McKibben: Blame the blizzards on climate change

Writing in the Washington Post, former Adirondacker and current Vermonter Bill McKibben works to dispel climate change doubts with an essay about this winter’s weird weather.

…the weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you’d expect as the planet warms. Here’s how it works:

In most places, winter is clearly growing shorter and less intense. We can tell, because Arctic sea ice is melting, because the glaciers on Greenland are shrinking and because a thousand other signals send the same message. Here in the mountains of the Northeast, for instance, lakes freeze later than they used to, and sometimes not at all: Lake Champlain remained open in winter only three times during the 19th century, but it did so 18 times between 1970 and 2007.

But rising temperature is only one effect of climate change. Probably more crucially, warmer air holds more water vapor than cold air does. The increased evaporation from land and sea leads to more drought but also to more precipitation, since what goes up eventually comes down. The numbers aren’t trivial — global warming has added 4 percent more moisture to the atmosphere since 1970.

Also writing in the Post, Dana Milbank has a slightly different take. He too finds the climate change debunking to be scientifically sketchy.

But he points out that arguments in support of global warming have often used the same anecdotal accounts that are now being floated by critics of the theory.

For years, climate-change activists have argued by anecdote to make their case. [Al] Gore, in his famous slide shows, ties human-caused global warming to increasing hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought and the spread of mosquitoes, pine beetles and disease. It’s not that Gore is wrong about these things. The problem is that his storm stories have conditioned people to expect an endless worldwide heat wave, when in fact the changes so far are subtle.