This chart from "An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950" is just one of multiple different lines of evidence & argument used to refute the global warming deniers false claim that the planet has been cooling since 1998 at the "Skeptical Science" website.
I grabbed the graphic because it's an arresting lead-in to the global warming interview on Democracy Now! yesterday with Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard University's Center for Health and the Global Environment, titled "From Snowstorms to Heat Waves, How Global Warming Causes Extreme Weather and Climate Instability." The idea that global warming contributes to snowstorms seems counter-intuitive, if you only think of global warming in terms of surface temperaturers--especially land surface temperatures. But when you realize--as the above chart shows--that the vast majority of warming goes into the oceans, which thus adds a great deal of energy to the world's weather system, then it's not that counter-intuitive at all. There's more energy for stronger snowstorms as well as hurricanes, tornadoes, whatever. But that's only the beginning of how Epstein paints a very different picture than that possessed by most lay people--even those who accept the science. Above all, the potential health impacts are broad, diverse, and potentially staggering. Details on the flip.
First on the importance of ocean heating and the impact on the hydrological cycle:
AMY GOODMAN: While TV networks blare the two words "extreme weather," what about another two: global warming? Dr. Paul Epstein is associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. He's co-author of the forthcoming book Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It. He's joining us via Democracy Now! video stream from his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.Dr. Epstein, welcome to Democracy Now! Let's get an assessment from you. One article said, "Bundle up. It's global warming." Relate the two-the freezing weather to global warming.
DR. PAUL EPSTEIN: Good morning, Amy. Good to be with you.
Yes, we are certainly in a spate of extreme weather events, and it seems that this year has been a real uptick in all sorts of events, from heavy rains to droughts to heat waves and now cold weather. And I think if we think back at last winter, we also had a very intense winter with three large snowstorms together. And now we're seeing this heavy snowfall in the United States, but also the last several months in Europe, as you recall here.
The underlying issue between global warming and climate change, meaning warming and changes in weather patterns, is that in the last 50 years, the oceans have absorbed 22 times as much heat as has the atmosphere. Let me repeat that, because it's not often considered as part of the global warming story, but the heat of the last half century has built up in the oceans, and it's the accelerated evaporation off of warm oceans that drives the heavy rains. A warmer atmosphere also holds more water vapor. For each one degree centigrade it heats up, it holds seven more-seven percent more water vapor. So there's a push and a pull on the whole water cycle. And the key here is that global warming in the hemisphere, through the ocean engine, is now changing the weather patterns, and it's the hydrological cycle, the earth's water cycle, that's been dramatically changed, with more droughts in some areas and more intense rains in others, and now intense snows.
After Katrina in 2005, I wrote about the connection to global warming. There were already studies indicating a connection between global warming and increased overall storm intensities, but they were just beginning to be published. The connections between global warming and extreme weather have grown much stronger since then, and have taken on a wider variety of forms. as explained in this part of the interview:
DR. PAUL EPSTEIN: Now, the media has done a real up-and-down job on this whole issue, but the connection between warming and warming of the oceans and the extreme weather events that have become much more common is something that the media has been spotty, slow to pick up, and one wonders where the agenda for that kind of ignoring as a pattern that's emerging and something in the scientific literature that's now well accepted. Even up to a year or year and a half ago, this was not so-there were many questions in the scientific literature about the connections. And now it's well accepted, and all of the modeling studies show that this is-we're going to see more extreme weather events and more intense outliers.But it's not just the models; it's the data and the first principles. Those are the three parts of science: the models, the data, the first principles. And the first principles are that greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere. The data shows us the oceans are warming. And the data is now very clear, that we're seeing heavier rain events and more droughts. Over the U.S., for example, since 1970, rains have gone up a little bit, like seven percent. But the two-inches-a-day rains have gone up 14 percent. Four-inches-a-day rains have gone up 20 percent. And six-inches-a-day rains have gone up 27 percent. A whole shift in the whole pattern of extreme events, the bell-shaped curve-if you picture the normal distribution of events, from warm to cold, to dry to hot, the whole curve is changing shape as we-as the earth gets warmer. And some-and we're seeing more extremes of both ends, hotter days as well as colder periods, more rain in some areas, more drought in others. And it's a whole pattern where the curve is kind of caving in on itself: fewer normal days and much more in the extremes.
This is what we call now climate instability-climate instability meaning that rates of change in the ice are accelerating, wider swings from one extreme to the other, more chance of major outliers like the heat wave in Russia, the floods in Pakistan, these storms now. This is all part of a changing climate, and "global warming" is the word that-the two words that kind of throw us. The real issue is climate change, climate instability. And unfortunately, it appears that this is all accelerating, particularly over this last year.
