Noted left-fascist zombie Eugene Robinson of Washington's other newspaper leads off with a cranky piece obviously written while trying to defecate without the benefit of air conditioning:
Still Don't Believe In Climate Change?
Still don’t believe in climate change? Then you’re either deep in denial or delirious from the heat.
Have you noticed how the bogeyman has changed from "global warming" to "climate change"?
Heck, the climate here at my dacha changes every time the sun goes down. Or when the seasons change.
As I write this, the nation’s capital and its suburbs are in post-apocalypse mode.
[Post-apocalyptic zombie mode is more like it. Eric Holder is killing and eating Border Patrol agents and then blaming The Vast Right Wing You-Know-What. - F.G.] About one-fourth of all households have no electricity, the legacy of
an unprecedented assault by violent thunderstorms Friday night. Things
are improving: At the height of the power outage, nearly half the region
was dark.
The line of storms, which killed at least 18 people as it raced from the
Midwest to the sea, culminated a punishing day when the official
temperature here reached 104 degrees, a record for June. Hurricane-force
winds wreaked havoc
with the lush tree canopy that is perhaps Washington’s most glorious
amenity. One of my neighbors was lucky when a huge branch, headed for
his roof, got snagged by a power line. Another neighbor lost a tree that
fell into another tree that smashed an adjacent house, demolishing the
second floor.
Yes, it’s always hot here in the summer — but not this hot. Yes, we
always have thunderstorms — but never like these. (The cliche is true:
It did sound like a freight train.)
According to
scientists, climate change means not only that we will see higher
temperatures but that there will be more extreme weather events like the
one we just experienced. Welcome to the rest of our lives.
This
is the point in the column where I’m obliged to insert the disclaimer
that no one event — no heat wave, no hurricane, no outbreak of tornadoes
or freakish storms — can be definitively blamed on climate change. Any
one data point can be an anomaly; any cluster of data points can be mere
noise.
Now watch as Geenie Weenie disregards the only reasonable paragraph [albeit a short one] he has ever typed...
The problem for those who dismiss climate change as a figment of
scientists’ imagination, or even as a crypto-socialist one-worldish plot
to take away our God-given SUVs, is that the data are beginning to add
up.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
says the past winter was the fourth-warmest on record in the United
States. To top that, spring — which meteorologists define as the months
of March, April and May — was the warmest since recordkeeping began in 1895. If you don’t believe me or the scientists, ask a farmer whose planting seasons have gone awry.
NASA’s
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which monitors global surface
temperatures, reports that nine of the warmest 10 years on record have
occurred since 2000. The warmest of all was 2010; last year was only the ninth-warmest, but global temperatures were still almost a full degree warmer than they were during the middle of the 20th century.
Why might this be happening? Well, the level of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is more than 35 percent greater
than in 1880, NASA scientists report, with most of the increase coming
since 1960. And why might carbon dioxide levels be rising? Because since
the Industrial Revolution, humankind has been burning fossil fuels —
and spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — at what could turn out
to be a catastrophic rate.
Scientists’ predictions about how quickly temperatures would rise —
and how rapidly assorted phenomena, such as melting polar ice and rising
sea levels, would proceed — have turned out, thus far, to be
conservative.
There comes a point where anomalies can start
looking like a trend. What much of the country has seen the past few
days is no ordinary heat wave. Temperatures reached 105 in Raleigh; 106 in Atlanta; 108 in Columbia, S.C., and Macon, Ga.; 109 in Nashville — all-time highs.
Meanwhile, the most destructive wildfires in Colorado history
were destroying hundreds of homes — a legacy of drought that left
forests as dry as tinder. Changes in rainfall and snowfall patterns in
the West cannot, of course, be blamed on climate change with any
certainty. But they are consistent with scientists’ predictions.
It becomes harder to ignore those predictions when a toppled tree is blocking your driveway and the power is out.
One
other observation: As repair crews struggle to get the lights back on,
it happens to be another sunny day. Critics have blasted the Obama
administration’s unfruitful investment in solar energy. But if
government-funded research had managed to lower the price of solar
panels to the point where it became economical to install them on
residential roofs, all you global-warming skeptics would have air
conditioning right now. I’m just sayin’.
Heat Miser. He's neither Heat Nazi nor zombie.
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