"Global Warming" -- Patterns Consistent and True

After having had one of the wettest and coolest springs and early summers in New England, the late summer shows no signs of stopping this trend. To date, Boston has had six 90-degree days for the entire season, two of them coming in April and May with none in June and July.

August, which has been consistently humid and wet - or at least dank almost daily - has had the highest number of 90-degree days this year, to date, four. Normally, at this latitude the area has between 12 and 19 90-degree days and many more in the 80s with high humidity.

The humidity has been there and so has the rain so that this has been one of the coolest summer's that has been experienced in this area in the last dozen years or more.

This is not something that has been unexpected. If you look global warming predictions, the weather patterns have been in the process of change over the last 20 years or more. The predictions say that the area around Boston will become what is known as a temperate rain forest, much like the area around Seattle and the Northwest.

At the same time, global warming models have shown that the Northwest would become drier and, at times, warmer. In effect, they would become more desert-like in their weather. And, while we all have pictures of the Gobi or Sahara or even just the great Southwestern desert in mind when we think of deserts, deserts can be areas where rainfall just drops to a low level and scrub growth hangs on.

That global warming is happening is also apparent from an interesting phenomenon that has its history in some of our earlier history. One of our goals has always been to find the "Great Northwest Passage," the one that would take ships through the waters at the top of the world and which would cut days or weeks out of trips.

Through much of the 19th century, explorers were sought the "Northwest Passage." Indeed, the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1801-1804 to the Northwest was not only used to map out the land ceded to the United States by France, but it was, secondarily, to find the Northwest Passage so that trade with China could be enhanced.

That it turned out to be mostly a landlocked route with rivers that may have crossed but which were either a. too shallow for navigation or b. too wild for navigation, was just another of the tales that came out of this expedition. But it pointed to the fact that there was no "Northwest Passage" below the 49th parallel.

Above that parallel in a land better known as Canada, the "Northwest Passage" explorations from Great Britain fared little better because the ice was just too thick.

That is changing now according to Global Warming theory that not only posits, but also has shown that the permanent ice pack that kept ships from traversing the top of the world easily is breaking down. Today, there is more open water and more ships are making the trip via a real "Northwest Passage" than ever before. It was something that visionaries had foreseen in the heyday of the Yankee Clipper trade of the 1840s and 1850s. They wanted, no needed, that passage that would cut weeks off their passage from the Orient.

Today, it is there - as models have predicted - ice that would normally have blocked the flow of shipping to the north of Canada is breaking down and allowing ships to have a new northern route to Asia. This, in turn, is actually cutting shipping time back and forth.

Global warming also accurately predicted the long Southern drought that brought water levels in the normally wetter states of the Southeast would undergo periodic long droughts as high pressure areas that normally would remain farther south and which would force low pressure areas along their boundaries, thus producing rain, to move further north and bring that rain to the Northeast and Eastern areas of the country.

The Southeast has been recovering of late, but the Southwest is still feeling the effects of drought as long fetches of dry wind - not the usual wet monsoon winds they feel - have pulled water levels in some of their reservoirs to record low levels and some of the areas to which many Eastern folks have retired in Arizona have become even drier.

The fight that is occurring over drawing water from the Colorado River is one of the fallouts of this change in climate.

Interestingly, this is nothing new. It was accurately predicted back in the 1970s by some researchers, working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and by others working for the United Nations.

In today's Newyorktimes.com, you will find the following statement that pretty well sums things up:
"On Feb. 2, 2007, the United Nations scientific panel studying climate change declared that the evidence of a warming trend is "unequivocal," and that human activity has "very likely" been the driving force in that change over the last 50 years. The last report by the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in 2001, had found that humanity had "likely" played a role.
The addition of that single word "very" did more than reflect mounting scientific evidence that the release of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases from smokestacks, tailpipes and burning forests has played a central role in raising the average surface temperature of the earth by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1900. It also added new momentum to a debate that now seems centered less over whether humans are warming the planet, but instead over what to do about it. In recent months, business groups have banded together to make unprecedented calls for federal regulation of greenhouse gases. The subject had a red-carpet moment when former Vice President Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," was awarded an Oscar; and the Supreme Court made its first global warming-related decision, ruling 5 to 4 that the Environmental Protection Agency had not justified (its own anti-global warming position in its regulations).
That alone sums up the findings of researchers, however, if you live in some of the areas affected by global warming predictions, you know first-hand the effects where even after several dry days, the ground water level is right near the top and you cannot dig down three inches without finding mud (it happened recently here).
And, worldchanging.com, said today that "We're starting to see more and more work on the health impacts of global warming..." The article goes on to discuss the very real public health threats posed by global warming.
President Obama has made one of his public goals the implementation of the Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming and hopefully his stand won't be too late. If it is, who knows, we may all end up going the way of the dodo bird whose last remaining member passed into extinction about a century ago.
Sources: NOAA, New York Times, worldchanging.com