The killer snowstorms socking much of the country are providing pundits on the right all the ammunition they need to mow down poor ol' Al Gore.
Mr. Inconvenient Truth was called out last week by Bill O'Reilly, who wanted to know, if global warming exists, “Why has
southern New York turned into the tundra?” Matt Drudge linked to Gore's answer–that “increased heavy
snowfalls are completely consistent with . . . man-made global warming”–promptly crashing Gore's site Tuesday.
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What a maroon, the conservatives cackled at Albert.
The thing is, Gore's answer is completely consistent with . . . something I'd heard about global warming before his famous documentary–hell, even before he won the 2000 presidential election over George W. Bush. (Talk about inconvenient truths!)
In fact, then as now, longtime climate-change denier Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Bulkhead) would point to every drop of rain as proof the planet is not warming. Then as now, no one listened to Rohrabacher. (Just kidding, teabaggers.)
Those who dared listen to climate experts back at the turn of the millennium heard that global warming would bring longer, drier summers and shorter but more intense winters. Do you know how I know? Because I was there when they said it at a gathering of some of the planet's leading climate and environmental scientists at UC Irvine. I even wrote about it in a story titled, “It's the End of the World As You Know It, and I Don't Feel Fine.”
Publication date: April 20, 2000.
William J. Merrell, then the president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, presented during “Global Climate Change and Public Policy: What Are the Implications for You?” what global warming will have wrought for Southern California by 2050.
Annual rainfall totals won't change
much, but 40 percent more rain will drop in winter–pounding rain that
will bring floodwaters, mudslides, the works. There will be little if
any precipitation the rest of the year, so longer dry spells–coupled
with our usual Santa Ana winds–will increase fire dangers dramatically.One thing that won't rise is snowfall in the mountains (it'll be too
warm), so we'll have to make do with less drinking water from the annual
snowmelt. Deserts and wetlands–which play vital ecological roles in
SoCal–are expected to disappear completely. Rising sea levels will
swallow up more coastline, representing $500 million in lost real estate
annually. We will be forced to decide whether to tear down houses so
that we can still have beaches or create bulkheads to stop encroaching
water.
One thing that was stressed early in the presentation, which featured other experts trotting out even-more-dire consequences for other parts of the world, particularly Africa, was that their projections were based on very conservative analyses of computer modeling in 2000.
Good thing Orange County has so far escaped the pounding rain that will bring floodwaters, mudslides, the works during this period of global warm– . . . uh, check that:
For more fun reading, here's Gore's full answer to Papa Bear:
Last week on his show, Bill O'Reilly asked, and then said he had a call
into me. I appreciate the question.As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this
particular question for some time now, and they say that increased heavy
snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting
as a consequence of man-made global warming:“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that
global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple
ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a
sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below
freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.“A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging
from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly
violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.”
Oh, shut up, Job Killer!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.