Note:
It has been a busy three weeks which included a week of much needed
vacation. Much has happened in the interim. I am working on a number of posts which will
be rolled out in May.
Meanwhile,
many people often confuse weather with climate.
You have heard the refrains like it is so cold, how could the earth be
warming? Or how can we be in a drought
when we’re having a flood? Just when
does weather become climate? Good
question! Meteorologists at the European
Space Agency have produced an answer to that question.
The
following video is about 12 minutes long, but it is well produced and worth the
time to view it. They have a wealth of
information with which to determine climate change and it is interesting
comparing weather in the early 1800’s to weather today. I hope you enjoy this production.
Click
here: When Weather Becomes Climate
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| Click on the image for a larger version. Image Credit: Climate Central. |
This
past Monday was Earth Day, the environmental-awareness event inaugurated 43
years ago, just three years after the Super Bowl was born. Earth Day I in 1970 represented
a massive change in the world’s consciousness about the environment, and
arguably led to the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency and passage
of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The strange notion of “recycling,” which
only a few oddballs had even heard of, suddenly entered America’s consciousness
as well.
With
all of that attention to the environment, though, nobody was talking back in
1970 about a bigger threat to the planet than air and water pollution: at the
time, climate change wasn’t even a blip on most environmentalists’ radar. But
annual average temperatures have been on an upward trend ever since — more in
some places, less in others — thanks in large part to our emissions of
heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
It’s
true if you look at the United States as a whole (see below), and it’s also
true if you focus in on any specific state. The graphic above shows the trend
for South Carolina: thanks to the natural variability of weather, some years
have been warmer than average, others cooler. Overall, though, the trend is
steadily up — by 0.41 degrees per decade for South Carolina since 1970 — and
climate scientists are convinced that without action to limit greenhouse gases,
that trend will continue.
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| Click on the image for a larger version. Image Credit: Climate Central. |
