Don Wooten: Climate change crisis keeps slipping into background - Quad-City Times

Don Wooten: Climate change crisis keeps slipping into background
Don Wooten

Summer officially arrived around 10 a.m. this past Wednesday, asserting itself with a high temperature of 93: about 8 degrees above normal.

Above normal seems to be our fate for this season. We’ve had a string of 90s already with more to come. Drought conditions continue in the near term even as humidity inches up. Some rain may be falling in the region, but this summer looks to be a mostly dry scorcher.

There are no guarantees in the weather forecasting business, other than that conditions will change; they always do. Global warming continues to rise and, with it, unpredictable swings in temperature and precipitation. Like economists, meteorologists are better at explaining the past than the future.

The truth is, we don’t know nearly enough about the weather. I’ve lived long enough to have witnessed the discovery of the jet stream and low-level jets, along with our increasing knowledge about storm cells, the formation of rain drops, the hole in the ozone layer, and dozens of other phenomena as we continue to probe into the how and why of weather. There’s still a lot to learn.

People are also reading…

Along with the arrival of the hurricane season’s first named tropical storm (“Bret,” now entering the Caribbean region), comes “Hurricane of Data,” an article in the May 14th New York Times magazine. It was written by Porter Fox, containing research drawn from his forthcoming book, “The Great River of the Sea.” His essay covers some remarkable new information about these massive storms, focusing on the sail drone, an ingenious device which yields new and surprising information about what drives and sustains these monsters.

Fox emphasizes our relative ignorance of oceans: “More than 80 percent has yet to be mapped in high definition, and hardly any of it is being monitored and measured regularly. Oceanographers often point out that appropriations for NASA’s deep-space exploration outpaces ocean exploration by more than 150 to 1 - to the point that scientists know more about the surface of Mars than they do our own seas.”

The article is an eye-opener. I am anxious to read the book. It also reminds us that, as devastating as Atlantic hurricanes can be, they constitute only 16% of such storms worldwide; with 60% confined to the Pacific regions of eastern Asia and 24% to the South Pacific and Indian oceans.

Another newsworthy event prompted interest in another book. We recently experienced the smoky remains of huge fires in southeastern Canada. John Vaillant, a Canadian American journalist has written a terrifying account of the 2016 fire that obliterated Fort McMurray in Alberta. It was a boomtown built to house workers mining oil sands in the middle of a forest. Global warming had extended the dry season and years of fire suppression had left it a dry dense timberland that could explode in fire.

On May 1, 2016, a wildfire started and went out of control, forcing the town’s 88,000 residents to flee. Miraculously, no one was killed, but 2,400 homes and buildings were destroyed in a blaze that consumed 1.5 million acres and grew so hot it created its own weather system, with hurricane-force winds, lightning, and black hail falling from towering clouds of smoke.

Vaillant’s book is entitled “Fire Weather,” something North American forests seem doomed to experience as droughts stretch out. Vaillant notes that it was human intrusion into the pristine region that precipitated “The Beast” as the fire became known. Alberta’s forests cover the world’s largest source of tar sands which produce bitumen, a molasses like substance from which crude oil can be fashioned. The U.S. gets 40% of its oil imports from this source. The $9 billion dollar fire won’t be Alberta’s last.

On the subject of forests, the latest Science News carries a thoughtful examination of “The Amazon’s Cloudy Future” by Nikk Ogasa, a staff writer specializing in the physical sciences. The Amazon constitutes more than half of the world’s remaining forests. It is a critical part of the “weather machine” circulating from South America to the Arctic.

Ogasa explains how the Amazon sustains itself, transporting moisture from the trade winds throughout the entire forest, through roots and rain, about five times before releasing it into the upper atmosphere. “A single tree can pump 500 liters of water into the atmosphere each day.” It is a delicate balance which is being threatened by the loss of some 17% of its eastern edge.

Again, it is human intrusion which threatens the Amazon’s existence. Trees are being cut down and land cleared to raise cattle. About six years ago, Earth system scientist Carlos Nobre and his colleagues warned that “If just 20 to 25 percent of the Amazon was deforested and global warming reached about 2.4 degrees Celsius, the ecosystem could collapse.”

These stories are just part of current literature dealing with recent weather phenomena, from California’s vacillation between drought and deluge to the heat dome blistering Texas.

We get so caught up in other matters of concern that the climate change crisis keeps slipping into the background. Worried climatologists keep trying to catch our attention, but we are easily distracted by the clown show of political campaigning and the more serious problems of gun violence, abortion, the steady creep of religion into government, the continuing takeover of real estate by investor groups, and other developing sores in the body politic.

These are serious matters, well worth our attention. But even those crucial concerns and threats pale beside the realization that we are swinging into the tipping point in climate change and will soon be unable to stop it. Reading about it won’t change things, but it might help stir us into action.

Don Wooten is a former Illinois state senator and a regular columnist. Email him at: donwooten4115@gmail.com.