A Hoax You Say...

How many more devastating hurricanes like Sandy must we endure before people recognize that such storms, which had long been considered a once in a century phenomenon,  are now a regular part of life's fabric.  Hurricane Sandy is the most costly natural event in American history.  The Jersey shore, Staten Island, and the lower part of Manhattan in New York City are a wreck.  The damage is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars.

Storms like Sandy are becoming all too common, and the reason why is not complicated.  We are responsible.  The warming of the atmosphere is driven largely by our consumption of hydrocarbon fuels.  The physics is not complicated. 

It is natural for the sunlight to enter the planet's atmosphere. It is also natural for a large portion of that solar energy to be reflected back out again.  The amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere depends on many factors, including cyclical and seasonal weather patterns.  The amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere is closely correlated to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) lingering in the upper atmosphere.  If you look at a graph of CO2 alongside average temperature, you find that they rise almost in lockstep

When you burn oil, coal, or natural gas, what comes out of the exhaust is CO2, and a whole bunch of other nasty hydrocarbon pollutants.  That's not theory. That's a fact. When you pump billions of tons of dirty exhaust into the atmosphere, you enable the conditions warming the atmosphere. More pollutants translates to higher average temperatures. It causes glaciers to melt. It causes the arctic icecap to melt.  It perturbs weather patterns, causing unprecedented extremes.  There are not two sides to this. There is one truth.  It's physics.  It's a fact.  The amount of extra energy attributable to human activity that gets into the atmosphere every single day is equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs.

Hurricane Sandy hammered the East coast with a storm surge that caused jaw dropping destruction.  Hurricanes are a natural phenomenon. Storms like Sandy and Katrina are beyond normal because of their power.  That additional strength starts with elevated ocean temperatures.caused by human induced global warming. The temperature rise in the Gulf of Mexico that propagated the unprecedented damage caused by Hurricane Katrina was less than two degrees fahrenheit. On a global scale, humanity has never faced anything close to the challenge of climate change. Sandy and Katrina are the tip of the iceberg to use a bad pun; a harbinger of much worse things  to come.

Climate denial has become a growth industry, funded by companies like Exxon Mobil and billionaires like the Koch Brothers, who are heavily invested in Canadian tar sands.  Conservative climate deniers sell the line that the jury is still out about climate change; that at worst its a hoax and at best it has not been proven.  Groups like  the Heartland Institute employ a small cadre of academic shills who, in effect, have sold their professional credentials to cast doubt on human induced climate change.  The confusion these so-called scientists create enables the fossil energy giants to continue 'doing the dirty', business as usual.

Literally thousands of climate scientists stand together affirming unequivocally that human uinduced climate change is real. On the other side, there are a handful of naysayers 'scienitsts', most or all of whom are being bankrolled by the fossil energy giants.  Along with media outlets like Fox News, these 'hired gun' obfuscators sew skepticism about climate change.

Unfortunately, it seems we're going to have to endure more mega-scale weather disasters before the public wakes up sufficienty to face our self-generated, and very daunting climate change reality. I find it deeply unsettling.