From Face the Nation today:
BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, Doctor Shepherd, let me just cut to the chase here. Are we doing something here on Earth that is causing the weather to change or is this just one of the cycles that– that what we go through?
J. MARSHALL SHEPHERD (American Meteorological Society): Yeah, this is a question I often get, Bob. Of course, I mean, it’s amazing to me when someone comes up to me and says “Doctor Shepherd, the climate change is natural.” I say, of course, it does. I should send my degree back to Florida State University, if I didn’t know that. But what’s most important about that is that on top of this natural variability, as– as Heidi mentioned, we now have a steroid. Think of a basketball player. I mean I’m a big basketball fan. We were in the middle of the playoffs right now. A basketball ten feet high think of it this way: Climate change is actually adding about a foot to the basketball floor so that more people can dunk the basketball. There’s just more amplification. That warmer and more moist climate is amplifying, as– as Heidi mentioned, some of the weather systems that we see. And one quick point I want to make. I often get the question: well, what is the big deal? One and a half degree? Well, if our child gets a one-and-a-half or a two-degree fever that may not sound like a lot, but our body responds to that and our climate system as well. But the scary news is we’re talking about an additional three- to ten-to-fourteen degrees perhaps in some models in the next one hundred years. [Emphasis added]
This was the first time I’ve heard an activist suggest there was a natural component to climate change, but he didn’t give us a guess on the affect of the natural component. My first thought on reading this was just how much under 9 feet from the floor was the basket in the department that granted his doctorate.