As 2005 melted into 2006,
one thing seems like it will remain
unchanged—the weather’s surprising
unpredictability and severity. In January,
mudslides buried portions of southern California
freeways and it rained on the Tournament of
Roses Parade in Pasadena for the first time in
50 years. While Californians were getting hosed,
portions of Texas and half of Oklahoma were
engulfed in brush fires, the result of an
extensive, months-long drought that created
tinder-box conditions in these Great Plains’
states.
Tropical storm Zeta,
spawned one month after the hurricane season
officially ended, was spinning itself out
approximately 1,000 miles southwest of the
Azores, putting—meteorologists hope—the
finishing touches on a year that broke records
for the most named Atlantic storms (26),
hurricanes (13), the greatest number of category
five storms (3; Katrina, Rita and Wilma) and the
largest number of major hurricanes to hit the US
(4). For the first time since 1953 when
hurricanes were named, letters of the Greek
alphabet had to be used to keep up with the
steady stream of storms that continued well
after Wilma, the last name on the regular list.
Some climatologists believe the strange weather
we have experienced, most notably, the tropical
onslaught of 2005, is the direct result of
global warming.
The Pew Center on Global Climate Change reported
last year, “global warming will result in more
intense hurricanes, as increasing sea surface
temperatures provide energy for storm
intensification.”
Real Climate, a
website that provides commentary on climate
science by “working climate scientists for the
interested public and journalists,” added heat
to that argument, stating; “the available
scientific evidence indicates that it is likely
that global warming will make—and possibly
already is making—those hurricanes that form
more destructive than they otherwise would have
been.”
But the Pew
Center did offer what could be understood as a
disclaimer: “Although the average number of
hurricanes between 1995 and 2005 is probably
unprecedented, we have not seen a long-term
increase in hurricane frequency during the 20th
century overall. Instead, we have seen periods
of high hurricane activity that last for several
decades, followed by decades of low activity.
The 1920s-30s and 1950s-60s were active periods.
In 1995 we entered and are currently in the
latest natural phase of high hurricane
frequency, which is expected to persist for
another decade or two.”
The National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Hurricane
Center explained in a theory devoid of any
mention of global warming that last year’s
active tropical hurricane cycle was a natural
result of a “confluence of optimal ocean and
atmosphere conditions [that] has been known to
produce increased tropical storm activity in
multi-decadal (approximately 20-30 year)
cycles…similar conditions also produced very
active Atlantic hurricane seasons during the
1950s and 1960s. In contrast, the opposite phase
of this signal during 1970-1994 resulted in only
three above-normal Atlantic hurricane seasons in
the entire 25-year period.”
It wasn’t just hurricanes that resurrected the
specter of global warming last year. NOAA also
reported the global annual temperature for
combined land and ocean surfaces was expected to
be “very close to the record global temperature
that was established in 1998…[with] unusual
warmth across large parts of the globe
throughout the year.” Additionally, it reported
that a new record was established in September
for the lowest Arctic sea ice extent since
satellite monitoring began in the late 1970s.
I witnessed two
events myself during 2005 that brought to mind
global warming as a possible explanation.
The first
occurred in August, during a trek through the
Andes Mountains in Peru. This is a trip that has
become an annual pilgrimage of sorts, the first
having taken place in 1999. Last year’s trek was
by far the warmest. The evenings never really
got cold despite camping near 12,000 feet. In
previous years, we would often awaken to find
frost on our tents. And one afternoon, the
temperature rose to 85 degrees, a strange
phenomenon in a country south of the equator
where it’s winter during our summer. In one
high-altitude Quechua village where we spent the
night, the people were starving; the result of a
severe drought that caused extensive crop
failure, something I had never witnessed
especially during this time of year when harvest
time was just around the corner.
And then this past December during Christmas
week, I witnessed another strange
event—literally in our backyard. We live on a
small, 4-acre lake in northern Morris County,
formed by the impoundment of a small stream that
flows from Butler’s reservoir. The first part of
the month began with below normal temperatures.
Then, shortly before Christmas, the mercury
soared dramatically into the 60s. Around this
time, I observed three male Hooded
Mergansers—small diving ducks—that appeared to
be feeding on fish in the open part of the water
that had recently thawed. Then a flock of
Herring gulls appeared. Their numbers steadily
grew. Something had attracted them. On December
23, while walking our dog around the lake, I
noticed dozens of dead Alewife herring that had
become lodged between the rocks above the
waterfall where the lake spills out at its lower
end. At first, I thought someone had dumped out
a pail of baitfish. But the number of dead
Alewives were too numerous. And by now, the
number of gulls had increased to 186.
