In a powerful essay in The New Yorker that’s mainly about President Obama’s dismal record on tackling climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert — one of the best writers on climate science around — lays out in stark terms what’s gone on with the weather of late.
This is the best round-up I’ve seen. It seemed worth a quick ‘check this out’ blog. Here’s the passage…
“In mid-May, the President met with Memphis residents who had been left homeless by the flooding of the Mississippi River, and, not long before that, he toured sections of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that had also been flattened by a tornado. Meanwhile, even as the President was consoling the bereaved in Joplin, residents in Vermont were bailing out from record-high water levels around Lake Champlain; Texas was suffering from a near-record drought that could cost the state more than four billion dollars in agricultural losses; and officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were forecasting that the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season, which formally began on June 1st, would once again be “above normal.” (The 2010 season was tied for the third most active on record.) The news from abroad was, if anything, more worrisome. Last week, the Chinese government estimated that more than four million people were having trouble finding drinking water, owing to a drought along the Yangtze River. The French agricultural minister warned that an exceptionally hot, dry spring would reduce that country’s wheat harvest. And in Colombia more than two million acres of land have been submerged after almost a year of nearly continuous rain. “Over the past ten months, we have registered five or six times more rainfall than usual,” the director of Colombia’s meteorological agency, Ricardo Lozano, said.”
Just to repeat, that’s 5 TIMES more rainfall, not, say, 5% more.
Anyway, for the rest of Kolbert’s piece, please go to the New Yorker site here…
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