talkin about the weather

[42itous]

(I'm sorry I don't remember how to do an LJ cut tag, so I apologize for cluttering up your friends page with this random meander through Martha's brain...)

Remember when talking about the weather was small talk, something to do to pass the time of day with strangers at a party or in line at the grocery store? When did weather become a topic loaded with political and religious implications?

I may be paranoid, but it seems to me like the increasing peculiarity of the weather over the last few years is a political agenda waiting to happen.
In 2002, it was 90 degrees in April and then snowed in May.
In 2002-03, we had record-breaking amounts of snow in the winter.
In 2003-04, we had a blizzard in December and then three record-breaking weeks during which the temperature never rose above 0 degrees fahrenheit.
In 2005, so far, we've had a blizzard (January), a month of rain (May), three months with no rain, an unprecedented number of hurricanes causing an unprecedented amount of damage.
The above statistics are very, very skewed because I'm too lazy to look up what was going on elsewhere in the world, but I only mean them to serve as a basis for my next thought:

Some people see the strange weather as acts of God (and earthquakes play into that opinion, admittedly).
Some people suspect that the violence of the weather lately can be attributed to the way humans have been treating the Earth (badly).
The problem is, the segment of the population who take the Acts of God view overlaps very strongly with the segment of the population who influence legislation governing how humans are allowed to treat the Earth.

Another random thought:
On September 11th 2001, many people had eighteen minutes of "that was a horrible accident" before they faced "that was an act of terrorism." I feel like we're in the middle of the parallel to that 18 minutes, here at the beginning of what may be a drastic change in global weather patterns. It still seems like it might be coincidence. I wonder if we will look back on these past few years and think how innocent we were, just before we as a species realized that we had permanently munged our environment.

Comments

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Not that this was an excessively long entry or anything, but since you mentioned for future reference: <lj-cut>

(Or <lj-cut text="Text for cut">)

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

Eh. When you hear about "record breaking weather!!!!!1!!1!!one!!!", what they tend to fail to mention is that the records only go back to the late 19th century. And if you recall, the planet was just coming out of a "Little Ice Age" at the time.

So yeah, we're going to see warmer weather. Record-breaking, even.

You listed some wonky weather from the last few years, but that's local phenomena. My home-town (Burlington VT) still hasn't seen the record cold of the winter of 1969/1970 broken, nor the record snowfall of 1970/1971. Six years later, when Buffalo NY was inundated, we had a "typical" blizzard-filled winter.

Is it warmer now than it was in the 15th century? We literally don't know. We know about some global trends of that time, but aside from the urban heat island effect (from the sun shining on all that pavement), we don't actually have human activity nailed down to the global warming we're seeing.

But let's not go overboard: there is global warming, and anyone who says otherwise is actively not paying attention. The Arctic ice cap has already receded miles from shore. Ocean levels are definitely rising. And the intensity of hurricanes, mapped across the thirty-some-odd-year intensity cycle, is rising.

But let's not go overboard: there were more named storms this year than any other, but we didn't have the ability to see, measure, or identify tropical depressions worth naming in the mid-Atlantic until only fifteen years ago (and that was at the "trough" of the latest hurricane-intensity cycle).

I far prefer it when everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

I wonder if we will look back on these past few years and think how innocent we were, just before we as a species realized that we had permanently munged our environment.

Yeah, that thought had crossed my mind. Sigh. BTW, I'd pretty much decided to spend the day of Oct 31st in Salem alone, but wanted to specifically invite you to join me if you were able, since we rarely get to hang together. I assumed that you saw my general posting about it, but in case you haven't..

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

PS - was that subject line a Dave Matthews reference?

[sings] So much to say, so much to say...

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Oh! No, it wasn't intentional, but now I have that song in my head. :)

I'm sorry I can't hang out with you on Halloween. I have two jobs that day (and another that would gladly keep me occupied all day if I didn't have either of the two I intend to actually go to). And in the evening, I must feed a shelterful of cats before heading home to hand out chocolate to neighborhood kids. Kyle thinks we'll have a lot of them, it being such a nice neighborhood, but I think it's a cul-de-sac essentially and we won't have more than a few.

[galadhelsul.livejournal.com]

It's just because you can buy and sell weather now. Once people can make money off bad weather, they are going to try to cause bad weather. Currently, you can only buy and sell what are effectively average temperatures. They will almost certainly add rain and snow eventually. I wouldn't be surprised if they add hurricanes at some point. In case anyone cares, weather is traded at CME (www.cme.com).

More seriously, we still don't have good climate models. There is still a lot of uncertainty about what weather is normal. There is supposed to be a 30ish year hurricane cycle, which means that even without global warming things would be getting worse now. People just don't remember things for that long.