OK, everybody raise their hand. With all of the horrible weather events that have taken place in the last decade or so, how many of you have thought – way deep down – “I wonder if all these storms and floods and hurricanes could somehow be linked to the frantic warnings we’ve been getting for two decades about Global Warming?”
As the wildfires roared across the Texas plains or the tornadoes walloped the Southeast, it was hard not to at least wonder if the scientists’ plaintive warnings about traumatic weather events might be coming true. I am not talking about the more typical trap that friends and neighbors fall into of decrying the woes of a particularly hot (or cold) afternoon by moaning, “So much for Global Warming,” or, respectively, “Where’s that Global Warming when we need it?”
If you paid any attention at all to the debate (as opposed to simply the overheated rhetoric), you’ll recall that the perils of global climate change aren’t necessarily embodied in the day-to-day changes in temperature, etc., but rather in much longer term trends. What the scientists have emphasized with the greatest zeal is the understanding that the big-picture climate changes hold the potential to make regularly occurring weather events like flood, drought, tornadoes, hurricanes, and the like more devastating than we might normally expect, even given the normal wide swings in severity of same over many decades or centuries.
Doesn’t that sound about right with what we’ve experienced in the last 10 or 20 years? Though I am surprised that I don’t hear of the possible linkage as much as I would have thought, the severity of so many weather-related events just since this topsy-turvy new millennium arrived has certainly gotten my attention.
Even if I am wrong and the fires, floods and monster tornadoes and hurricanes are nothing more than cyclical swings from El Nino and El Nina oceanic temperatures, it’s still woefully apparent that the nation is ill equipped to deal with something as massive as Global Warming. We can’t even get political leaders to form some kind of remotely functional consensus on the legitimacy of the phenomenon itself, to say nothing of marshaling the incredible international cooperation that would be needed to have some kind of significant impact on lessening its devastation or even merely delaying some awful day(s) of reckoning.
No, ours is a government that barely functions well enough to address the immediate concerns of this week or this year. Partisan political backbiting has long since taken precedence over even seemingly visible looming catastrophes like our deficit reduction woes, which have been out there for all to see for many, many years, yet nobody much wanted to bother about them. Sure, it’s a different kind of flood, or drought, or maybe wildfire, but even more than Global Warming, it’s one we can’t pretend that we didn’t know it was coming.
I sure hope the Global Warming deniers are right, because I am certain we can’t afford to pay for all of the devastation to come if they are not. And it’s not much consolation that I won’t be around to suffer the consequences; I am about five weeks away from becoming a Great Uncle, and I’d like to leave the little feller a planet in at least roughly the same shape that I found it.
- T.S. O’Connell
