Why I Like Global Warming

Published: February 17th, 2012

COMMENTARY
Mike Lemonick

“It’s so cold outside!” a woman in the elevator said to me the other day. But it really wasn’t. It was in the 20s, and in Princeton, N.J., that may be below average for February, but it isn’t at all unusual. We often have stretches of a week or more when the temperature never gets above the low 20s, and it’s not rare to see a reading in the teens for a few days in a row. So that particular day wasn’t terribly cold, and the cold snap, such as it was, had lasted 48 hours at most.

A glimpse of the 2010 winter in Princeton, NJ. This year, temperatures are starkly different reaching the high 50's, low 60's at times. Credit: The University Press Club

The rest of the winter, aside from a few short blips of not-so-frigid weather, has been ridiculously warm, with daytime highs usually in the 40s, 50s and even occasionally in the low 60s. And as I left the office yesterday, with the temperature hovering just below 50, I said to myself, “This is great! I wouldn’t mind if winters stayed like this from now on!”

That won’t happen right away. Even with global warming, this unusually warm winter has more to do with short-term fluctuations in local climate. Europe is having an unusually cold winter, and next year both places may return to more familiar conditions. But in the long term, balmy winters are likely to become more common here. The idea of climate change doesn’t seem so bad, suddenly.

But what was I thinking? I’ve been writing about the enormous risks posed by climate change for more than 20 years. I know about the rising seas that threaten hundreds of millions of people, in some of the biggest, most economically vital cities on the planet. I know about the extreme weather — heat waves, droughts, torrential rainstorms — that climate change is likely to bring. I know about threats to agriculture, disrupted ecosystems, the extinction of species, the acidification of the ocean, the melting glaciers, the whole mess. And I know about countries like India and China and Brazil, which are growing so rapidly that their output of heat-trapping greenhouse gases could make the problem much worse before the world can even begin to deal with the emissions we already have.

Yet even with all that knowledge, I jumped right to the thought that climate change — in winters, in New Jersey, anyway — is something I might just welcome. And that gives me a new appreciation for the tough job communicators have in getting people to care about the looming threat.

It’s not nearly as difficult, of course, in the middle of a heat wave like the one that hit Texas and Oklahoma last summer. It’s not so hard when a one-two punch from back-to-back tropical storms triggers deadly floods in the Northeast, or when an out-of-season snowstorm cripples that same region a month later. In Europe, people shivering through the harsh winter are a receptive audience.

But most of the time, in most places, the effects of climate change are subtle and intellectual arguments don’t always convince people to take the coming changes seriously. And even when the climate goes crazy in a bad way, people tend to reassure themselves that it’s a fluke.

But the warmer Februaries here should give people pause, as should the likelihood that Quebec will no longer face competition from Vermont maple syrup as the Green Mountain state heats up, and that America’s grain belt may migrate to Saskatchewan. There will be winners and losers in a changing climate, as scientists have acknowledged all along. The losers are likely to outnumber the winners, though, and the overall disruption in the world’s economy that climate change could bring might not make winning as sweet as some of us might think.

It almost makes me regret that the thermometer is supposed to hit 50 today. Almost, but not quite.

Posted in Causes, Greenhouse Gases, Impacts, Climate, Weather, Society, Global, United States

Comments

By wendy (48224)
on February 17th, 2012

great article! thanks.

By jdey123
on February 17th, 2012

Mike, you need to start looking at the data, rather than anecdotal evidence especially from your own perspective.

The world has been trending cooler over the last 10+ years:-
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:60

It’s in a noticeably warming long term trend, but you can see there are only 2 periods (1910 to 1940 and 1978 to 1998) in which the world was in warming mode, whereas we’ve been increasing CO2 emissions since the mid 18th century.

The US (according to Hansen’s own website) is only 0.5C above anomaly and is trending cooler:-
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.D.gif

The UK has the world’s longest reliable temperature record and is only 0.5C above anomaly in a period since before we handed our colonies over to your care:-
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/

If you compare and contrast the long term climate change with the alarming stories pumped out by so-called climate ‘scientists’, you can see why the world’s switching off.

