Letter: Is Superstorm Sandy the new normal?
To the community,
In the popular movie “The Day After Tomorrow” audiences are confronted with disturbing scenes of a “superstorm” that dwarfs all other storms. At the time, most experts derided the movie and questioned whether such sudden catastrophic superstorms are really possible.
Today, with the emergence of Superstorm Sandy, there is no longer any doubts about the potential for massive superstorms to emerge from our global climate change. Many people believe we are headed for global warming, but new evidence suggests global cooling may be where we are actually going.
Steve Kubby
Until recently, scientists considered any theory of catastrophic change to be heresy. However, science has undergone an astonishing paradigm shift and now accepts the compelling evidence that catastrophic climate change can occur much more rapidly than previously thought.
An example of an extremely quick climate change came during a period of time known as the Younger Dryas, which happened right after the last ice age ended, about 12,000 years ago. The Younger Dryas itself lasted about 1,000 years. What we didn’t know until recently was just how quickly the Younger Dryas started and stopped.
In a period of less than 50 years, the climate from the eastern U.S. and Canada to much of Europe went from climate conditions much like today’s, to frigid readings more like the Ice Age, at least a ten degree Fahrenheit change. That’s how it stayed for a thousand years – and then the climate flipped back to normal in as little as 20 years.
Greenpeace released a classified study, prepared for the Pentagon, that warns of increasingly unstable and violent weather. This Pentagon Weather Report paints a grim picture of the Gulf Stream failing to deliver warm water to the North Atlantic, triggering widespread weather disasters: “A world thrown into turmoil by drought, floods, typhoons. Whole countries rendered uninhabitable. The capital of the Netherlands submerged. The borders of the U.S. and Australia patrolled by armies firing into waves of starving boat people desperate to find a new home. Fishing boats armed with cannon to drive off competitors. Demands for access to water and farmland backed up with nuclear weapons.”
The idea that the Earth has been molded by sudden, catastrophic climate change is something that scientists have resisted for many decades, according to a scientific analysis of the past few decades of climate research by Spencer Weart, director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics.
In an article published by Physics Today, Weart explains how weather scientists have historically refused to comprehend the evidence before them supporting rapid climate change. Each new discovery keeps shortening the time in which massive global climate changes are recognized and understood to have occurred.
Here’s how the National Academy of Sciences describes the situation: “Paleoclimatic records show that large, widespread, abrupt climate changes have affected much or all of the earth repeatedly over the last ice-age cycle as well as earlier – and these changes sometimes have occurred in periods as short as a few years.”
The sudden appearance of Superstorm Sandy may be a freak event, or it may become the new normal. Is Superstorm Sandy the harbinger of things to come? Are we headed toward a new Ice Age?
Apparently, we are about to find out.
Steve Kubby, South Lake Tahoe
Thanks for not deriving a conclusion from conflicting opinions. Climate change has ocurred for millions of years. The belief that it is changing again should be a normal event based on geologists (not politicians or people with a biased cause). You can find tropical plant artifacts in today’s American deserts. This was the situation before man and will be the situation after us.
Tahoe…Climate change has occurred forever, but not on this scale and nowhere near at this rate. It is like saying that if I step on my bathroom scale every morning and gain a few ounces, which are gone by the following day, it is the same as if I step on the scale and gain 30 lbs over two months. They are not the same and climatologists and other scientist that study the effect of weather on plants or animals are all in agreement. Yes the earth will be here after we are gone, but our behavior is bring “after” far quicker than it needs to be.
I have always maintained the we think too much of ourselves. We might just be mold on the side of a mayonnaise jar, in the big dishwasher of life. Sooner or later…..something will flip that switch. We need to be mindful of our actions.
Claptrap and climate fodder feed the mind of ignorance and speculation. We can’t even wait until Sandy has done its thing to evaluate it.
Will the sky fall before or after Sandy?
Pathetic scaremongering at its best and science at its worst. There must be lots of easy cash available from the government somewhere.
Clear day today so far but have you noticed the chemtrail spraying in the last few days? Those aerosol trails being sprayed constantly? Something is going on up there in our skies whether you like it or not.
It is not only the size of the impending storms, but the frequency as well that are alarming. . .whether Mr. Zitts thinks this is all ‘claptrap’ or not, the coming realities affect lots of peoples lives. . .
To add to Mr. Kubby’s more esoteric (and obscure) references, one might look in on http://www.architeture2030.org, founded by my friend and colleague Ed Mazria in Santa Fe, N.M. . . it has been adopted by both the 80,000 member American Institute of Architecture (AIA) and Congress as an appropriate bellwether for what we’re really up against. . .
Stronger buildings, more conservational in all respects (i.e., reduced energy usage that relies on fossil fuels, etc.) are to be the new norm, hence the importance of green building at all points in any project.
As much of a favor Al Gore did with the stark reminder of “Inconvenient Truth” (climate change/global warming) it is nevertheless important to remember that greenhouse gases are but merely one of a multitude of symptoms (not the CAUSE or source) that ail the world’s systems right now: water supplies, shrinking habitats, degraded ecosystems – enough that the climate issues are but punctuation, even if they are more dramatic and focused at each frightening instance.
This would be the challenge in the Tahoe Basin: both the TMDL & GHG reductions that TRPA wants to anchor its’ future on will require more serious considerations at each point as to how to contribute to the health of our surroundings, and not just because TRPA says so. . .it is imperative to our own future to not take these issues lightly any more.