Opinion
Why we should worry about the weather
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Also by Courtney Ehlers:
- Giving up beer, pizza not a prerequisite for environmentalism (November 20, 2008)
- Why we should worry about the weather (November 6, 2008)
- Vietnam-era guilt skews liberal dialogue on war (October 23, 2008)
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Small talk at the University of Wisconsin is not like small talk in other places. We really like starting out with the topics that bring our bizarre college-town sub-culture together — such as alcohol, midterms, alcohol, sleep deprivation, alcohol, politics and alcohol. As such, we tend to forego a classic universal icebreaker: talking about the weather. We do so at our peril.
Tuesday afternoon, while we were all glued to our televisions or continuously clicking the “refresh” button on cnn.com, the temperature in Madison soared to 71 degrees. The native Wisconsinites of this campus have undoubtedly all done double-takes at some point this week, but let’s get some numbers for good measure: the average recorded temperature for Nov. 4 in Madison is 41 degrees, a full 23 degrees lower than Tuesday’s average of 64. And meteorologists have told us to expect snow later this week.
Apart from extended T-shirt weather and a few unexpected Frisbee games, what does this really mean? For starters, it means that climate change deniers can give up already and go home to the three-story houses that have been built for them by the George C. Marshal Institute and other appendages of Exxon-Mobil. If it is not enough to hear it from NASA, the National Academy of the Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, perhaps the remaining skeptics may yet be open-minded enough to trust their own skins.
Hopefully this autumn heat wave will bring home the reality of climate change. When climatologists talk about sea level rise and the acidification of the oceans, it’s easy for Midwestern Americans to pretend global warming does not concern us directly, like it’s an abstract global phenomenon that may in some vague way complicate the lives of our children’s children if we aren’t careful. We’ve seen this week that it is local and immediate — here and now.
For my part, I spent Tuesday afternoon at Picnic Point with my environmental studies class, so it took an effort to force myself to remember how 70 degrees and sunny could possibly be bad news. Once I did, I started to wonder if all those flies biting at my feet should have been killed off in a late-night freeze by now, and if the loons on Lake Mendota would ever join the ranks of bird populations compelled by warmer weather to stop migrating altogether or be driven to extinction by species that do.
The lake itself had to be suffering some complex reactions to temperature confusion that day, too. On an average recorded winter, Lake Mendota stays frozen for about 105 days, from late December to early April. In the winter of 2006-07, ice cover lasted a mere 66 days, from late January to late March. Limnologists predict a messy conglomeration of impacts, ranging from dropping lake levels (and thus erosion) to a depletion of oxygen in the water, and therefore of fish.
If changes in local biodiversity and ice cover sound like objects of merely academic interest to you (or none at all), consider this: a study conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency maintains that a 3 degree temperature rise in Milwaukee (urban areas heat more and faster than rural ones) would double the deaths in heat waves. Further warming also promises a boom in the disease-carrying mosquito population, an item worthy of serious concern as the carriers of diseases like yellow fever continue to move north. EPA climatologists predict the conversion of 55-75 percent of Wisconsin’s forests to grassland and savannah over the coming century. Impacts on Wisconsin’s $6 billion agriculture industry are difficult to predict, but some studies suggest a loss of as much as 34 percent of Wisconsin’s corn production as agriculture shifts north. Finally, climate change promises more repeat episodes of extreme weather, from drought to excessive precipitation, as we have already seen in last winter’s record-breaking snowfall and last summer’s “thousand-year flood.”
In the spirit of hope, change or whatever the hell it is we just elected to rule the free world, I suggest we get together with our friends, our business leaders and our representatives to spend a lot more time talking about the weather.
Courtney Ehlers (ehlers@wisc.edu) is a sophomore majoring in history and environmental science.
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Gee, if you pick your examples like that (two non-random samples) it’s pretty easy to prove ANYTHING.
Great, we had a few unusually warm days this week. Your very next statement was that it was supposed to snow later in the week. Do you realize that the weather fluctuates and we occasionally have both warm and cold spells.
Next you choose to point out that we only had 66 days of ice coverage on the lake in 06-07. Way to pick the number that supports your cause! In 07-08 we had 106 and in 05-06 we had 95.
If we’re going to use your fuzzy proof we can actually prove it’s getting colder. In 97-98 there were only 47 days of ice coverage, in 98-99 there were 53. Based on the changes we are obviously heading for an ice age! Throw in the fact that recorded temps last year actually showed the world cooling off from the year before and a much stronger picture could be made the other way, accurate or not.
If you’re going to go into a science related field, you better get a whole lot better at backing up your arguments with solid facts, if not, start looking at another major.
This is an extremely misguided article. While global warming is an extremely important issue, it is foolish to think that 70 degree days in November are a sign of global warming. By that reasoning, if you look at this summer there was actually global cooling. How many 100 degree days were there this year?
Also, why would corn production move north, they grow corn in the tropical areas of Central America, not to mention Illinois. The only significant change in corn production will be to plant other varieties.
