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| From the NOAA Collection: Ten Signs of a Warming World |
I was catching up on some reading today—as another snowstorm
kept me indoors for most of the day. Someone mentioned this article in the New York Times and I
thought I might as well catch-up on it as part of my reading. If you have not
read it, you should. It is interesting. The author, Porter Fox, an editor at
Powder magazine, writes about how climate scientists anticipate that by the end
of this century there will be few ski resorts left, and those that remain will
have shorter seasons.
The most interesting theory, Fox writes in his piece “The
End of Snow,” comes from one researcher who theorizes that there will be
only six cities left by the year 2100 cold enough to host the winter Olympics
of the 19 that have held them. This assumes a global temperature rise of 7
degrees Fahrenheit by then.
If you are a global warming scoffer, consider the following.
The average temperature in the United States hit
a record in 2012 at 55.3 F, 3.2 degrees higher than average and 1 degree
above the previous record of 1998. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s National Climate Data Center has a wealth of information on
this. One of the most eye-opening statistics is a graph I ran (you can run any
of a series of statics to get an overall picture
of U.S. and global
temperature patterns) that clearly shows a pattern of increasing average
temperatures, most dramatically since the mid-1990s (check the U.S. and global hyperlinks
if you haven’t).
There are people still hell-bent on denying that global
morning is a fact and that man-made activity is the cause. Because it is such a
hot-button issue among some extremists, who invariably tend to make a lot of
noise, many good people in the United States avoid using the term global warming.
The reality is denying reality and doing nothing to ameliorate carbon gases is
killing our environment and leaving a worse legacy for future generations than
budget deficits.
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