Year 2, Month 12, Day 22: Oh! What A Situation Is Now Confronting The World!!!

The North County Times (CA) runs a piece on the specific local and regional impacts of climate change:

For instance, speaker Marty Ralph, a branch chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said both droughts and floods will become more pronounced in coming decades.

Water supply may diminish as snow lines rise in the mountains, reducing winter snow packs, which act as natural reservoirs, he said. As warmer temperatures extend the growing season, plants will absorb more runoff.

“You’re going to end up with less water in streams, because basically the ecosystem is consuming more of it along the way,” he said.

Fierce storms could exceed previous natural disasters, straining the state’s emergency resources, he said.

For instance, he said, models show increasing risk that an immense storm could strike Southern California, draw emergency responders from around the state, and then, days later, hit Northern California, to cause as much as $500 billion in damage.

“This is Katrina on steroids,” he said.

Katrina and Godzilla, sitting on a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Sent December 18:

“Katrina on steroids.” It’s true that phrases which connect directly to our own experience have much more impact than the statistics and analyses which make up much scientific reporting. Nowhere is this more crucial than in the domain of climate change, where an ADD-afflicted media and an easily distracted population make it all but impossible for the facts of a profound global crisis to penetrate.

Climate change isn’t something that’s going to happen to some other people sometime in the future; it’s something that’s happening now, to you and me. Agricultural failures leading to higher food costs? Infrastructural damage? Droughts that are increasing in severity and frequency? Wildfires? Insects carrying tropical diseases migrating North? The coming decades will see all of us feeling ever more severe impacts as the greenhouse effect continues to destabilize the Earth’s weather patterns — the future is now, and those other people are us.

Warren Senders