Long-time reader Gail, who has been at Wit’s End in NJ for an even longer time, directs me to today’s New York Times editorial, “April Heat,” and gives her reply — I have a slightly different take — all of which are below.
She asked to file this under humor. Why not?
Thanks to global warming, the NYT will be able to write lots and lots of these faux poetic, unintentionally ironic, pro-heat-wave editorials in the future:
The past few days in the Northeast have been the spring version of Indian summer. It is the kind of weather that comes sooner or later every April or early May, a short burst of heat that takes the upstate magnolias out of bud into bloom and leaves the ground strewn with their streamer-like petals, all in a matter of a few days. We like to think that nature isn’t fooled by much, but this is the warmth that could do it, teasing sudden growth out of every growing thing.
And yet this has been just the right kind of warm spell. The warmth seems fragile, easily dispelled by the night. It lacks the ingrown, acrid tang of the heat that feels like August come early, the kind that embeds itself in the asphalt and drifts down the subway steps and piles up in stale corners all across the city. The breeze rises in the late afternoon, and that’s that.
The difference, too, is that this warm spell has felt like a just reward, a kind influence after a harsh winter and what has been, so far, a cold, slow spring. It is usually pretty hard to say just what we, as humans, really deserve. But there were a lot of us walking around this weekend, heads tipped back to catch the sun, thinking we deserve this.
The forecasters are promising one more hot day on Tuesday. Then the weather will break and we will be back where we belong, in late April, shading into May with no foreknowledge of what the rest of this season will bring. That is perhaps the best thing about this short-lived heat wave “” a sense of modesty and restraint, the clear understanding that this was a cameo.
Gail writes me:
It’s almost a schizophrenic response to what is clearly hideous, anomalous and freakish weather. Did I say dangerous?
These past few days have been horrifying for me. It’s so hot and dry, the new leaves are hanging, limp and wilted. It’s terrifying, frankly, to see August in April.
Please do a post and file it under humor, or something. Here’s what I wrote the greying ladies:
This is utterly crazy.
The climate is changing. The trees and other vegetation that evolved over millions of years to live in the environment on the Eastern Seaboard cannot adapt fast enough to keep up with warmer, dryer conditions. Thus, the trees and shrubs are all dying. The ecosystem is collapsing. We are in the midst of a rapidly accelerating mass extinction.
All you have to do is go outside and take a cursory inventory to see this is true. Consider the implications. With trees drying and dying, we will have wildfires. All the life dependent on trees will also expire – squirrels, birds, ferns, even trout in streams that require cool, shaded water.
For the next generation, maple syrup and apples and squirrels will be legends. The soil will wash away and we will be lucky if we can grow food.
Wonder why newspapers are irrelevant? Maybe cause they don’t print the news. Just garbage to make their advertisers happy.
Want a real story? Write about the environmental holocaust going on in everyone’s back yard that they don’t want to acknowledge.
My take: Yes, we all know the difference between climate and weather, and the unexpected heatwave down here in Washington DC is evidence of nothing in particular concerning global warming.
But the question always arises as to what is a good use for the very limited space that the NYT or any major publication has for things like editorials — or cover stories of the Sunday magazine.
I think the NYT editorial should be cut and and framed as one of the last of its kind, a prose poem to a naive but dying era. By, say, 2020 — and then perhaps for the next several hundred years assuming we don’t quickly and sharply get off of our current emissions path — no serious publication, and that includes the NYT (at least the online edition is likely to survive that long) would ever write and publish such a piece.
For me, the irony is the best part:
We like to think that nature isn’t fooled by much….
… this warm spell has felt like a just reward…. It is usually pretty hard to say just what we, as humans, really deserve. But there were a lot of us walking around this weekend … thinking we deserve this.
I can hardly wait for future generations to dig up this editorial and stare at it in utter disbelief.
Apparently what we humans really deserve is what we are doing to ourselves. Let’s all pat ourselves on the back for gliding through the global Ponzi scheme, hoping we can be the last to cash out before the collapse, thinking that we pulled a fast one on nature.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Is the Washington Post suppressing its news content on Global Warming? This from the NYT’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/science/earth/28climate.html?hpw
NYT Headline. Clinton says US is ready to lead on Climate.
I didn’t see anything in the Post on this, but then I’m just online on both.
