The day the warth warmed
(January, 2002)You don't have to don a pair of hiking boots, get into the car or board a train or plane to travel. And you don't need HG Wells or the souped-up Delorean in Back to the Future to see forward in time. Sometimes, you get a glimpse of a different world or a different future without going anywhere.
On January 9th, the mercury at the Dane County regional airport in Madison, Wisconsin airport reached a high of 53 °F, almost 30 °F greater than the average high for January. The spring-like January day followed one of the warmest years on recorded history, both in the mid-western island of Madison and across the entire world.
That afternoon, cycling home from my office in the atmospheric sciences department, past green lawns and children running in the street, I struggled with all the climate science I had learned. I wanted to say it: global warming occurred today.
There is unprecedented consensus among scientists - a notoriously contentious lot - that global warming is occurring and it will accelerate in the future. The evidence is virtually incontrovertible. We have just experienced the second warmest year since reliable measurements began. Unlike the all-time champion of 1998, there is no El Nino to blame for last year's warmth, like a live baseball tainting the home run records. It has been warm. No excuses, no asterisk in the record book.
It must be global warming, right? Er, probably.
An objective climate scientist must deliver the speech: "The observations agree with the predictions of a general warming of the climate. However, the weather on a particular day or during a particular year cannot be definitively attributed to a long-term change in climate." Just as a market analyst cannot look at the jump in a few stocks one day and declare a bull market, a meteorologist or climate scientist cannot look at the weather one day, or even one year, and declare it is due to climate change.
The climate is simply not something one experiences on a daily basis. It is a representation of typical weather conditions, a long-term average of a constantly fluctuating quantity. As the climate continues to warm, there will continue to be more summer heat waves, more mid-winter thaws, more droughts and more floods. Along the way, there will also be also some mild summers, some cold winters, some cold snaps that prompt rational people to rant about those crackpot climate scientists. So we can't look at one day and scream global warming.
Unfortunately, a long-term trend does not sell in an increasingly frenetic, wired world, where stock prices and baseball scores can be instantly updated on a handheld while commuting to work. The pace of recent climate change may be unprecedented in recent geological history, but it is too slow for the FOX-News ticker.
While the public and political discourse on the climate has increased dramatically in recent years, there is still no general sense of urgency about global warming. The government approach to environmental and social ills is one of crisis management, rather than prevention.
One would hope in the aftermath of September 11, it should be abundantly clear that crisis management is an obsolete political model. Yet the Bush administration, the energy industry and the public still await the forecast on the Weather Channel: "Tomorrow, high of 52 °F with a 50% chance of showers. Friday, dress light, the earth will be warming".
The problem is we will never see that day. Even the most abrupt changes in climate, like those my colleagues suggest will be triggered by a warming-induced shift in ocean circulation, would not occur with the tenure of a single U.S. president. By the time a substantial change in the climate occurs, it will likely be too late to take action.
Fifty years from now, I won't point to January 9th, 2002 and make some Ussher-like claim the climate changed that day. But I will remember the green lawns across Madison, the students running in shirt-sleeves. The lone ice fisherman perched precariously on a slushy slab of normally solid Lake Wingra, like a polar clinging to a melting spring ice floe. I will also remember all the headlines about fighting terror to ensure a safe future, the need for energy self-sufficiency, the struggle with automotive fuel efficiency standards. And I will wonder just how on this increasingly green and volatile Earth it was possible that an educated, developed country like the U.S. couldn't put it all together.
Alas, hindsight is always 20/20. Foresight, as any meteorologist could tell you, is the real challenge.