Warming leads to ‘global weirding’

Farmers agree ‘something’s different’: expert

Winters are warming faster than any other season and cold temperatures are more rare than in the last 50 or 60 years, said an American expert on climate change who made two presentations Monday at a conference in Edmonton.

“We also expect there isn’t going to be a big change in rainfall during the growing season, but as it gets warmer, water evaporates more, and so if it gets warmer and there is no change in rainfall, it gets drier,” said Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University.

People who understand and live in the outdoors such as farmers or ranchers will agree something’s different, she said.

“They will tell you that tulips used to bloom at the end of April, but now they are blooming in the beginning of April,” she said.

“The birds that they see migrating are migrating at different times of the year.”

That is why she likes to call this “global weirding,” she said. “Things are different.”

Hayhoe is the author of A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions, which untangles the complex science and tackles many long-held misconceptions about global warming. She spoke with Postmedia at the Cities and Climate Change Science Conference at the Shaw Conference Centre.

More winter precipitation will fall as rain and less as snow, with more hot days, she said.

For thousands of years, climate has changed, Hayhoe said.

“Little ups and downs and ups and downs and then whoa — big change,” she said. “We are not prepared for this rate of change.”

Hayhoe is known to challenge the idea that faith and science are incompatible.

“Science is not a religion,” Hayhoe said. “You cannot choose whether you want to believe in it or not and have your choice actually make a difference. If you say you don’t believe in gravity and step off a cliff, you’re going down just as fast as the person who does believe in gravity.”

“What we do as climate scientists is that we look at climate change,” she said. “People don’t realize this. We study it.”

Scientists study the sun and know the sun’s energy has been going down over the last few decades, she said.

“So if we are being controlled by the sun’s energy right now, we should have been getting cooler, not warmer.”

Orbital cycles were studied and showed that the next thing coming was an ice age: “But we are getting warmer.”

Scientists study volcanoes and know they produce one-tenth of the carbon dioxide and methane human emissions produce.

“So we look at all those natural factors and we say for the first time in the history of the planet, humans are controlling climate,” she said.

“And that means that our choices will determine our future.”