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Re: Climate Change - Global Warming
From Scenes from a Melting Planet: On the Climate-Change Novel by Carolyn Kormann in The New Yorker, July 3, 2013
See http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...ng-planet.html
“We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” President Obama said last week as he outlined his climate-change plan. The gibe was widely tweeted and repeated, the message clear: when it comes to global warming, Obama won’t tolerate any more anti-science bunk. He will direct the Environmental Protection Agency to limit greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, adapt the country’s infrastructure to protect against extreme weather, and use federal funds to increase renewable-energy production.
To justify all this, the President cited recent national disasters, like Hurricane Sandy, the worst wildfires in recorded history, and the most severe droughts since the Dust Bowl. He even mentioned a long-running drought that has “forced a town to truck in water from the outside.”
That town is Spicewood Beach, a subdivision in the hill country outside of Austin, Texas. In February, 2012, according to the Times, the town’s well ran dry. Four thousand gallons of water still have to be hauled in many times a day.
Of course, no single weather event can be linked to the increased concentration of human-produced greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And yet the increased frequency of extreme weather is a scientifically proven result of those gases. In the past month alone, floods in Canada killed four people and forced seventy-five thousand to evacuate Calgary; floods in central Europe killed eighteen; and floods in India killed a thousand. The drought in Spicewood Beach is, by comparison, mundane. Still, it is an example of an inconvenient, costly impact of climate change. And, unlike mass death and trauma, it’s a story that we can picture.
From Scenes from a Melting Planet: On the Climate-Change Novel by Carolyn Kormann in The New Yorker, July 3, 2013
See http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...ng-planet.html
“We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” President Obama said last week as he outlined his climate-change plan. The gibe was widely tweeted and repeated, the message clear: when it comes to global warming, Obama won’t tolerate any more anti-science bunk. He will direct the Environmental Protection Agency to limit greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, adapt the country’s infrastructure to protect against extreme weather, and use federal funds to increase renewable-energy production.
To justify all this, the President cited recent national disasters, like Hurricane Sandy, the worst wildfires in recorded history, and the most severe droughts since the Dust Bowl. He even mentioned a long-running drought that has “forced a town to truck in water from the outside.”
That town is Spicewood Beach, a subdivision in the hill country outside of Austin, Texas. In February, 2012, according to the Times, the town’s well ran dry. Four thousand gallons of water still have to be hauled in many times a day.
Of course, no single weather event can be linked to the increased concentration of human-produced greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And yet the increased frequency of extreme weather is a scientifically proven result of those gases. In the past month alone, floods in Canada killed four people and forced seventy-five thousand to evacuate Calgary; floods in central Europe killed eighteen; and floods in India killed a thousand. The drought in Spicewood Beach is, by comparison, mundane. Still, it is an example of an inconvenient, costly impact of climate change. And, unlike mass death and trauma, it’s a story that we can picture.
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