And then there's issue of health impacts, which Epstein identifies in five distinct areas:
DR. PAUL EPSTEIN: Five areas in which climate affects health: infectious disease is one; respiratory disease and asthma, particularly; third is now these winter weather anomalies that we're seeing more of; heat waves and its impacts; and then the impacts of pests and pathogens, diseases on crops, forests and marine life, that are also responding to warming and to the extremes.Now, if we look at the infectious disease for a moment here, as I mentioned, we've seen Lyme disease, carried by ticks, an arachnoid in the spider family, grow tenfold in Maine this decade and move up to the northern latitudes. Now, if we look at the United States overall, it's warned about one degree Fahrenheit in the last hundred years. Maine has warmed two degrees, but the winters have gone up three degrees. In Alaska, the temperature is even more dramatic. We've seen increase in overall temperatures, 3.4 degrees, and winters have warmed a startling 6.4 degrees. So, Alaska is experiencing mosquitoes, stinging insects. And then these forest beetles, that are from Arizona all the way up to Alaska, decimating forests, and they are overwintering, moving to higher latitudes, moving to higher altitudes, sneaking in more generations each year. And the droughts dry the trees, dry the rosin that normally drowns the beetles as they try to drive through the bark. So the extremes weaken the trees. The temperatures and warming and lack of chilling frosts embolden the pests. And we're seeing this dramatic increase.
But that's not the whole story with infectious disease. It's also these floods and droughts. It's the extreme weather events that affect the timing, the intensity, the location of outbreaks. After floods, we see upsurges of malaria in many countries, just as we're seeing floods set off cholera in Haiti, combined with the impacts of the earthquake, of course. And in droughts, we often see diseases like dengue fever, where people store water about their houses and the Aedes aegypti that carries that disease flare-surges. So it's the extremes as well as the warming that affect infectious disease. In this country, we've mapped it out. Over-two-inches-a-day rains are associated with waterborne disease outbreaks from E. coli, Cryptosporidium. So again, it's not just the warming; it's the extreme weather events that affect either timing, intensity of infectious disease outbreaks.
AMY GOODMAN: That was one of your five points. Number two?
DR. PAUL EPSTEIN: Number two, asthma. We've seen a tremendous rise in pollen counts. And one of the explanations appears to be the rise in carbon dioxide only. Rise in carbon dioxide, from burning fossil fuels and felling forests, affects ragweed pollen. And we've taken-back of Harvard in the greenhouses, we've put ragweed under double CO2 in containers, and the pollen goes up 60 percent. The stalks only go up about 10 percent. We're seeing tremendous counts in the fall. We're seeing early arrival of spring. And spring, the-some of the fast-growing trees. So the whole allergy and asthma season has prolonged about two to three weeks in the Northern Hemisphere, depending on location. More pollen. Diesel particles and other particles from burning fossil fuels, coal and diesel, helps deliver these pollen grains deep into the lungs, if they glob onto one another. And then ozone from burning fossil fuels, and combined with others, also affects our lungs. So here we are, burning fossil fuels and carbon dioxide, burning fossil fuels and diesel, burning fossil fuels and ozone, and then the aggregate, the prolongation of this spring and spring-to-fall season affecting the whole amount of exposure that we are having to pollen in the spring and fall. And we've seen a doubling to tripling of asthma in this country in the last two to three decades. So some of this may be accountable by climate change and the burning of fossil fuels.
Heat waves, number three, clearly related to warming. And here again, what you recounted in Russia, we're seeing more of these major events, major outliers. If we think back in 2003 in Europe, this was an event, the summer heat wave, that was six standard deviations from the norm-in other words, back to our bell-shaped curve, way out there in the tails. Not one or two standard deviations, but way out with degrees-with heating that was not recorded in-well, not in any of our records back to 1890s when we started our good global records.
Winter weather, we've addressed. And here we are again with the oceans and the ice cover affecting that.
And then, finally, what keeps me up at night are the bark beetles and some of the other pests that are affecting forests. And here we have very little in public health to offer to stop the longhorn beetles that are affecting the eastern coast. They're an invasive species. But warming affects the range in which they can occur. Now, these cold winters are going to knock it back. Cold winters are excellent for public health. So, that may actually set back some of the pests that are affecting the forests. But in general, over the last several decades, we've seen an aphid-like bug, for instance, affect the hemlock trees-not the hemlock you take to solve all your problems, but pine tree hemlocks affected by the woolly adelgid. And it's moved from-through Connecticut, through Massachusetts, threatening Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine. And again, it's the warm winters that have allowed the overwintering and the increase in generations of these pests of forests that then change our forest cover, which affects streams, it affects our oxygen, the carbon storage ability. So these are the long-term issues in terms of the life support systems and how they'll respond to climate change.
In short, as the denialists try to keep us trapped in our own end-zone, the scientific understanding of how vast the impacts of global warming truly are continue growing, both in terms of how much more the heat impact is than surface temperature records reflect, and in terms of the various different ways in which global warming can harm us.
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