(no subject)
My wife IM-ed me with this question this afternoon: "so, do you think all this flooding in the Midwest is a direct result of global warming?"
Is the flooding a direct result? There's no way to be certain right now. As the earth heats up, weather patterns will become more and more unstable and violent weather will become more common. The heavy rains definitely qualify as violent, and they were unexpected, so it's entirely possible that global warming was a factor. But the flooding is also a result of rivers that have dozens of dams on them.
Dams work fine until the point where there's too much water on the upstream side. At that point, things go very, very wrong for people downstream. And I think that's what happened there. Too much rain too fast, people downstream relying on the dam upstream to keep all that rain from causing the river to flood its banks, and the dam(s) just couldn't do it.
Let me put this another way. When we talk about global warming, what we're really worried about is climate change, not weather change. Weather changes all the time, and mostly we can handle it. Individual storms are weather. Violent storms that hit an area repeatedly over a decade or so is climate.
One of the main tools that meteorologists use to forecast the weather (and warn people that bad weather is coming) is history. They look at the wind direction and strength, barometric pressure, temperature, time of year, and other stuff... then look for other times in the past when those factors were the same (or nearly the same).
This is how you get a forecast saying "40% chance of rain." What they're saying is, when all those factors I mentioned above were roughly the same as they are now (let's say it was 10 times since they started recording weather data), 4 out of those 10 times in the past, it rained.
The problem happens when the weather doesn't follow what it's done in the past, particularly when the weather we're talking about is heavy rain, thunderstorms, or tornadoes. They can be forecasting sunny skies, and then the people in the area get a flash flood instead. Now, the meteorologists will see it coming an hour or two before, but they won't see it coming soon enough to warn people that they need to head for high ground.
It's difficult to put the blame for one particular storm on global warming, because it's one single data point. You can say that the flood is the sort of thing that can and will happen as our planet heats up, but you can't be 100% certain that the one particular storm was caused mostly by global warming.
It's just as difficult to answer your question as it was to respond when people were saying that global warming caused Hurricane Katrina. You could probably make a case that the hurricane would not have been as large or as severe if it weren't for the extra heat energy in the atmosphere, but you couldn't really say that global warming caused that one hurricane in the first place.
It's tough to explain global warming to people, though, because most folks don't care about history and don't have very long memories. They don't remember that there was flooding in Prague five years ago where it never flooded before, or that Australia in the last decade is drier than it has ever been, or that there was massive flooding in the St. Louis area last year. They don't remember all those things (or they misremember them) and they don't connect them together to see a pattern of severe weather and general weather instability. It's much easier to point to a satellite photo of a big-ass hurricane and say, "See? This is what you're going to be getting more of if we don't stop burning fossil fuels like they're going out of style." It's not as scientifically accurate, but it's much better at getting people's attention.
It's horrible that people refer to severe weather occurrences as "acts of God," because they don't understand weather and climate and it seems so random... but they believe that there's a God who controls the things that seem random to us. Like God's up there with a console of buttons that say things like Flood New Orleans and Blast the Crap out of Fred's House with a Lightning Bolt.
It's the same as those dipshits that believe in faith healing, denying medical care to relatives who need it because they don't understand and don't trust modern medicine. They don't believe that humans have any control over what happens to a human body--that an invisible force controls it all. That same thinking leads people to believe that humans have no effect on the weather whatsoever.
Is the flooding a direct result? There's no way to be certain right now. As the earth heats up, weather patterns will become more and more unstable and violent weather will become more common. The heavy rains definitely qualify as violent, and they were unexpected, so it's entirely possible that global warming was a factor. But the flooding is also a result of rivers that have dozens of dams on them.
Dams work fine until the point where there's too much water on the upstream side. At that point, things go very, very wrong for people downstream. And I think that's what happened there. Too much rain too fast, people downstream relying on the dam upstream to keep all that rain from causing the river to flood its banks, and the dam(s) just couldn't do it.
Let me put this another way. When we talk about global warming, what we're really worried about is climate change, not weather change. Weather changes all the time, and mostly we can handle it. Individual storms are weather. Violent storms that hit an area repeatedly over a decade or so is climate.
One of the main tools that meteorologists use to forecast the weather (and warn people that bad weather is coming) is history. They look at the wind direction and strength, barometric pressure, temperature, time of year, and other stuff... then look for other times in the past when those factors were the same (or nearly the same).
This is how you get a forecast saying "40% chance of rain." What they're saying is, when all those factors I mentioned above were roughly the same as they are now (let's say it was 10 times since they started recording weather data), 4 out of those 10 times in the past, it rained.
The problem happens when the weather doesn't follow what it's done in the past, particularly when the weather we're talking about is heavy rain, thunderstorms, or tornadoes. They can be forecasting sunny skies, and then the people in the area get a flash flood instead. Now, the meteorologists will see it coming an hour or two before, but they won't see it coming soon enough to warn people that they need to head for high ground.
It's difficult to put the blame for one particular storm on global warming, because it's one single data point. You can say that the flood is the sort of thing that can and will happen as our planet heats up, but you can't be 100% certain that the one particular storm was caused mostly by global warming.
It's just as difficult to answer your question as it was to respond when people were saying that global warming caused Hurricane Katrina. You could probably make a case that the hurricane would not have been as large or as severe if it weren't for the extra heat energy in the atmosphere, but you couldn't really say that global warming caused that one hurricane in the first place.
It's tough to explain global warming to people, though, because most folks don't care about history and don't have very long memories. They don't remember that there was flooding in Prague five years ago where it never flooded before, or that Australia in the last decade is drier than it has ever been, or that there was massive flooding in the St. Louis area last year. They don't remember all those things (or they misremember them) and they don't connect them together to see a pattern of severe weather and general weather instability. It's much easier to point to a satellite photo of a big-ass hurricane and say, "See? This is what you're going to be getting more of if we don't stop burning fossil fuels like they're going out of style." It's not as scientifically accurate, but it's much better at getting people's attention.
It's horrible that people refer to severe weather occurrences as "acts of God," because they don't understand weather and climate and it seems so random... but they believe that there's a God who controls the things that seem random to us. Like God's up there with a console of buttons that say things like Flood New Orleans and Blast the Crap out of Fred's House with a Lightning Bolt.
It's the same as those dipshits that believe in faith healing, denying medical care to relatives who need it because they don't understand and don't trust modern medicine. They don't believe that humans have any control over what happens to a human body--that an invisible force controls it all. That same thinking leads people to believe that humans have no effect on the weather whatsoever.