On Monday, during the last week of September 2010, Oakland CA, had the highest temperature of any day in its history—ninety-six degrees. Downtown LA made history on the same day with a midday temperature of 113. One might think these temperatures are proof Global Warming has arrived. But during this same year, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and the Bay Area had the coolest summers in decades. It was overcast and cool in the Bay Area for months. Summer temperatures were lower all over the state. This inconsistency is why the terms global warming and climate change may not capture what is occurring in our biosphere. Some believe “climate destabilization” best describes the complexity of what we are now calling climate change.
Climate destabilization sounds less comforting than climate change. I think we all hope climate change and global warming will be like the Y2K scare in the late nineties. We were warned on the nightly news that when the clock struck “2000” millions of computers would stop functioning, and so would our banking system, phone system, airplanes, hospitals and every technology driven by a computer. Companies and governments spent hundreds of millions of dollars to avert this catastrophic scenario.
But as the final seconds of 1999 came to end, and the ominous computer clocks all struck 2000, the computers kept running just fine. The takeaway for everyone was, “experts can be wrong.”
Today many people believe the experts are wrong again. They think the global warming scare is a story created by climate scientists looking for new sources of funding. The greater the threat of global warming, the more research grants they can get to investigate the threat.
I think there is some global warming denying going on in all of us. Global warming sounds ominous. Climate destabilization sounds even worse. It seems like it is not an emergency today so we have time to kick the can down the road a little longer. But the evidence where we live is beginning to mount. Something is amiss in our climate system. With the crazy weather we had in California, and the examples of once in a century flooding in the central US this year, and the record sweltering temperatures on the East Coast this summer, it seems wise to be smart about where we are headed.
Are we putting in motion the destabilization of our planet’s climate system? If you study all the facts available, especially the most compelling ones, it looks like we are. As a global warming denier, you can feel smug knowing you are not falling for another Y2K. It is nice not to be fooled again. But, the great persuader is personal experience. And with the unusual weather I have experienced personally this year, and have seen happening in so many places throughout the world in 2010, it seems wise and prudent to reverse our course.
Smart Green 2020 