The Storm

2-13-06 SHORT HILLS: We got plowed out sometime during the night. I tidied up this am and opened a walking path down the drive and cleared the street drains and the fire hydrant. I guess I don’t have to go to the gym today.
The TV news weather reporters said that the storm was as intense as it was and that the load of snow was so big because of the high ocean temperature, relatively high I guess. Another sign of global warming as if Rita and Katrina weren’t enough.
Of course the administration continues to deny warming. John Tierney in the NY Times, he is a Bush apologist, said yesterday that a little warming would be nice and that the Kyoto Treaty should be ignored by the U.S. because it would be bad for business.
The climate models are not perfect and are not in complete agreement, but if the carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, which seems inevitable, the planet will get hotter. As long as more and more oil, or coal, is burnt, more CO 2 will be added to the atmosphere. Consider the rise of the economies of India and China and ask yourself more or less oil will be used in the future.
It will get hotter either fast or very fast compared to the nature cycles of global heating or cooling. The Earth has been hotter than now; hot enough to be ice free with ocean levels hundreds of feet higher than at present. It has also been colder, cold enough for the ice caps to reach the tropics.
The big difference is that those temperature extremes developed over several millennia and not over the course of a century. The slow change permits the biota, the plants and animals, to evolve, adapt or migrate and thus survive. Tree species, for instance, that grow in temperate regions could, with lots of time, move northward or higher in altitude to survive when their current environment became too hot or to dry. Imagine the southern U.S. as a desert except where the ocean invaded to reach Atlanta and St. Louis. Think of New Orleans and then think about what the costs would be for a series of disasters many times worse. Maybe the cost of the Kyoto Treaty wouldn’t be so terrible after all.