Maybe someday I will have the energy to go the whole topic in depth, although I'm not sure there's really a point. But I have to say one thing about this whole climate change business:
WEATHER IS NOT THE SAME THING AS CLIMATE!!
Weather = (noun) the state of the atmosphere with respect to wind, temperature, cloudiness, moisture, pressure, etc. This refers to a LOCALIZED area. I.e. the weather in any place you happen to be
Climate = (noun) the
composite or generally prevailing weather conditions of a region, as temperature, air pressure, humidity, precipitation, sunshine, cloudiness, and winds, throughout the year,
averaged over a series of years.
Therefore, just because it happens to be quite cold where you are right now, does NOT mean that global AVERAGE temperature is not increasing. There's a tricky little thing about hemispheres: it may be damn cold in Maryland right now but it's close to 100 degrees in Darwin, Australia at the moment. So someone there is sweating their tail off wondering why the world is so damn HOT.
The top ten hottest years on record include 2009, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 1998, and 1997 and the past decade was the hottest in recorded history. A dump of snow on a fraction of one continent does not affect this.
I am also instituting a new rule in society: if you do not know how to perform analytical statistical tests on a data set or correctly interpret a logistic or logarithmic plot, you do not get to have an opinion about climate change data and its veracity.
*stomps out of room grumbling*
I just finished reading
this article in last month's National Geographic. If you haven't figured it out yet, yes, I unashamedly love that magazine. In short, we are introduced to a program called the
Watershed Organization Trust (WOTR), who works with villages in India to reclaim their land by reshaping their watersheds and capturing the rain on which their life depends.
India, like most of the world, including the US, has fallen victim to the fatal combination of changing climate patterns, development, and associated human over-exploitation of resources. Most villages rely on farming, which in turn, relies on water, in order to survive. However, as water is sucked up by development in cities and water tables are drained while less rain falls due to climate change, wells dry up, crops fail, land parches, and hope withers and blows away on the dusty wind.
From the article: "Our lives are wrapped up in the rain," explained a woman named Anusayabai Pawar... "When it comes, we have everything. When it doesn't, we have nothing."
WOTR works with villages, getting everyone invested by requiring that all parties, including women, lower caste members, and children contribute to the work of planting vegetation, digging ditches, capturing runoff, everything that slows down the monsoon rainwater and allows it to soak into the soil, replenshing wells and reviving both the land and the people's futures.
If you are thinking, "Oh, this is India, they just have lots of poor hungry people, and deserts, I am just fine in my snug suburban home in my western nation," think again. We are not unspeakably far from a similar predicament in the US. Our water tables are dropping steadily as it is impossible for rainfall to replace the massive quantities we suck out for ridiculous things like golf greens and car washes. Wells must be drilled deeper and even then, they are frequently in danger of contamination or drying up in droughts, which we are beginning to see more of. Full on legal wars broke out all over the country during our most recent dry-up in 2007 pitting state against state in a battle over a scarce resource.
We don't do a good job of using water wisely, as I discussed
here. We don't do a good job of keeping the water we drink clean (
here and
here). But that doesn't mean we can't change. That doesn't mean we can't take a hint from WOTR and from some hardworking villagers in India who have discovered that not only does taking care of your watershed benefit you directly by ensuring that you have water to use, it builds your community via people working together, talking to each other, and enterprising new solutions for a better, brighter future.
So I am back from some more travel! My apologies once again for missing your Friday Fun Fact, it could not be helped.
Today I want to share a fun and important campaign from the
Center for Biological Diversity called
350 Reasons We Need To Get To 350. In short, 350 species that will be in big trouble if we cannot get atmospheric carbon levels to 350 parts per million.
You can check out the regional map to find out species in your area that have made the list, sign the petition asking the Obama administration to follow the clear science, join the cause on Facebook, read the science behind the number, follow the campaign on Twitter, or even submit your own photo to be part of the 350 exhibit which will travel to Copenhagen.
For some ridiculous and endlessly disappointing reason due to a combination of staunch denial of personal responsibility, obstinance, ignorance and god knows what else, there are still people out there who claim that climate change is a "hoax" or it's "natural" or some other such nonsense. Of course, almost all of them are people who know virtually nothing about the scientific process themselves and generally haven't even viewed the data but suddenly consider themselves experts on global climate, one of the most complex systems on earth. For some reason they are completely oblivious to the fact that stating such backwards things pretty much makes them look and sound, well, like an idiot.
I'm not going to write out all the reasons they are wrong, other than to say the data is overwhelming -- I've seen it, I've talked to climatologists, I've read very critically the literature. And there's no room for argument in there, it's so obvious that even a monkey could see it. Because it's not just about change, change in and of itself IS natural. It's about the RATE of change and that is what we in our infinite short-sightedness and self-destructiveness have accelerated to a disasterous point.
Should you run into one of these misguided souls,
Grist has put together a phenomenal page called
How To Talk To A Climate Skeptic. Very well laid out into clearly defined sections, it addresses all of the commonly heard excuses folks use to try and avoid accepting responsibility for their actions. You can now have the perfect response to that moron (bless their heart, right?) whining, "Scientists don't agree" or "But it's cold today!" or "The models don't agree" (this last is my personal favourite because it's usually from someone who couldn't build or even define a mathmatical model if their life depended on it).
Most likely, the result of using this page will cause the blustering denier to stick their fingers in their ears screaming "I can't hear you!" in a desperate attempt to maintain that their uninformed statements based on nothing more than hope and fantasy are right.
Oh well, the truth hurts.
