Connect The Dots

May 5, 2012

Despite all my efforts to keep track of shit, I’d never heard of Climate Impacts Day — the event launched by Bill McKibben’s 350.org — until this morning and was reading Dr. Jeff Masters, where he talks about how climate change is altering our weather in the worse way.

And the entire process is geared toward connecting the dots‘ between all the global extreme weather the last couple of years to climate change — the intent to maybe force asshole politicians to attack global warming like they do gay people.

(Illustration found here).

Apparently, however, we can’t leave it to the MSM — nightly news coverage of climate change has dropped 72 percent between 2009 and 2011 (Media Matters).

Meanwhile, Dr. Masters at his WunderBlog pretty-much sums it up:

Connecting the dots between human-caused climate change and extreme weather events is fraught with difficulty and uncertainty.
One the one hand, the underlying physics is clear — the huge amounts of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide humans have pumped into the atmosphere must be already causing significant changes to the weather.
But the weather has huge natural variations on its own, without climate change.
So, communicators of the links between climate change and extreme weather need to emphasize how climate change shifts the odds.
We’ve loaded the dice towards some types of extreme weather events, by heating the atmosphere to add more heat and moisture.
This can bring more extreme weather events like heat waves, heavy downpours, and intense droughts.
What’s more, the added heat and moisture can change atmospheric circulation patterns, causing meanders in the jet stream capable of bringing longer-lasting periods of extreme weather.

And this shit ain’t gonna stop until…

UPDATE

Yesterday morning, I wrote about the Heartland Institute’s horrifying PR stunt of comparing people who know and understand climate change to Charles Manson and Fidel Castro.
The shit didn’t stick — Heartland pulled the whole project in less than 24 hours.
What assholes!
Read the results at DeSmogBlog.

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