New Philly Weekly: Climate Change Follies
I’ve always been confused by the debate between which term is more appropriate to describe humanity’s carbon dioxide driven destruction of our world: global warming or climate change? “Climate change” has such a passive sound to it, but “global warming” is confusing: how come it snows so much if the globe is getting warmer?
So for now, I’m leaning toward climate change, and in my latest for the Philadelphia Weekly, I explain why we’re getting more snow as the planet heats up:
Behind all of this is, as Martin Longman at Booman Tribune points out, is an inability to grasp the fact climate change and the record snowfall might well be connected. “I guess that’s why people stopped using the term ‘global warming,’” he writes, “since it obviously mystifies conservatives.”
I’ll admit the term is confusing, but the fact remains that our crazy weather, from our incredibly wet summer 2009 to the blizzards we just went through, are tied to climate change/global warming. In fact, the connection was predicted almost a decade ago by scientists at the World Wildlife Fund, who argued that in the years ahead, we’d see more precipitation, stronger El Niños, and more extreme changes in the weather overall as the planet heats up. And what do we have this year? A stronger than usual El Niño, a Pennsylvania so soaked in precipitation that we had one of the worst growing seasons ever, and record-breaking blizzards in Philadelphia.
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