I just read the same piece in the Times and was also struck by the irony. But I am concerned about Gail’s take on this and your putting it on the site without comment. I’m afraid this may sound nit-picky, but it’s important in terms of credibility and the need to reach a wider audience and getting beyond preaching to the quire. Those trees Gail refers to as having evolved to live in a particular (implicitly stable, unchanging) climate for millions of years have, in fact, been adapting to changing conditions for about ten thousand years–before that, in the northeast, there was either several thousand feet of ice or arctic tundra for at least a hundred thousand years, and endless change before that. More important, where exactly are these trees and shrubs that are “all dying.” I have a background in both landscape gardening and forestry and pay pretty close attention to such things. At least here in Massachusetts I am surrounded by lushly budding greenery. Perhaps New Jersey is a wasteland, but this is the first I’ve heard of it.
Please know that I am entirely on your side. I have been deeply concerned about global warming for decades. In recent years I’ve become really quite scared. And I understand how such feelings can lead to overstatement. But I also am quite sure that if we don’t keep a steady reign on those feelings and exercize care in what we write and what we publish we can easily do more harm than good. Someone new to this site, reading this post might well turn and run in the other direction. Certainly this sort of thing opens the site up to criticism from the climate deniers.
Best,
Daniel Smith
I also have been sympathetic to but puzzled by Gail’s reports of major problems with the trees in her area. Just not seeing any thing like it here on the Eastern Shore of the Delmarva peninsula. And we’re just a 100 miles or so south of NJ. I’m wondering if it’s some combination of local effects?
Daniel, I do appreciate your reservations. I admit, I am getting impatient with the widespread conviction that the effects of climate change are happening (take your pick) far away in some exotic remote location; in the distant future; slowly and gradually.
Anywhere but home.
I haven’t been to Massachusetts lately, but I have been as far north as Rhode Island and Virginia. The conifers are the most obviously damaged. They are thin – you can see through to the trunks, or all the way through them. Some are bare of needles, or fallen over.
The deciduous trees also exhibit damage. They are dropping limbs, their bark is split, their crowns are thinning.
These signs of decline mean the roots are terminally, irreversibly damaged. An individual specimen may limp along for a few seasons but eventually it will die.
It amazes me that so few people recognize what appears obvious to me. But then, it was not so very long ago that millions of people walked passively into gas chambers and millions more pretended not to know about it.
I mention this not to be overly dramatic but simply to illustrate that it is indeed possible for enormous numbers of people to shut their eyes to reality when that reality is unimaginably soul-crushing.
Brooks, what I would really like to see are hard statistics from utilities, city, county, and state road crews, and tree companies. The one arborist I talked to said they are overwhelmed with tree removal for NJP&L to keep falling branches and trees from knocking over the power lines.
To be fair, in 2050 the New York Times will probably also have editorials on how pleasant the April weather is.
… because it will be the last pleasant month before the killing heatwaves of May, June, July, August, September.
Thought I might take this opportunity to provide a couple of resources regarding our “cold” year of 2008, which we know only seemed cold because people are comparing it to recent hot years.
If you go to http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
you will see that for 2008, the only inhabited land on the ENTIRE PLANET whose temperature was below average for the year of 2008 is a little patch in the upper midwest of the US. The only other areas below average were in the ocean, mostly the la nina regions, and a touch of Antarctica. I know that Chicagoans like their city, and with good reason, but their cool winter does not rule the world.
Secondly, I took the liberty of copying the decades-long trend graph on the left to a page of mine. I then added a line from 1998 to 2008 – the supposed evidence of cooling. Go to
http://www.deanmyerson.org/cooling_NOT
and look for that downward-trending gray line in the upper right. There is your cooling – the end of warming! (sic)
May you find these useful with open-minded deniers – those confused by bad media and the like.
I just read the following story about a NY-sized ice sheet collapsing from the Wilkins:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/new-yorksized-ice-shelf-collapses-off-antarctica-1675400.html
However the following sentence in the article was a bit unusual for this kind of news:
“The loss of ice shelves does not raise sea levels significantly because the ice is floating and already mostly submerged by the ocean”.
I am more used to catastrophic predictions of sea level rise when the wilkins is involved in the news.
I went to the Wikipedia and the illustrations of what an ice sheet is and how it behaves led me to believe that the sentence in the news may well be true. Some sea rise may happen because of the ice being fresh-water ice, less dense, but that would not be much. What is your take, Joe?
