Wake Up and Smell the Tropical Flowers

In our last column we discussed the stormy winter of 2009-2010, and how record snows were recorded in the Northeast.  Shortly after one of those snowstorms, I was in the car, flipping through the radio channels, when I happened upon Rush Limbaugh, the self-proclaimed genius, talking about climate.  The gist of what he said was as follows: “When we have a winter with no snow in Washington, D.C., the climate scientists say it is because of global warming.  When we have the snowiest month in history, they say it is consistent with global warming.  You can’t have it both ways.”  Well let me ‘splain it to you, El Rushbo.  It really is quite simple.  Global climate models predict that, as greenhouse gasses continue to build up in the atmosphere, two important things will happen. First, of course, it will get warmer.  Second, it will get stormier, i.e., wetter.  As far as the warming part, we will continue to have some cold winters for some time, just not as many of them.  In years when the winter is warm, precipitation will fall mostly as rain, sometimes lots of it.  When the winter is cold, the extra wetness, predicted by global warming models, falls as snow, which will occasionally, but more frequently, break records.

Global warming is occurring at a rate of a degree or so per decade.  That doesn’t sound like very much, but it has enormous global ecological consequences.  But because of the relatively small rate of change, it is best viewed on a decade by decade basis, which tends to even out much of the normal year to year variability.  In this respect, the data are quite clear.  The decade from 2000 through 2009 was the warmest since measurements began.  The climate warming naysayers and data cherry-pickers were out in force this past January and February, when North America was unseasonably cold.  Did they happen to notice that these same months were the warmest in history at virtually every Southern Hemisphere weather station?  In fact, world-wide, ocean surface temperatures for the first four months of 2010 were the warmest on record.

Maybe El Rushbo should take a trip to Greenland, where the world’s second largest ice mass is showing alarming signs of melting.  Using land-based and satellite measurements, scientists have determined that the Greenland Icecap shrunk by 385 cubic miles between 2002 and 2009, contributing more than twice the volume of Lake Erie to the ocean.  That also accounts for about a three millimeter rise in sea level.  It is considered likely that this global warming induced melting in Greenalnd will increase in rate.  Similar evidence of rapid melting of the Antarctic Ice Cap, the world’s largest, has been reported in past issues of this column.  Further global warming evidence is obvious in the world’s tropical alpine glaciers, such as the famous glacier atop Mt. Kilimanjaro, most of which will disappear within a few decades.

Fortunately, complete melting of the Greenland ice mass will take a very long time, albeit causing problems the whole time.  So what would happen if all of Greenland’s ice melted?  Even without any contribution from Antarctica, et al., global sea level would rise 21 feet!  That would put our shoreline in the Babylon-Islip area somewhere north of Sunrise Highway.  Deny all you want, Rush.  You and your descendents will have to deal with the consequences of this just like everybody else.  So sober up and find your way home to reality.