water on the move

March GreenWay article
to hazelwoodeditor@yahoo.com
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Understanding climate change

Scientists have often oversimplified in order to summarize findings they present to the public. An honest desire to convey important facts quickly - so that people can make good real-time decisions - has resulted in a willingness to label specific dramatic aspects of the world as if they were separate from other less obviously dramatic ones. Two examples are acid rain and global warming. The recognition that air pollution was destroying the life in our lakes, streams, forests, and farms - along with our lungs and other things - led to the emphasis on dramatic aspects of air pollution such as that here in the heart of acid rain country the rain has been as acidic as vinegar. That acidity was not the only aspect of air pollution that was a problem was ignored. It's the same now with global warming. Climate change involves not only an increase in average temperature earthwide. It also involves increasing variability in temperatures, wind speeds, and rainfall or snowfall amounts. So to constrict the discussion to "global warming" rather than the more wide angle "climate change" or "environmental change" is to restrict our understanding of what is going on.

It's an old trick, unconscious or not, of a mind inclined to win an argument to set boundaries on a discussion so that one might win the argument. Cheerleaders for "clean nuclear power" conveniently omit, for instance, routine emissions of radioactivity from power plants from their calculations. Operators of the coke mill thought of pollution as an external cost which didn't involve them. "That's irrelevant" is oft heard in shareholder meetings when pollution and community effects of a corporation's activities are brought up.

So those who don't want to hear the call to action implied by the fact that the climate change we have been a part of causing is reaching apocalyptic proportions - and which we can be a part of managing - are quick to discount any connections between the average global temperatures and such specific events such as Hurricane Katrina and the Great Blizzard of 2010. But the fact is that there is more heat energy and consequently more water vapor in the atmosphere now, and there has been an increase in hurricane strength and for instance what are called "lake effect" type snows such as when huge amounts of water is evaporated from the Great Lakes and dumped nearby as massive snows.

Since I am also convinced that we are at the dawn of a new age, as well as in a period of terrible destruction, I remain optimistic. To the extent we humans lovingly work together as family - doing our part to engage the miraculous new communications, energy, and food production technologies being developed in service of life - we will be able to transition to this new Earth civilization without suffering.
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