environment: allergies asthma extreme weather pollen
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 3: A Cashew? A Tissue? A Fichu?
The Sonoma County Press-Democrat reprints a story from the LA times on the likelihood of an increase in asthma from global warming (hotter, wetter weather equals more pollenaceous plants).
Sent February 22:
A person racked by sneezes and coughs, eyes and nose streaming, is a convenient figure of fun for those who don’t suffer from allergies. Global climate change’s effect on the atmospheric pollen count has similar humorous potential — as long as we avoid looking at the ways in which all of us are affected. And it’s not just asthma and allergies. As planetary warming changes our environment in unpredictable ways over the next decades, we can anticipate some of its effects: hotter temperatures will help spread tropical diseases; unpredictable and extreme weather may destroy local infrastructure (impassable roads, unsafe drinking water, rolling blackouts); agriculture will suffer (and food will get more expensive). Any of these by itself is a mere inconvenience. Collectively they are the localized face of a threat that’s planetary in scope, existential in nature. Environmentalists seek to limit the damage; Republican politicians, by contrast, are investing heavily in antihistamines.
Warren Senders
The title references Ogden Nash’s poem “Allergy in a Country Churchyard.”
environment: assholes denialists extreme weather idiots
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 25: If They’ll Say “You Told Us So,” We Promise Not To Say “We Told You So.”
USA Today recognizes two new studies that offer even more robust correlation between global warming and extreme weather events.
John Fogerty once crooned “Who’ll stop the rain?” Not humanity, apparently, as new research shows that human-caused climate change has significantly increased the chances of extreme rain- and snowfall around the world, along with the deadly floods that follow.
This is according to two new studies published Wednesday in the British journal Nature.
While other studies have suggested that global warming may be partly responsible for an increase in heavy precipitation, what’s new in this study is the formal finding that human influence has “likely made intense precipitation stronger, on average, over the second half of the 20th century,” says study co-author Francis Zwiers of the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
“The observed change cannot be explained by natural fluctuations of the climate system alone,” he says.
Leaving aside the question of whether John Fogerty was/is capable of crooning, the rest of the article is pretty straightforward.
Read the comments for a hearty helping of stupid.
Sent February 16:
The two newly published studies serve to confirm what many people have been positing for years: the greenhouse effect causes global warming, and global warming is causally linked to extreme weather events. But even a brief glance at online comments on this subject shows that there is essentially no evidence that will serve to convince the climate-change deniers. Some cling to the notion that there was an equally robust scientific consensus in the 1970s predicting global cooling (no, there wasn’t). Some maintain that errors in the 3000-page IPCC report invalidate its conclusions (in which case a typo anywhere in this issue of USA Today would mean the whole newspaper was untrustworthy). Some conflate “climate” with “weather” and insist that global warming isn’t happening — because it’s snowing outside their windows. Some base their arguments on religion, claiming that “God won’t let humans change the planet’s atmosphere” (although He’s apparently got no objection to hydrogen bombs, a Texas-sized garbage patch in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or regional aquifers so contaminated by LNG extraction that tap water is flammable). The evidence is mounting, while the denialists have their fingers in their ears. Good luck to us all. We’ll need it.
Warren Senders
environment: extreme weather flooding media failure pakistan
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 1: Get Ready For Severe Disaster Fatigue.
The LA Times had an article about the floods in Pakistan. Naturally, nobody mentioned that climate change is one of the primary triggering factors in such extreme weather events.
The tragic flooding in Pakistan’s Northwest territories, like the 128-degree temperatures recently recorded elsewhere in that beleaguered country, are a symptom of a larger and much more profound problem: the increase in extreme weather events brought on by global climate change. Across the USA we are seeing unexpected flooding and storms, with attendant injuries, loss of lives, and property damage. While it is not possible to state that a particular storm was “caused by global warming,” scientists have been predicting for decades that the burgeoning greenhouse effect would trigger more storms, more rain, more snow, more damage. Now it’s happening, just as we were told it would. Even as headlines blaring the news of catastrophic weather everywhere around the world appear ever more frequently, our news media fail to connect the dots. Because we have failed to do something about climate change, climate change is doing something about us.
Warren Senders