Living in a world where the population is topping 7 billion and temperatures are rising is going to be anything but normal.
A panel Saturday morning at the opening session of the Aspen Environment Forum painted an often bleak picture of how climate change is altering the world and how humans are dealing with the challenges.
The annual conference, presented by the Aspen Institute and National Geographic, is titled “Living in the New Normal” this year. The opening discussion carried the same name, but it soon became evident that there is no new normal.
“We’re living in a new abnormal, perhaps,” said Dennis Dimick, National Geographic magazine’s executive editor for the environment. He showed detailed graphic displays that demonstrate how global temperatures have increased 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1970s. Projections indicate that summers in 2040 to 2060 will be “warmer than the warmest on record,” he said.
Go ahead and throw weather records out the window, agreed Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The atmospheric conditions are changing to the point where “every weather event is different than it would have been,” Trenberth said. “We keep changing the climate so there is no new normal.”
The doublespeak factories are working overtime. “Normal” has now been redefined as “abnormal.”
For 3.5 billion years adaptation has been the ‘normal’ response to ‘change’ – at least by those destined to survive. I seriously doubt that the New Semantics will change that.
On a separate note, as a laboratory scientist I learned (very early!) that the only effect of projections using graphical data is self-delusion. Just because you *think* you know what Mother Nature has been doing so far, that does not mean that you are right, nor that Mother Nature isn’t going to change her mind in a moment. I have seen many *simple* physical cases (energy from a flame, gas leaking through a hole) where a linear response was only appropriate up to a point, beyond which the ‘hidden variable’ kicks in and changes the rules of the game.
At least the article didn’t appear in the “science” section of the paper. Pity that there was no opportunity to comment/rebut.
I’ve noticed that locally, all the “weather guessers” have moved away from “average” to “normal”. And they’ve also shortened their historical window from 100 or even 150 years to about 30 or 40 years, in order to eliminate many of the old extremes that make today’s temperatures seem relatively tame. I mean, why talk about the 1930s, or even the 1970s, when there were many days with more extreme weather than today, when you can shorten your window and pretend those extremes didn’t happen?