{"id":4350,"date":"2011-06-10T07:09:38","date_gmt":"2011-06-10T11:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=4350"},"modified":"2011-06-10T07:25:58","modified_gmt":"2011-06-10T11:25:58","slug":"morning-read-the-weather-has-changed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/06\/10\/morning-read-the-weather-has-changed\/","title":{"rendered":"Morning Read: “The weather has changed”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Is this what climate change looks like?<\/p><\/div>\n

Sometimes the debate over climate change can seem pretty academic, pretty abstract.<\/p>\n

This morning, Jon Alexander in the Glens Falls Post Star<\/a> is reporting on the clean-up efforts now underway in the Adirondack town of Thurman, where flash floods wiped out dozens of roads and bridges.<\/p>\n

The people commenting in his story aren’t environmentalists or policy wonks or journalists.\u00a0 They are nuts-and-bolts guys, the folks who have to make hard-headed decisions about the world we live in.<\/p>\n

Usually, I don’t excerpt such long sections of a story, but this passage from the Post Star<\/a> warrants being read in full context.<\/p>\n

While the town is taking the initial steps toward repairing its 34 damaged roads, county officials are now assessing how climate change is changing the way they do business.<\/p>\n

“The books we’ve always used to design culverts, you can throw them all out,” said Dave Wick, district manager of the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District. “Global warming is changing everything.”<\/p>\n

The state Department of Transportation considers any storm that produces 4 inches of rain in an hour to be a 100-year event, but the May 28 storm saw 6 inches of rain fall in less than an hour.<\/p>\n

The size of a culvert required at a particular site is determined by a combination of hydrological analysis and a century of historical precipitation data compiled by DOT and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.<\/p>\n

And it’s that data that may no longer be relevant, officials said.<\/p>\n

“The snowfall and rainfall models we use are no longer correct,” said Warren County engineer Todd Beadnell. “The weather has changed.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m seeing more and more of this kind of language, from business leaders, from engineers, from people like Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, who say it’s time to stop debating the “ifs” and start talking about what practical steps we need to take now that climate change is here.<\/p>\n

A regular reader of the In Box also sent me this link from Elizabeth Kolbert, environmental writer for the New Yorker<\/a>, who makes much the same point.<\/p>\n

So what do you think?\u00a0 Does it raise new alarms that we’re hearing about global warming not from greenies and tree-huggers, but from the guys wearing hard hats?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes the debate over climate change can seem pretty academic, pretty abstract. This morning, Jon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4350"}],"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\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4351,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4350\/revisions\/4351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}