Global warming is a very important issue, but it is generalizations like 71 degrees in November is due to global warming that contribute to people not actually understanding the real problem- that the overall global average temperature is rising, causing climate and weather pattern shifts. These are mentioned in the article, but the whole basis for the article is a false premise that represents the misguided way many people think of global warming.
An increase in temperature will not cause problems with disease carrying mosquitoes. It would increase the number of mosquitoes but I doubt there would be any significant increase in diseases carried by mosquitoes. Besides, the only disease carried by mosquitoes in this area is west nile. Seems like you just put together a bunch of facts from various sources and tried to make them into an article. Nice try…
“Record snowfall” due… to global warming ??? Wow, you must be taught anything except critical thinking at college.
Global warming will be a problem.
Global cooling will be the end of civilization.
The Sun determines the climate, not human activity.
What a horribly written article. The average temperature is just that, an average. There is a little thing called variance present. Yes, the recent warm weather is very unusual, but so was the sharp cold snap the previous week.
Climate change is a long-term issue and is completely unrelated to infinitesimal daily fluctuations around the mean.
I’m with ya, here. But, I’m not gonna lie…it is pretty damn nice out right now. It will be cold soon enough… :(
How’d they let you into this university? And then give you a computer to write this nonsense. the point of the article is a valid concern, but how you get there is just flat wrong. I’m not a scientist or statistician, but you can’t use 1 day for for a proof to your theorm that global warming is real. For your sake, we’ll let you use monday - wednesday of this week. that is 3 DAYS out of at least 100 YEARS of data you should be looking at…
By that logic, when it is -10 degrees in january, are we entering another ice age…
Perhaps we should gather a bit more data before going to the “sky is falling” stage?
The return of sea ice
That’s right. Satellites show that the area of the planet covered by sea ice is back to the baseline.
We await the breathless headlines with, well, bated breath.
http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2008/11/return-of-sea-ice.html
‘When the Romans lived in Britain they were growing very good red grapes and making wine on the borders of Scotland. It was evidently a lot warmer.’
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/69623
Must have been those Roman SUV chariots - all the methane from horse farts maybe?
Please stop exhaling, Courtney.
You are obviously an acolyte in the Gaian Church of NonScience Global Warming Now. Show your commitment to reducing Woman-Made Global Warming and stop exhaling CO2 now.
Invictus Maneo
I totally agree with the first poster, and was going to say the same thing. Don’t pick and choose your “scientific” data. Most notably you left out last year, which, as most of us remember, was the snowiest winter in Wisconsin history. Over 100 inches of snow.
Let me also add that you shouldn’t close your mind to the idea that global warming may not be man-made. Michael Crichton, who sadly passed away yesterday, author of Jurassic Park and State of Fear (along with many other great novels) has given some amazing speeches about environmentalism. I encourage you to go to his website and read his speech. Here is the link: http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-complexity.html
There are several speeches he gave concerning the environment, including one on Environmentalism as Religion, and I encourage you to read each of them. It may not change your mind, but I hope it at least allows you to recognize that the debate over global warming is not over, that it is just a theory, and that theories or what has been known as “scientific fact” have been debunked before.
Great article! I especially like that you mentioned the George C. Marshal institute, the main agency responsible for the “global warming debate” producing “scientific evidence” by writing letters to the editor.
Some of the earlier comments are also confusing to me, since when is Michael Chrichton an expert on the environment?
And in response to some of the other comments, global warming is not necessarily characterized by an increase in temperature, more like global climate destabilization.
In a final point, the ice cover duration on Lake Mendota has been decreasing on average over the last 140 years since the industrial revolution. In fact, here’s a graph of the trend from the Wisconsin Climatology Office! http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~sco/lakes/mendota-dur.gif
I believe the point this author was trying to make was that we cannot simply ignore climate change and expect everything to turn out alright. Most likely it will humans, and the poorest of them, who will suffer the most from this.
I’m going to try and build my own dirty coal firing plant now because it will make the weather in Wisconsin a lot nicer. Thanks for the advice.
Wow! Are you actually serious? Please tell us that you were trying to make a funny. Lame attempt but please tell us thats your intentions.
Nice article! It is important to realize that the weather is changing and has been for some time. The comments criticizing Courtney come from ignorant people who haven’t taken the time to actually research the facts. The Arctic icecap was at its all time lowest extent this summer and was also at its thinnest ever recorded. If the shrinking of the icecap doesn’t convince some people, they must like sticking there head in the sand and pretending that nothing is wrong.
I was only following the logic of this article. Cause: “Global Warming” yields effect “Nice Weather” and there isn’t a possibility that it could be anything else. We’ll assume Global Warming is caused by CO2 emissions. So how do we get nice weather? We have to pollute!
Of course I’m not serious but the author of this article must have be “trying to make a funny” because last time I checked you can’t suppport a thesis with like 3 days and one winter out of over a century of climate patterns since the industrial revolution. I don’t doubt climate change. I doubt people who don’t support their argument.
Courtney, I agree with you, but this kind of faulty science is what discredits our cause. Even if you were just trying to illustrate your point, it’s easy for people to take you out of context and chalk us all up to be just a bunch of pseudo-science believers.