It’s Too Darn Hot
Kurt Vonnegut included a brief preamble to “Sirens of Titan”, one of
those beautiful pieces of terse Vonnegutian prose whose impact has
stayed with me, although I do forget the exact phrasing. It was
something like, “With every passing minute, our solar system moves
35,000 miles closer to the galaxy M31 in the constellation
Andromeda. And still there are some fools who insist there is no
such thing as progress.”
We’ve just broken through to the end of a massive heat wave here in
Alabama. If it wasn’t record-breaking, it must have come darn close.
Over 2 weeks of 100+ days, 3-4 weeks straight where it broke 100 at
least once. This, combined with a criminal (on the part of any deity
who might be charge of such things) lack of rain, has resulted in
some of the most insufferable weather anyone around here can
remember. Sweltering really doesn’t do justice to the reality.
Living in a furnace may come closer. “Pure hell” seems perfectly
apt.
And still there are some fools who insist there is no such thing as
global warming.
Two years ago, there came a record breaking number of hurricanes,
together with a record-breaking number of Category Five
hurricanes. Hurricanes, though they have their genesis in
complicated weather patterns and the effects of upper atmosphere air
patterns, are nevertheless dependent on, and ultimately receive
their power from, warm surface ocean water. The warmer the waters,
the more energy they impart to the hurricane, once it has gained its
circular structure. That’s why hurricanes weaken over land. As any
first year chemistry or physics student can tell you, dirt has a
much lower specific heat than water, meaning that it’s not as
efficient storing up the solar energy that oceans release so readily
into the hurricanes ever-ravenous eye. Warmer waters means more
powerful hurricanes, and sure enough, the waters of the Gulf of
Mexico, the Carribbean Sea, and all the world’s oceans are
extraordinarily warm, hotter than any time since we’ve been
measuring them.
[By
the way, if you want to see a hurricane nursery, go look at
weather.com’s maps of Equatorial Africa. You can see the hurricane
ova, lined up across Africa, like runners milling at the starting
gate, ready to launch themselves out over the Atlantic. Ready to
discover if any particular storm will encounter that chancy mix of
upper level winds and surface ocean currents that will transform it,
as it reaches the Outer Antilles, into a full-fledged
Hurrakan. Then other rolls of the dice will decide whether it
turns safely north; or maybe slams into Florida, Georgia, the
Carolinas; or vectors straight across the southern Carribbean into
Central America or Mexico; or, makes the little right-hand turn
around or across Cuba, enters the Gulf of Mexico, and takes aim at
Texas-Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama.]
So, it’s blazing hot on land. It’s hot as hell over the water. We’ve
got drought, monster storms, record heat. Surely there can be no
reasonable denial that we’re suffering some sort of climate change,
that global warming is real?
Au contraire, mon frere.
There is plenty of denial, although “reasonable” is not necessarily
a characteristic. There are people who insist on pointing out that,
concomitant with the drought and the heat, there have been, in
places, unseasonably extreme cold weather. There have been drenching
rains (look at Oklahoma, Texas, the Midwest). That, sure, 2005 was a
hurricane disaster, but 2006 was essentially bereft of hurricanes,
and this year looks pretty barren, too.
And they’re right.
Look, global warming is a misnomer in a way. The more correct
(albeit awkward) term should be something like “global retention of
energy”. The earth is essentially a fairly closed system, and
heat-trapping elements in the atmosphere (CO2, H20, CH4, etc) are
actually trapping energy in the system. We immediately translate
“heat” into “temperature”, the more heat, the higher the
temperature.
But we should think in terms of the total energy in
the system. Weather is like a huge set of mathematical chaos
functions, forming strange attractors that look like “stable”
weather patterns over a long period of time. But chaos theory
predicts that when you continue to ramp up the driving force for
these functions, the strange attractors will begin to wildly
oscillate. It’s not that everything gets hotter. It’s that
everything gets more extreme. And eventually, a set of new
strange attractors will be established, and we have, Voila!, climate
change. I.e., a new set of “stable” weather patterns.
I mean, look at the examples stated: torrential floods in Texas
and Oklahoma? A record number of named storms one year, then
practically none the next year. Some really frigid winter
storms, combined with extensive melting of the ice caps. These are
all examples of extreme events, not just a constant rise in average
temperature (although that, too, is happening).
And still there are some fools who insist there is no such thing as
man-made global retention of energy.
Does it matter? I mean, really, does it matter if the all the
CO2 emissions that are coincident with the Industrial Age, here in
the Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, does it matter if they are the
cause of these phenomena? What if there really is some hidden cycle
at work, doesn’t that absolve humankind from reacting to all this
mess? If it’s inevitable, then so be it.
Au contraire, mon frere.
Because, even if there is some hidden cycle, some function of
orbital variations combined with fluctuations in solar output
exacerbated by periodic passage through a galactic cloud of dark
matter, the fact remains that humankind is pumping astronomical
amounts of energy-trapping CO2 into the atmosphere. The fact
remains that we are continuously burning Connecticut-sized swaths of
CO2-abosrbing (O2-producing) rain forest. The fact remains that
(surprise!) we do have a significant impact, by our presence, on the
global status quo.
And the fact is, that cycle or not, that impact is negative. If
there is a cycle, we are pumping more and more into a
positive feedback loop, the thing that chaos theory thrives on, and
are therefore forcing the function into what is, by definition, an
unnatural resolution. And if there is no cycle, we’re just
screwing it all up all by ourselves. Either way, we’re not off the
hook.
With every passing moment, the Arctic Ocean reveals more and more
open water. With every passing moment, the average temperature
climbs a small, but finite amount. With every passing moment,
hundreds of species succumb to their inability to adapt to new
strange attractors.
And still there are some fools who claim there is no such thing as
progress.
© 2007 Chuck Puckett