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 ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in history and environmental science.
