Blowing Away

IN A SINGLE DAY during the second week of December, no fewer than fifty six tornadoes tore through the American south. meanwhile, one superstorm after another sprad across the lower forty eight, bringing multiple feet of snow and sub zero temperatures, with howling winds. Climate change deniers are already back at it, telling us that there is cold weather every winter, and, not to worry, the climate is alway changing of its own accord, independent of any human activity. As usual, climate change deniers are quite full of it. Climate denial seems to be a psychological mechanism whose function is to allow conservatives to cling to their resistance to change, the changes necessary to preserve the Earth's health for future generations. There was a time, and that time was quite recent, when tornadoes in December were nearly non existant. There is no sudden, natural climatic change which could possibly account for the sudden appearance of tornadoes in December. Confusion arises when people, usually conservatives, fail to distinguish between "climate" and "weather". The former refers to long term tendencies, the latter, to meteorological conditions at any given point in time, as most people know. A single, extremely cold day in winter does not disprove the reality of climate change, and neither does a cool day in July. Climate change is proven by observing that the seven hottest years in recorded history were the most recent seven years, that outbreaks of violent, tornadic weather are now occurring throughout the calendar year, and that severe droughts and severe rain events and floods have become an almost constant phenomenon. Most importantly, climate change is demonstrated by merely measuring its cause; that there are now nearly four hundred and fifty parts per million carbon in the earth's atmosphere, amounting to nearly one trillion tons of atmospheric carbon which do not belong there. The painful but necessary transformation from fossil fuels to healty sources of energy cannot be completed until the world has the political will to accomplish the task. It appears that the successful completion of human-made nuclear fusion, the ultimate soultion, has manifested a bit too late to help; we must rely instead on solar and wind energy. Climate change is already well underway, and is upon us. Any meteorologist will tell you that the weather patterns are no longer recognizable, but have become crazily violent and unpredictable. One is reminded of a stanza from a poem by Bertolt Brecht: "There shall remain of our cities but the wind that blew through them." Unless we act decisively now, the wind, all alone, will blow ever stronger through our dead and abandoned cities.