Politics muddy global warming debate

Politics muddy weather debate

Seems you can’t even talk about the weather without stirring up some politics these days.

You know the conversation: It’s often borne out of an awkward silence between two or more people, when somebody says something like, “Some weather we’re having, huh?”

It’s generally a noncontroversial topic of conversation.

Until, that is, someone brings up climate change.

link Tom McDonald

I thought about this as I considered writing this column about the wild weather fluctuations we’ve had lately.

From my Las Vegas perch in northeastern New Mexico, I watched as temperatures plummeted from the 70s on a recent Sunday afternoon to below zero by Wednesday morning. Then, a day later, the sun heated us back up into the 60s — before dropping into the teens and delivering a few inches of snow.

So, as I started on my crazy-weather column, I realized I couldn’t do the subject justice without raising the question of global warming and its impact on weather patterns.

Meteorologists said the cause of the recent dramatic drop in temperatures — not just in New Mexico but nationwide — was polar air being picked up and delivered to us by a jet stream dipping further south than normal.

But with a little bit of online research, I found a more thorough explanation.

It’s called “arctic amplification” and it makes sense — though it’s not an established fact.

In a report at weather.com (The Weather Channel’s website), a research professor at Rutgers University, Jennifer Francis, explained that as the planet warms, sea ice melts and the sunshine that would have bounced off the ice and reflected back into space is instead absorbed by the ocean, which heats up and melts more ice.

Then, come autumn, the extra heat in all that open water makes its way into the atmosphere and, as Francis says, “all that extra heat … cannot help but affect the weather, both locally and on a large scale.”

Scientists say the Arctic is warming up about twice as fast as the rest of the earth, which is narrowing the temperature differences between the top of the world and lower latitudes. That affects the jet stream and its looping path across North America, making it larger and more sluggish, so the cold air hits us all the harder and sticks around that much longer.

The weather.com article, written by Terrell Johnson, points out that “not all climate scientists accept the linkages between long-term global warming, thinning Arctic sea ice, and weather events ... The science around attributing weather events at lower latitudes to what happens in the Arctic is still very new, and scientists are far from consensus on whether such a link exists.”

Now that’s a debate worth having, because it’s based on science.

For most Americans, financial realities are front and center among their worries. While they may be concerned about the environment, keeping a roof over their family’s head is a far more pressing concern.

Still, that doesn’t change reality. We need to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions. But our political divisions have robbed us of the willpower to do what’s necessary to keep our planet inhabitable.

That’s what politics did to the conversation.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at: tmcdonald@ gazettemediaservices.com