Climate-change deniers have shifted the international response to global warming. The new plan for humankind is adaptation
IT’S ALL happening in front of our eyes. The US is parched. More than half of its continental land area is affected by moderate to extreme drought after the warmest 12 months since records began, in 1895. The US National Weather Service issued excessive-heat warnings this month for parts of Arizona, Nevada and California: temperatures were forecast to hit 45 degrees in Phoenix, 45.5 degrees in Las Vegas and 51.6 degrees in Death Valley.
In Russia, a state of emergency was declared in the southern towns and cities of Krymsk, Novorossiysk and Gelendzhik after six months’ rain fell on the region in two days, causing devastating floods that killed at least 170 people and led to almost 3,000 being evacuated. On Thursday a report by climate-change strategists at HSBC bank said this extreme weather has “direct implications for agricultural production” and was already being reflected in higher commodity prices; in the US alone, corn production forecasts have been cut by 12.3 per cent.
Closer to home, it was reported that large parts of Cork city are now uninsurable because of the floodings of recent years, the latest at the end of last month. This week the Government approved a €10 million hardship fund for householders affected by the floods.
Although none of this extreme weather can be definitively attributed to global warming, it is all entirely consistent with the predictions of climate scientists going back many years that we would experience increasingly severe weather, including droughts, floods and heatwaves as a result of climate change.
This link is barely acknowledged, especially in the US. “The phrase ‘extreme weather’ flashes across television screens from coast to coast, but its connection to climate change is consistently ignored, if not outright mocked,” says Amy Goodman, an American columnist. As a result, “we may not act in time to avert even greater catastrophe.”
“The phrase ‘extreme weather’ flashes across television screens from coast to coast, but its connection to climate change is consistently ignored, if not outright mocked,”
I’m not sure what they would have expected when they CAGW believers told us throughout the late 80s and 90s that all those very cold, very snowy winters we experienced were “weather”, not climate. Now they want the “weather” to be proof of their climate change religion, so we’re supposed to forget what they said all those winters we could barely keep ourselves dug out of the snow.
Year round we need shovels to dig ourselves out. Not from snow but from what the promoters of CAGW are spewing. Chest waders might be advised actually. I can’t beleive that some people are still foolish enough to believe all that fertilizer.