As a scientist, you have to question the ‘science’ as well. With things like cancer rates and life expectancies, the signal became obvious above the noise a long time ago, and observations have matched the statistical probability rates. This isn’t so with global warming. We have at least records which are supposed to be reliable on a global basis going back to 1880, and similarly have CO2 emission records, yet the ‘scientists’ can still not determine a precise value for climate sensitivity (increase in temperature for doubling of CO2 since pre-industrial level). You’ve got to ask yourself, that if climate change is a stochastic problem, why this problem isn’t any closer to being resolved. Then, of course, we have the ‘scientist’s who try to pretend that they’ve turned the problem in to a deterministic one e.g. Foster & Rahmstorf (2011), Lean & Rind (2008), Hansen (innumerable occasions) who claim they’ve identified all the forcing agents, and by eliminiating the non-manmade ones, they can show a broadly linear or exponential (dependent on whose saying it) trend.

Then we have ludicrous suggestions as to where the ‘missing heat’ is. Heat rises, yet Hansen in his analysis of 2011 claims that the ‘missing heat’ i.e. the reason why the earth has failed to warm since 1998 is due to the sun heating the ocean surface and the heat being sucked down to the depths and somehow staying trapped there, for 18 months!

All of the above makes climate ‘scientists’ seem laughing stocks. Then you have the barmy army of treehuggers and communists who attack anybody who points out that this is all nonsense, who have no ability at arguing from a logical perspective, and just serve to alienate anybody right-brained.

By Mike Lemonick (Princeton, NJ 08540)
on February 17th, 2012

Thanks for the comment, jdey. I have to disagree with your anaysis, though. When climate modelers go back to the mid-1800’s and project the climate forward to the present—including all known inputs, including greenhouse gases, the projections look a lot like what actually ended up happening. Due to the complex feedbacks in the climate system, the projections include periods of faster and slower warming, and even cooling, as part of an overall warming trend. The real world looks just the same, although the ups and downs happen at different times in different model runs. You somehow see this as a failure of theory and models. I see it as a resounding success.

Comparing greenhouse warming with entirely different phenomena doesn’t strike me as useful. I would expect the speed with which signal emerges from noise to be different; you somehow see this as a surprising and incriminating.

Finally, the idea that the ocean would absorb much of the extra heat we’ve trapped at first doesn’t strike me as “ludicrous.” Water takes much longer to heat up, and the oceans contain an enormous volume of water. How this is ludicrous is beyond me.

To repeat: models PROJECT that there will be periods of slow or no warming, and even periods of cooling. The relative flatness of the warming in the past decade supports the idea of AGW, it doesn’t refute it. Beyond which, as I thought everyone knew by now, 1998 was an anomalously warm year thanks to a strong El Nino. Choosing that particular year as a starting point, rather than 1997 or 1999, gives a trend that is most favorable to critics of AGW. I wonder why they always seem to choose that year.

What do you think the reason might be?

By Anna Haynes
on February 18th, 2012

re the original post, Monbiot wrote about this a few years back -

“Winter is no longer the great grey longing of my childhood. .... Across most of the upper northern hemisphere, climate change, so far, has been kind to us.

And this is surely one of the reasons why we find it so hard to accept what the climatologists are now telling us. In our mythologies, an early spring is a reward for virtue.
...
Why are we transfixed by terrorism, yet relaxed about the collapse of the conditions that make our lives possible? One reason is surely the disjunction between our expectations and our observations. If climate change is to introduce horror into our lives, we would expect - because throughout our evolutionary history we survived by finding patterns in nature - to see that horror beginning to unfold….But the overwhelming sensation, experienced by all of us, almost every day, is that of being blessed by our pollution. ...”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2005/feb/15/environment.comment

By John Knox (Melbourne/Australia/3042)
on February 20th, 2012

Mike,
Thanks for your thoughtful essay. It IS indeed difficult when some of the effects could be construed as positive. Unfortunately, by the time the full range of negative effects become obvious, it may be too late to maintain civilisation as we now know it.
I am just hoping there are enough people who realise the potential and engage with those that are not so concerned. It is only through education about what the science says that the general population may become energised to action. I believe we cannot wait for our political leaders to act - we need to show them that it will be political suicide NOT to act.

By Britton (Caro, MI. 48723)
on February 21st, 2012

It’s false that Europe has had an unusually cold winter. The last few weeks they have, but before that they were way above normal for months. In fact at Christmas there wasn’t even snow in most of Norway or Finland.

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