This rant by Bill McKibben is emblematic of the kind of slap-dash, free association that passes for smart commentary by global warming fanaticists. The author seeks to discredit those who would not readily assume that a series of recent severe weather events constitute evidence of climate change. By mocking those who would assert otherwise, McKibben is, in effect, arguing that recent torandos in Joplin, MO, and Tuscaloosa, AL, and the "enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that" are related events, and that the link is . . . (you guessed it) manmade global warming!
What a rube I must be. Here I've lived in the upper Midwest my entire life, and just assumed that tornadoes occur when air masses of certain temperature and barometric pressure collide. I also believed what I heard in statistics class about random, independent events seeming to come about in discernible patterns.
Until now, when people told me that "deaths come in threes," I would gently suggest to them that it just seems that way, given a never-ending string of deaths in our lives, and a vague idea of just how close those deaths would have to be in order to be related. If A dies on April 27, and B dies on May 22 (the span of time between Tuscaloosa and Joplin), are those deaths close enough to be part of the same tri-part event? Does that mean that C has to die on or before June 22? What if C doesn't die until July 15?
Some people see religious imagery in knots on trees, on rust stains on stone walls, and in the random designs "visible" on burnt toast.
As is typical in screeds posted by true believers, the facts get in the way of McKibben's thesis. McKibben points to 2011 tornadic activity as evidence that global warming is heating up the atmosphere. The problem is that there are HUNDREDS OF TORNADOES EVERY YEAR in the United States. Once, over a two day span (April 3-4, 1974), there were 147 separate tornadoes in 13 states! (see the Online Tornado FAQ hosted by NOAA). Per the same source, the month of May, 2003, saw 543 tornadoes in the United States!
Let's face it, Bill, there are ALWAYS severe weather events (hurricanes, tsunamis, blizzards) trundling one after the other across North America and the world. You can group them any way you wish in order to suggest a pattern (or lack of one, for that matter).
I'm not saying that there could never be a link between global temperature change and severe weather. It makes perfect sense that there could be such a link. I for one, haven't seen the straw people that McKibben hypothesizes (the myopic d-e-n-i-e-r-s) who adamantly assert that there can't be a link. But I can well imagine the intelligent and thoughtful (not necessarily readers of WaPo) who admit the possibility but intuitively understand the risks of jumping to broad conclusions based on clusters of more or less random events.
It is silliness to suggest that a cool spring debunks theories of global warming. It is just as silly to assert that a couple of severe weather events in a 3 or 4 week period supports those same theories.
While there "could be" a link between 2011 tornadoes and global warming, I suppose that there could also be a link beween the death of my mail carrier and that of Aunt Agnes about 6 weeks ago.
If it is wrong to be skeptical about the conclusions of fanatics and true believers, then I don't want to be right.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
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