Today is, once again, mind-numbingly hot: the National Weather service warns that "HEAT INDICES...WILL PEAK BETWEEN 107 AND 113 AGAIN TODAY. THE OPPRESSIVE HEAT AND HUMIDITY WILL CONTINUE TONIGHT IN THE CITY WHERE HEAT INDICES ARE NOT FORECAST TO DROP OUT OF THE 90S ALL NIGHT LONG." We continue to languish in crop-killing sweltering heat, the third day in a row of heat above 100 degrees in Chicago, which is causing roads to buckle, and record heat fueling the largest forest fires in at least a decade in Colorado
In response, the WeatherChannel posted an article entitled “Torrid Heat: 4000 Record Highs and Counting.”
But they said nothing at all about climate change.
In one respect this is understandable: human-created global warming is ridiculously hard to measure in individual cases, because 100+/35+ degree air doesn't carry a country-of-origin tag: it is just heat.
But in another respect, the omission is almost criminal: this weather is related to global warming. If you never talk about climate on the weather channel, then you will get a bunch of people who never think about it, who never think about its relation to their own lives.
That and other news sources often run stories on (usually badly misinformed) people saying that climate change is a hoax. Every time there is bad winter weather, the climate-change deniers are out in force, saying, absurdly, "look: if there really was global warming, snowstorms would never happen!"
This is to believe, as Stephen Colbert says, that "whatever just happened is the only thing that is happening." Rachel Maddow, too, points out that this is to think that "whatever we're looking at this instant disproves everything else we know about the world."
Climate change deniers ought to take their own advice and look at the record heat with the exact same idea. And the Weather Channel ought to talk about climate change.
Climate change does not just involve the upward global trend of heat,
which even the oil industry acknowledges as real (Jon Stewart provided the best coverage on this story). It also involves shifting weather patterns.
For example, the jet stream, which acts like a
barrier between colder northern air and hot southern air, is changing
in speed and direction because the arctic is so much warmer. This is why we got a week of 80+ degree weather in March in Chicago, and it's one reason why temperatures are so extreme right
now.
These two videos give some excellent insight into how this works:
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Rob St. Amant
MJDN
Shannon Kelley
vzn
Barbara Joanne
SpiritManSF
Salon.com
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