National Post (National Edition)
Don’t blame it all on climate change
Seasonal allergies? Climate change. Dead whales washing up somewhere? Climate change. A civil war in Syria? Climate change.
Climate change is warming the planet and imparting a future of more frequent and intense extreme weather. But that doesn’t mean it’s singularly responsible for absolutely everything strange that happens around the world.
A telling example is the recent calving of a P.E.I.-sized iceberg from Antarctica’s Larsen Ice Shelf. Immediately, the event was touted as the best evidence going of Planet Earth coming apart at the seams.
But according to the scientists who actually study the ice shelf, the break probably would have happened anyway.
“The Larsen C rift and iceberg ‘calving’ is not a warning of imminent sea level rise, and any link to climate change is far from straightforward,” wrote Swansea University glaciologist Adrian Luckman.
A rift between Larsen C and the new iceberg had been forming since the 1980s. And while warming temperatures have generally been decimating global ice cover, Larsen C has been getting thicker.
Blaming everything unusual on climate change is akin to the guy who claims climate change is a hoax because it’s cold outside.
A classic example is U.S. Senator James Inhofe, who in 2015 used a snowball as evidence that the world wasn’t warming.
The continued existence of winter, however, does not discount the continued aggregate warming of the planet. Similarly, the evidence for climate change is a bit more detailed than “I saw some weird weather in the news.”
Take a look at almost any recent bout of extreme weather and there’s probably a historical equivalent.
Droughts are hitting North America? The Dust Bowl of the 1930s still stands as the worst of the last millennium.
B.C. is being ravaged by forest fires? In 1950, Alberta wildfires became so ferocious they plunged Toronto into darkness. The event remains the largest Canadian forest fire on record.
Phoenix was recently hit by a heat wave so intense it began to melt city infrastructure. And yet, the highest temperature ever recorded in the city, 50 C, occurred a generation ago, on June 26, 1990.
Look at the boring aggregated numbers, though, and the situation isn’t so normal: Sixteen of the world’s 17 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001, and global sea ice cover is definitely going down.
These changes are almost impossible to detect anecdotally. That’s why they need to be tracked with vast networks of satellites, weather observatories and lab-coated PhDs hunched over spreadsheets.
And even then, the consensus science is still pretty general: It’s getting hotter, humans are causing it and it’s screwing with everything — but science is still working on finding out how.
Take NASA’s Earth Observatory, which gives this measured assessment of global warming’s effect on natural disasters: “Climate change may not be responsible for the recent skyrocketing cost of natural disasters, but it is very likely that it will impact future catastrophes.”
A similar tone was struck in a recently leaked special report prepared by 13 U.S. federal agencies. Citing libraries of data, the report’s authors provided a sobering portrait of a warming world, but they treaded around the specifics of what that warming was doing to the weather.
“Some storm types such as hurricanes, tornadoes and winter storms are also exhibiting changes that have been linked to climate change, although the current state of the science does not permit detailed understanding,” they wrote.
The coming years will see climate change damage industries, eliminate species and kill people. But it will often be hard to tell which are the product of greenhouse gas emissions, and which would have happened anyway.
Think of it like an economic forecast.
Economists, for example, can confidently say that unemployment kills people. A 2011 megastudy analyzing 20 million patient records found that men and women without jobs were at much higher risk of mortality.
“Unemployment was associated with a substantially increased risk of death among broad segments of the population,” authors of that study wrote.
What an economist wouldn’t do, however, is stand in a morgue and slap a “killed by unemployment” sticker on any corpse that had recently been laid off. With or without a pink slip, maybe the worker would have died anyway.
Right now, the scientific big picture points to a planet that, on average, is going to be harder to handle: more powerful droughts, threatened coastal cities and intensified conflicts.
But that still doesn’t mean Ben and Jerry’s ice cream gets to claim climate change is literally coming to destroy the Statue of Liberty.