Year 2, Month 2, Day 8: Whiteout!

Written and sent to the Chicago Tribune on February 1, as Chicago is getting ready for its own massive snowstorm. Typically, the article is all about municipal preparations, ignoring the webs of causality that link this weather event with all the other crazy stuff that’s coming out of the sky elsewhere in the world.

As Chicago braces for a “once-in-a-decade” snowfall, it is easy and tempting to think of it as an isolated phenomenon. But this blizzard, like the multiple winter storms that are hammering the East coast, is part and parcel of the same complex set of phenomena that gave us the floods that have inundated Pakistan, the cyclone that’s headed for Australia, and the drought that devastated Russia last summer.

If we wish to build a future for our children and their children in turn, we must face the reality of global climate change. While no single weather event can be blamed on the greenhouse effect (science doesn’t work that way), there is no longer any serious doubt among experts: anthropogenic climate change makes extreme weather overwhelmingly more likely. The fact that the phrase “climate change” does not appear at all in this article is an unfortunate abdication of journalistic responsibility.

Warren Senders