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:<br>
<br><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/2/its_global_warming_stupid_as_bloomberg">http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/2/its_global_warming_stupid_as_bloomberg</a><br>-------------------------------------------<br>
<br>Only the first page of this article is copied below:<br><br><a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/its-global-warming-stupid">http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/its-global-warming-stupid</a><br>
<h1 id="article_headline">It's Global Warming, Stupid</h1>
<div class="attributor">
By <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/authors/1989-paul-m-barrett" rel="author">Paul M. Barrett</a> on November 01, 2012<br><p class="">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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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
<em>Bloomberg Businessweek</em>), 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 <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/rising-tide" target="_new">weather on steroids</a>.”<br></p>In an Oct. 30 blog post, Mark Fischetti of <em>Scientific American</em>
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.<br><p>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 <em>Oceanography</em>, 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>On Oct. 17 the giant German reinsurance company Munich Re issued a prescient report titled <em>Severe Weather in North America</em>.
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.”</p><p>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.</p>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.”<br></div><br>Which raises the question of what alerts and measures to undertake. In his book <em>The Conundrum</em>, David Owen, a staff writer at the <em>New Yorker</em>,
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.<br><br>------------------------------------------<br>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett<br>