From: Portside Moderator [mailto:moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG]
Storms Brewing
by Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorker: JUNE 13, 2011
When President Barack Obama arrived in
Obama's visit to
The news from abroad was, if anything, more worrisome. Last week, the Chinese government estimated that more than four million people were having trouble finding drinking water, owing to a drought along the
For decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as global temperatures rose, the side effects would include deeper droughts, more intense flooding, and more ferocious storms. The details of these forecasts are immensely complicated, but the underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.
What we are seeing now is these predictions being borne out. If no particular flood or drought or storm can be directly attributed to climate change - there's always the possibility that any single event was just a random occurrence of the over-all trend toward more extreme weather follows from the heating of the earth. As the cover of Newsweek declared last week, weather panic is the "new normal." The larger problem is that this "new normal"won't last. Each additional ton of carbon dioxide that's spewed into the atmosphere contributes to further warming, thus increasing the risk of violent weather. The day after the President visited Joplin, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, in
When Obama took office, he appointed some of the country's most knowledgeable climate scientists to his Administration, and it seemed for a time as if he might take his responsibility to lead on this issue seriously. That hope has faded. The President sat on the sidelines in 2009 and 2010 while congressional leaders tried to put together majorities in favor of climate legislation. Since the midterm elections, Obama has barely mentioned climate change, and just about every decision that his Administration has made on energy and the environment has been wrong. In March, the Administration announced that it would be opening up new public lands in
For More: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/06/13/110613taco_talk_kolbert
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