For the fall 2012 semester, I taught 3 environmentally-themed courses. Towards the end of the semester, students in these courses had assignments on topics that were relevant to this blog. I have selected some of the best works and messages to share as a series of posts for the readers until I sort through the outcomes of COP18 and write up a summary. Enjoy. dwh
Will We See
Sandy Again?
Caitlin
Campbell
December 2012
On a sandy beach, the high tide line is a ribbon
of shells and seaweed. It marks reliable swells of the ocean as it inhales and
exhales with the tides. On the front door of a home, it is a ruler of salt and
grime. It marks the feet of water that inundated a home or the inches that
spared it from ruin. One glance at that line, and you know which it was.
After the devastation of Superstorm Sandy, east coasters
are pulling together with the kind of grit we’re known for. Drive into Atlantic
City and the billboards will tell you, “Nice try Sandy, but we’re Jersey
Strong.”
But Sandy didn’t just cross the line. She redrew
it.
The assertion that our shifting climate will
bring erratic, extreme weather isn’t new. But Superstorm Sandy has forced us to
consider the impacts of climate change on weather with new urgency. I should
add that according to NOAA’s “State of the Climate Report,” released Thursday,
this year will end as the warmest on record for the United States.[i]
U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addressed this growing concern at this year’s
United Nation’s climate change conference. Rising sea-levels and increasingly
frequent super storms, he said, are signs of a climate crisis.[ii] To
his audience of over 200 nations he said, “Abnormal is the new normal.”
Of course we cannot say with absolutely
certainty that severity of Sandy can be attributed to climate change. Extreme
weather events themselves are single data points; they can’t show us what comes
next. But when we factor in other extreme events, like droughts and flooding, we
see that Sandy is on trend.
As Elizabeth Kolbert put it in her recent piece
for the New Yorker, “As with any particular “weather-related loss event,” it’s
impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say
that the storm fits the general pattern in North America, and indeed around the
world, toward more extreme weather, a pattern that, increasingly, can be
attributed to climate change.”[iii]
We can say that the symptoms of climate change
certainly work to make extreme weather more destructive. Consider that
hurricanes are fueled by warm water. Our oceans are over a degree Celsius warmer
than they were a century ago[iv].
Sea level has risen a foot, on average, in the same time. In places on the east
coast where land is simultaneously sinking, sea level is 18 inches higher than
sixty years ago.[v]
In a post for the American Geophysical Union,
Meteorologist Dan Satterfield wrote, “Ask someone in New Jersey, who had a foot
of water in their house, if they wish it were 18 inches lower.”[vi]
This assertion that our changing climate is
brewing a world of more frequent, more destructive storms is not easy to
stomach. And it will resurrect our hackneyed debate over climate change. It’s
hard. It’s hard to look at a planet so immense and imagine that we are turning
up its thermostat. It’s hard to face the science that tells us what kind of
planet we are going to leave our kids. So is rebuilding the infrastructure,
lives, and confidence of an entire coast.
Rather than waste ink resurrecting the points of
that debate, let it come down to this. Imagine your loved one is sick. You take
her one to a doctor, who diagnoses her with a serious illness. You go for
another opinion. Then another, until 97 of those doctors agree, she needs help.
Would you side with the other three because their diagnoses is the one you want
to hear? When would you begin treatment?
According to a study by the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 97% of climate scientists agree that we are
experiencing human accelerated climate change.[vii]
We can never know if the severity of Sandy destruction
was truly a symptom of climate change. But will we wait for more extreme
storms, floods, and droughts before we can agree that we have a serious problem?
Sandy hurt. But we know we cannot redraw the
high tide line that flooded the homes and crushed the spirits of millions. We
can only rebuild. But deciding when we have wasted enough time in addressing
climate change, that is a line that we can
draw.
[i] Chris
Dolce. “Record Warmest Year a "Virtual Certainty.” The Weather Channel.
<http://www.weather.com/news/warmest-year-on-record-noaa-november-20121206 >
[ii] Barbara
Lewis & Alister Doyle. “Extreme Weather is New Normal, U.N.’s Ban Tells
Climate Change Talks.” Insurance Journal.
<http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2012/12/05/272768.htm>
[iii] Elizabeth
Kolbert. “Watching Sandy, Ignoring Climate Change.” The New Yorker.
<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/watching-hurricane-sandy-ignoring-climate-change.html#ixzz2DdLIkGS2>
[iv] Dan
Satterfield. “What Those Who Understand Atmospheric Physics Are Talking About
After Sandy.” American Geophysical Union.
<http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2012/11/01/what-those-who-understand-atmospheric-physics-are-talking-about-after-sandy/>
[v] ibid
[vi] ibid
[vii] William R.
L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider. “Expert
credibility in climate change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
of the United States.
<http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.full.pdf+html>
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