[JR: Loss of floating ice shelves does not substantially impact of sea level rise directly, but it opens the gateway -- pops the cork -- for the landlocked ice to flow faster.]
bluebells arriving two weeks early in England…very pretty.
first bluebells of spring in Hertfordshire
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/video/2009/apr/28/bartons-britain-heartwood-forest
…
Re: JR
Your point is correct for a standard ice shelf, as ice shelves are normally fed by glaciers. But I read somewhere that this is not the case for the Wilkins ice shelve, there is no glacier feeding it, nothing clearly pushing the ice on the continental platform again into the sea. The Wilkins is (or was, I don’t know what to say at this point) more like a bridge between islands. I bet the break will have some effect on water currents, but I have no idea of how that would affect local climate.
I believe there was a decent ice storm in the Northeast back in January. That would account for a considerable amount of tree damage as described.
Gail says: “These past few days have been horrifying for me. It’s so hot and dry, the new leaves are hanging, limp and wilted. It’s terrifying, frankly, to see August in April.”
In Connecticut, average temperature in April is 48.7 F (averaged over 24 hours). For August, it is 71.6. That is a delta of 23 F. Global warming has raised average temperatures just 1.5 F over the last 100+ years. I think it is a bit premature to declare that August has moved to April, based on a couple of days of hot weather.
Today, we are supposed to set a new record high temperature (92). The previous record high: 91….. set in 1938. And for the remainder of the week, high temperatures will not break 70. It is supposed to get down to 38 F Thursday night. So I doubt that this hot spell represents anything freakishly abnormal, just the normal variability of weather.
Even if recent warming has been rapid by geological or historical standards, it is still pretty slow compared to what normal human beings can sense over the course of a life. That, of course, won’t stop frightened people like Gail from freaking out every time the temperature rises above normal. But please, don’t fall into the trap of substituting hysterical rants like that for reasoned discussion based on data.
I agree that we need to be careful about “freaking out” based on local weather. But I have no problem with people expressing concern that we’re already seeing effects beyond occasional early heat. That is, despite the the lag of thermal inertia and natural factors being in their neutral to cool phases. It’s what this could PORTEND that’s really key: The ecological and human impacts of rapid interglacial climate change (a bit different from something like a glacial period termination, or a multi-millennial regional climate shift).
@Al — The Northeast’s recent recordbreaking heat may not be that much of a delta, but just over a week ago, Los Angeles broke its previous high temperature record by 4 degrees F.
Obviously that one record alone doesn’t prove anything, but it’s not a good sign — not at all.
If you had any idea how fast adaptation can occur, you wouldn’t write drivel like “The trees and other vegetation that evolved over millions of years… cannot adapt fast enough to keep up with warmer, dryer conditions.” Maybe the next trees won’t look like these, maybe they won’t even be trees, but something WILL evolve to dominate that niche. And it won’t take millions of years to do it.
Elmo, I think you misread me or perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. I don’t mean to imply that nothing will evolve to dominate that niche. Nature abhors a vacuum. But as the niche changes, so must what inhabits it. And I don’t see how it can be that the current species of trees and other long-lived vegetation will be adapting because their generational change is over many decades and even hundreds of years. They are simply going to die off, and something else will move in to take their place. Adaptation of an individual species happens fast when you are talking fruit flies. The climate is changing faster than trees can adapt, or relocate, especially considering the barriers to gradual movement. We are likely to lose the lofty canopy of forests and be left with vines, weeds, and ultimately perhaps a desert.
If that’s what you call drivel eh, okay!
Exactly, Gail. It’s not whether LIFE will prevail, but the holocene ecology and biodiversity that’s helping sustain and advance human civilization. Have we no appreciation?
Elmo — In the End-Permian mass extinction all the corals of the Permian died.
It took ten million years before modern corals evolved.
NYT aside, The Guardian shows today fine picture of the Arctic ice. Only a slice any more ice older than 2 years, and a slice 1 – 2 years old. All other ice being from the last winter.
Don´t bother of the ice area, the picture shows there is only a small portion of the average ice volume compared to (the late) 1981 – 2008 average february.
Notwithstanding the usual caveats that weather is not climate, yada, yada, the recent heat wave blasted away many long-standing records, both daily and for the entire month of April. This began in California on April 20 and extended across the country into the Northeast.
In Boston we just broke 3 records over 4 days; yesterday it was 93. I noticed from weather news the variation was not aligned perfectly north and south. Those who remark on the preponderance of recordbreaking events are right on the money.
I have family in New Jersey and over the past few decades the ecosystem has increasingly been strained. Gail’s description matches my family’s experience. I agree with her in wondering where people are that they don’t notice what’s right in front of them in terms of overall events: how short their memories and how quick to remember only what matches their wishful thinking and find excuses for what they’d prefer not to believe. No doubt some are just buried in their electronic devices.