Climate and localized weather

Cameron

Member
Location
Ontario, Canada
An inteview on climate change with respect to the local weather events this year. Brief extract below.

https://grist.org/article/is-climat...mail&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily

Q:Do you hope the heatwave and other extreme weather events will alert the public to the variability of a couple of degrees C of warming?

A: I hope so. I think this just keeps coming back to this notion that a degree or two of global warming doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is a tremendous shift in the system. But that’s not intuitively obvious to really anyone except for folks who really understand the dynamics of these nonlinear Earth systems interactions. I think we’ve had, from a broader societal standpoint, kind of a failure of imagination in the sense that there hasn’t been enough conversation about what it really means to warm a degree or two degrees or five degrees, god forbid. I don’t think people really understand — and I think this is even true of some scientists, even some climate scientists, honestly. People who are climate scientists might study the carbon cycle or might study large-scale dynamics or paleoclimate. I think a lot specifically about the extreme climate, these transient huge bursts of severe weather that can occur. And we’re adding a lot of extra energy to the system.
 

I live in the Pacific Northwest and it's getting worse every year. Every day I wonder if the fire is going break out where I am. It's so dry, and the hot temperatures continue to get out of hand. There is little water in the reservoirs and some of it is being used to fight the fires. Our power is hydro electric, so when the water is gone, so is our power. We are supposed to be buying electric cars. Around here, there will soon be nothing to power them. The situation is dire.
 

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