[Vision2020] 11-1-12 "Bloomberg Businessweek": "It's Global Warming, Stupid"

[Ted Moffett]

The author of the following article was interviewed today on "Democracy
Now," which can be viewed at the first website below.  He insisted the
timing of this article and NYC Mayor Bloomberg's endorsement of Obama for
president this week, with Bloomberg asserting that Obama will address
climate change more than Romney, was not coordinated or arranged in any way
by Bloomberg, despite the fact he owns the magazine:

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/2/its_global_warming_stupid_as_bloomberg
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Only the first page of this article is copied below:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/its-global-warming-stupid
It's Global Warming, Stupid
By Paul M. Barrett
<http://www.businessweek.com/authors/1989-paul-m-barrett>on November
01, 2012

Yes, yes, it’s unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change.
Men and women in white lab coats tell us—and they’re right—that many
factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit
scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.

Clarity, however, is not beyond reach. Hurricane Sandy demands it: At least
40 U.S. deaths. Economic losses expected to climb as high as $50 billion.
Eight million homes without power. Hundreds of thousands of people
evacuated. More than 15,000 flights grounded. Factories, stores, and
hospitals shut. Lower Manhattan dark, silent, and underwater.

An unscientific survey of the social networking literature on Sandy reveals
an illuminating tweet (you read that correctly) from Jonathan Foley,
director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of
Minnesota. On Oct. 29, Foley thumbed thusly: “Would this kind of storm
happen without climate change? Yes. Fueled by many factors. Is storm
stronger because of climate change? Yes.” Eric Pooley, senior vice
president of the Environmental Defense Fund (and former deputy editor
of *Bloomberg
Businessweek*), offers a baseball analogy: “We can’t say that steroids
caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit
more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on
steroids<http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/rising-tide>
.”
In an Oct. 30 blog post, Mark Fischetti of *Scientific American* took a
spin through Ph.D.-land and found more and more credentialed experts
willing to shrug off the climate caveats. The broadening consensus:
“Climate change amps up other basic factors that contribute to big storms.
For example, the oceans have warmed, providing more energy for storms. And
the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed, so it retains more moisture, which is
drawn into storms and is then dumped on us.” Even those of us who are
science-phobic can get the gist of that.

Sandy featured a scary extra twist implicating climate change. An Atlantic
hurricane moving up the East Coast crashed into cold air dipping south from
Canada. The collision supercharged the storm’s energy level and extended
its geographical reach. Pushing that cold air south was an atmospheric
pattern, known as a blocking high, above the Arctic Ocean. Climate
scientists Charles Greene and Bruce Monger of Cornell University, writing
earlier this year in *Oceanography*, provided evidence that Arctic icemelts
linked to global warming contribute to the very atmospheric pattern that
sent the frigid burst down across Canada and the eastern U.S.

If all that doesn’t impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to
advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers
committed to compiling statistics for profit.

On Oct. 17 the giant German reinsurance company Munich Re issued a
prescient report titled *Severe Weather in North America*. Globally, the
rate of extreme weather events is rising, and “nowhere in the world is the
rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.”
>From 1980 through 2011, weather disasters caused losses totaling
$1.06 trillion. Munich Re found “a nearly quintupled number of
weather-related loss events in North America for the past three decades.”
By contrast, there was “an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2
in Europe, and 1.5 in South America.” Human-caused climate change “is
believed to contribute to this trend,” the report said, “though it
influences various perils in different ways.”

Global warming “particularly affects formation of heat waves, droughts,
intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also
tropical cyclone intensity,” Munich Re said. This July was the hottest
month recorded in the U.S. since record-keeping began in 1895, according to
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The U.S. Drought
Monitor reported that two-thirds of the continental U.S. suffered drought
conditions this summer.
Granted, Munich Re wants to sell more reinsurance (backup policies
purchased by other insurance companies), so maybe it has a selfish reason
to stir anxiety. But it has no obvious motive for fingering global warming
vs. other causes. “If the first effects of climate change are already
perceptible,” said Peter Hoppe, the company’s chief of geo-risks research,
“all alerts and measures against it have become even more pressing.”

Which raises the question of what alerts and measures to undertake. In his
book *The Conundrum*, David Owen, a staff writer at the *New Yorker*,
contends that as long as the West places high and unquestioning value on
economic growth and consumer gratification—with China and the rest of the
developing world right behind—we will continue to burn the fossil fuels
whose emissions trap heat in the atmosphere. Fast trains, hybrid cars,
compact fluorescent light bulbs, carbon offsets—they’re just not enough,
Owen writes.

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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