Isolated Weather Events are Not Evidence Against Global Warming March 10, 2009

An op-ed appearing in the Boston Globe on March 8, 2009, presented an anecdotal, base attack of global warming.  The author, Jeff Jacoby, pointed to the severe winter storms that have been slamming the East Coast recently and asked, essentially, that if there’s really global warming, why all this cold weather.  Unfortunately, Jacoby is not the only person to employ an argument against the existence of global warming based on isolated weather events.  In fact, the same sometimes snide argument was made by many following the recent protest of the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C., which just so happened to have occurred during a snow storm.   (Examples here, here, here, and here.)

The problem with these criticisms is that they rely on a basic misunderstanding of what global warming is and how it is affecting the planet.  To be correct, the problem isn’t just global warming; it’s global climate change.  That’s why the world’s pre-eminent multi-national group attempting to tackle this problem is called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The real danger of a warming planet is not just that the planet gets hotter.  In fact, we’re only talking about single degree increases in the planet’s surface temperature.  (According to the EPA, the earth’s surface temperature rose 0.6 degrees in the last century).   This is one of the reasons why pointing to anecdotes as a means of proving or disproving the existence of global warming is misplaced.  The real danger from global warming is its effects on climates around the world.  For example, the less than one degree increase in the earth’s surface temperature, necessarily felt in the ocean’s surface waters, combined with the increased acidity caused by more and more carbon dioxide absorbed by the oceans has had a significant negative impact on tropical reefs and other hard-shelled sea life around the globe.

Another problem with Jacoby’s argument, in particular, is that he presents evidence that the earth may actually be undergoing a cooling period, and implies that this cooling period will nullify the negative effects of global warming.  We just don’t know about that.  Even if cooling is occurring, how much is enough to stem the negative effects of global warming?  And, more importantly in my opinion, relying on a cooling period to counterbalance the effects of global warming allows us to simply ignore human contributions to climate change, which could just create more problems in the future, when the cooling period ends.  Even if we are experiencing a cooling period, we shouldn’t just ignore that humans are contributing to a significant rise in greenhouse gas emissions. 

I do agree with Jacoby in one respect, however.  He is right that we should not shut out legitimate scientific inquiry and he is right to criticize suggestions that isolated warm weather events are evidence of global warming.  However, we should also not rush to the conclusion that an isolated cold weather event is evidence against global warming. 

Jaguar Sighting in Arizona March 8, 2009

An adult male jaguar was captured and collared by a team of state researchers in Arizona, outside Tucson, recently during an unrelated study of mountain lions and bear habitat.  Apparently, there had been several sightings in recent years, but scientists had yet to collar a jaguar.   (Via LiveScience.)

Collecting Seeds February 27, 2008

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to house a huge variety of seeds in the protected Arctic environment, is officially open. The need for the Seed Vault arose from the vulnerability of seed storage facilities around the world to war, disease, and mismanagement, among other threats. The Seed Vault is a tribute to biodiversity and an important step in ensuring the viability of various plant species.

One threat to biodiversity that I did not see raised in the articles discussing the christening of the Seed Vault is the decreasing biodiversity of our food supply resulting from a standardization of our food choices. As farming becomes increasingly centralized, the same type of crop is grown and the same type of animal is raised for meat by all of the food producers in the country. As a result, we are given fewer and fewer alternative varieties of foods, and we risk losing the many varieties of plants and animals that we do not happen to be eating now.

In her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver makes the point dramatically. She and her family move to a farm in Virginia and vow to do their best to live off of the land for one year. Her family decides to raise turkeys for meat. In her research, she discovers that in the not-too-distant past, a huge variety of turkey was available to the average consumer. (In fact, she said the variety her family chose to raise tasted like lobster!) Yet, today, we are limited to one type of turkey produced by every major poultry company in the country.

To make matters worse, we bred this type of turkey to be super-efficient as food, rather than as being a turkey. We engineered it to be able to pack on so much meat that it cannot support its own weight as it grows making it unable to stand on its own legs, let alone mate, which now requires artificial insemination.

This increasing standardization is not limited to turkeys. It exists at nearly every level of our food consumption. But, like the seed vault, there are some people and companies who are working to ensure continued biodiversity. Heirloom tomatoes are becoming popular again, and other companies are devoting themselves to ensuring the continued existence of heirloom varieties of plants and animals. Hopefully, with efforts like these around the world, we will not forsake diversity for efficiency in our food supply.