{"id":4286,"date":"2011-05-25T11:42:37","date_gmt":"2011-05-25T15:42:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=4286"},"modified":"2011-06-01T08:53:51","modified_gmt":"2011-06-01T12:53:51","slug":"4286","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/05\/25\/4286\/","title":{"rendered":"Weather…or climate?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d been thinking about a blogpost yesterday and got distracted, but with more weather disaster news day by day, here it is. It’s actually a post to provide a link to an opinion piece, A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!<\/em> <\/a>in the Washington Post yesterday by environmentalist and writer, Bill McKibben, our friend from Vermont and the Adirondacks, founder of the climate change campaign 350.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He wrote about the weather “events” of the last few days, tying in droughts and crop failures and weather elsewhere around the world…<\/p>\n

But do not wonder if they\u2019re somehow connected.<\/p>\n

If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year\u2019s record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest \u2014 resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi \u2014 could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t know about you, but being a curious person, I’m always connecting dots like these. I do understand that weather is not climate, but, holy cow, there’s been a lot of disastrous weather in a lot of places. And just this morning, there’s news of tornadoes in Oklahoma overnight. The sirens sounded in Joplin again last night too. And there’s flooding in Montana now that the snow is melting…not to mention the Mississippi, still, or our own off the charts<\/a> flooding. Better not to make those connections, McKibben writes,<\/p>\n

Because if you asked yourself what it meant that the Amazon has just come through its second hundred-year drought in the past five years, or that the pine forests across the western part of this continent have been obliterated by a beetle in the past decade \u2014 well, you might have to ask other questions. Such as: Should President Obama really just have opened a huge swath of Wyoming to new coal mining? Should Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sign a permit this summer allowing a huge new pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta? You might also have to ask yourself: Do we have a bigger problem than $4-a-gallon gasoline?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d been thinking about a blogpost yesterday and got distracted, but with more weather disaster […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[884],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}