one of the neighborhoods that the previous week’s tornado had destroyed, then spoke at a memorial service for the dead. (By late last week, the official toll was a hundred and thirty-eight people.) At the service, the President’s tone turned brooding. “The question that weighs on us at a time like this is: Why?” he said. “Why our town? Why our home? Why my son, or husband, or wife, or sister, or friend? Why?” Such questions, the President went on, cannot be answered, as “these things are beyond our power to control.”

Obama’s visit to Joplin was the third that he had made in a month to the site of a weather-related disaster. In mid-May, the President met with Memphis residents who had been left homeless by the flooding of the Mississippi River, and, not long before that, he toured sections of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that had also been flattened by a tornado. Meanwhile, even as the President was consoling the bereaved in Joplin, residents in Vermont were bailing out from record-high water levels around Lake Champlain; Texas was suffering from a near-record drought that could cost the state more than four billion dollars in agricultural losses; and officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were forecasting that the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season, which formally began on June 1st, would once again be “above normal.” (The 2010 season was tied for the third most active on record.) The news from abroad was, if anything, more worrisome. 

Read more here...

Just Asking?

Is climate change a left-wing conspiracy? Seriously.  Is there something in it for liberals? Do they have it in for oil companies? Is it a preference for science, disruption or bike riding?

Rick Santorum froths at the mouth about climate change 
No way Rick Santorum is going the Mitt Romney route. Everybody knows that believing in global warming is for liberals, rational people, scientists, and other don't-want-to-win-the-GOP-nomination types. That's why Santorum told Rush Limbaugh (who yesterday announced that Romney had killed his chances by admitting that he understood how science works) that climate change is a vast liberal conspiracy.

Read more @ Grist

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Bringing up the topic of global warming can spark a heated debate. Dr. Kar Lee presented facts and statistics about climate change to about 50 people at the June Sustainability Forum at the CleanTech InnoVenture Center in Lynn last Wednesday.

Dr. Lee began his discussion by asking audience members about their experiences talking about climate change. Though many people reported that they had run into skeptics who didn’t believe in global warming, Dr. Lee presented compelling facts, adding that “there is no such thing as a long-term stable climate.”

It's a big issue. Here are a few more added points from Dr Lee on the subject:

Just as we came off from the record breaking Tornado month in April with 875 reported tornadoes nationwide, and just as we thought we have seen it all, then came the devastation in Joplin: entire area flattened out, death toll rose to 141 as of today.  Some people may ask: is it abnormal?  Just as some were asking, something hit home: tornadoes touched down in Springfield in Massachusetts.  Really, is it global warming?

What I did not get the chance to present during my talk last Wednesday at the North Shore Tech Council's Sustainability Forum was some statistics about tornadoes.  If we look at the number of reported tornadoes from 1950 to May of 2011, we indeed see a clear trend: it increases steadily from around 200 per year in 1950's to about 1400 per year in these several years. 

So, you may think, it must somehow relate to the global temperature increase. But to make matters rather confusing, the number of strong to violent tornadoes (EF3 to EF5) is actually flat: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/severeweather/tornadoes.html. 

The worst year for strongest tornadoes actually happened in 1974, clearly a one-off year.  Other than that, the trend for the strongest tornadoes is pretty much flat.

So, how can it be?

There are two possible explanations.

1) The increase is not real.  More get reported simply because we have vastly expanded our monitoring network, and by having people move into previously uninhabited areas (with their camcorders and cell phones!!!)  So, more get reported gradually over the years.

Problem with this explanation is, wouldn't the same people with camcorders and cell phones moving into new territories also catch more strong and violent tornadoes and therefore reported more of them as well?

The answer to this question is probably something like, "If the tornado is so strong, then no matter whether you are near it or not, you know about it because it leaves enough destruction to prove its existence. So the strong ones always get reported and if you see no increase, then there really is no increases."

2) The increase is real. There is an increase in the # of tornadoes touched down beyond the improvement of our monitoring network, and we have reported them. However, the change in the climate condition only causes the increase in the number of milder tornadoes, just like the global warming pattern changes the arctic regions more than the equatorial regions.  The effect is not uniform.

To decipher which explanation is more accurate, we really need to do some investigative work to find out if "strong tornadoes always get reported."  Were there very strong tornadoes that people would have missed during the 1950's?

The point of doing science is to find out which explanation is more likely to be true, and to not take sides prematurely.  Or else, we could be accused of sensationalism.

Everyone talks about the weather...

It's a swirling debate.  But what can we do about it? See you June 1 for our discussion on climate change.

Weather or Not

Snow? More? Global climate change? Stay tuned for any updates regarding our next Forum meeting on Wednesday.  Certainly can't accuse New Englanders of being soft.