Bob Papson, a biologist with the New Jersey
Department of Environmental Protection didn’t
know what to make of it when we spoke on the
telephone. But an article posted on the Internet
by the University Of Wisconsin Sea Grant
Institute explained what I witnessed.
In their native
habitat alewives are anadromous, i.e. they live
in salt water but like salmon, enter fresh water
rivers and streams in the spring to spawn.
Alewives that have adapted to living in fresh
water such as the ones in our lake do not do
well where there are rapid temperature changes.
Severe changes in water temperature can cause
the fish to die.
Global warming
is an indisputable fact: The earth’s surface
temperature warmed by one degree during the
twentieth century. What is in dispute is the
mechanism by which this occurred: Anthropogenic,
i.e. caused by humans burning fossil fuel, or
some other phenomenon that we may be powerless
to control.
And while the
earth’s surface temperature has
increased, other studies show that the
atmospheric temperature has cooled.
In 2004, NASA
reported “The lower [troposphere] data are often
cited as evidence against global warming,
because they have as yet failed to show any
warming trend when averaged over the entire
Earth. The lower stratospheric data show a
significant cooling trend…In addition to the
recent cooling; large temporary warming
perturbations may be seen in the data due to two
major volcanic eruptions: El Chichon in March
1982, and Mt. Pinatubo in June 1991.”
This finding is
in keeping with those of Dr. S. Fred Singer,
president of the Science and Environmental
Policy Project, who points out, “a study of
carbon dioxide and temperatures over the last
11,000 years that was analyzed in both
Science and Nature in 1999 found that
the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
tends to follow not precede a rise in
temperature…the bulk of the temperature rise in
the 20th century took place before 1940 while
most of the carbon dioxide emissions took place
after 1940 and coincided with a slight cooling
between 1940 and 1975.”
Richard S.
Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of
meteorology at MIT, in his testimony before a
Senate committee in 2002 agreed, stating, past
climate changes were either “uncorrelated with
changes in carbon dioxide or were characterized
by temperature changes which preceded changes in
carbon dioxide [levels] by hundreds or thousands
of years.”
Contrast this
to a December 30, 2005 New York Times
Op-ed titled, “While You Were Sleeping,” in
which the findings of a study on ice core
samples published in the journal Science
were reported. “The level of carbon dioxide, one
of the greenhouse gases that can warm the
planet, is now 27 percent higher than at any
previous time. The level is even far higher now
than it was in periods when the climate was much
warmer and North America was largely tropical.
Climatologists said the ice cores left no doubt
that the burning of fossil fuels is altering the
atmosphere in a substantial and unprecedented
way.”
Critics of the
anthropogenic hypothesis for global warming
point out that if there is now 27 percent more
carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere than
when North America was “largely tropical,” how
come we aren’t burning up? They also cite
anomalous climatological periods in earth’s
history that occurred before the invention of
the internal combustion engine.
During the
Little Ice Age (1250-1850), Atlantic pack ice
increased, warm summers in northern Europe were
no longer dependable and the overall expansion
of global pack ice began. This was preceded by
the Medieval Warm Period, sometimes referred to
as the Medieval Climate Optimum, a period that
spanned from the 10th to the 14th
centuries. During the Medieval Warm Period,
rising temperatures increased crop yields in
Europe, and allowed for the settlement of
Iceland and Greenland as the ice shelf receded.
Swamps dried up with a concomitant reduction in
mosquito populations. This led to a decrease in
infant mortality causing an increase in the
population of Europe from 40 million to 60
million. Perhaps no coincidence, the Medieval
Climate Optimum occurred during a time of peak
solar activity named the Medieval Maximum.
Could it be
that the cause of global warming is staring us
in the face—literally—from 93 million miles
away? In December 2001, a story appeared on
ABC News.com. Entitled “Red Planet Warming,” it
reported that high resolution images taken by
NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor showed that the
levels of frozen water and carbon dioxide in
Mars’s polar ice caps dwindled dramatically—by
more than 10 feet over a single Martian year
(equivalent to about two earth years.)
2005 was a wild
year for weather-related events around the
globe. Whether this was related to global
warming is open to speculation. And even if that
hypothesis were to be proven, it would still
leave unanswered the question of whether global
warming is anthropogenic. As much as we’d like
to be able to control the earth’s weather, we
may be forced to stand by and watch, powerless
to effect change, and humbled in the process.
All we may finally come to
understand is how small and insignificant we
really are.
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