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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated

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To: average joe who wrote (210721)	7/4/2007 2:59:15 PM
From: Mike McFarland	of 793926

<Recognize that we live in a time of crisis> It doesn't really feel like a crisis though, does it? The blizzards of the 1880's and the Dust Bowl of the 1930's were climatic crises. Maybe if I lived in Siberia I would see melting permafrost and be worried about something. Although winters below zero instead of far below zero hardly seem like a big threat. In the past few decades there have been more sporadic blizzards, tornado outbreaks, floods and hurricanes--and some drought. None of which seems to be anything but normal North American climate. A really impressive signal that climate has tipped away from the mean hasn't really appeared that I know of (aside from the arctic and the melting of alpine glaciers...) That global climate will change over the next hundred years is a good guess. But the climate models are not sophisticated enough to say anything about large changes to regional climate. The only thing I have seen regarding Pacific Northwest climate suggests winters a little wetter. If we had adequate storage to get through normally dry summers we certainly wouldn't be sweating a potential drop in snowpack under warming. The global climate models have been tweaked so that they correctly simulate the warming of the past decades, and then continue and accelerate this trend based on a doubling of co2--but the details are pretty hazy. In a nutshell, "crisis" seems too strong in the absense much specific threats. Climate change is interesting though, that much is true. Here in Seattle on average we hit 90F or higher at the airport three times a summer. That average was unchanged for the past fifty years--but comes with a large deviation year to year--some summers were cool and never hit 90F while in hot summers we might get a week or two of hot weather. It will be interesting to see if Seattle more routinely hits 90F or better over the decades ahead. And if Seattlites are bitching about water use restrictions years from now, they'll have only themselves to blame for not storing more of the ridiculous amount of water that runs off the terrain each winter up here.

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