This winter, many of us have witnessed first-hand the power of extreme weather to wreak havoc in people's lives. In the south Puget Sound, ice-laden branches and treetops strained, creaked, then cracked and crashed to the ground. Snow the next night, then a rapid warming, torrential rain and wind that broke more trees and caused floods and mudslides throughout the region. California was awash in record flooding, and much of the broad middle of the continent, like Europe, was gripped by incredible cold. Naturally, this has many people speculating on whether or not global warming has somehow thrown the climate system out of equilibrium, so that weather of all types surges with more intensity.
Science has no way to say how much, if at all, human influence on the atmosphere has augmented a specific storm event. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of more than 2000 top climate scientists worldwide, concluded in late 1995 that humans have in fact altered the climate of the Earth in the last century.
Christopher Flavin, in the January/February issue of World Watch, notes that the economic damage caused by storms has grown markedly in the last 15 years. Worldwide, insurance companies paid out $17 billion in weather-related damages through the entire 1980's. In just the first half of the 1990's, weather-caused damages reached $57 billion (add uninsured damages and the figure reaches $160 billion). This has the global insurance industry sweating bullets.
Few people understand the growing danger that global warming will get out of our control as carbon is released to the atmosphere as CO2 from immense storehouses in the soils and forests, accelerating global warming. For example, new field measurements suggest that the Arctic Tundra, where the equivalent of one-third of the total carbon in the atmosphere is locked in permafrost, is beginning to release more carbon than it is locking away. "The concern is what will happen in the future as global warming increases and melting permafrost exposes more of this buried carbon to be respired and released to the atmosphere," says George W, King of the National Science Foundation team that did the study.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
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