Tomgram: Christian Parenti, Big Storms Require Big Government
At some basic level, climate change shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Fossil-fuel burning -- the essence of our civilization since the industrial revolution -- dumps prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. As it happens, 2010 was another banner year for carbon dioxide production; the 5.9% rise in CO2 emissions was the “biggest jump ever recorded.” That greenhouse gas, in turn, traps heat and so warms the planet. The results are clear enough for anyone to see. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. Last year was the ninth warmest on record, despite an expected cooling effect from a strong La Niña temperature pattern in the Pacific Ocean.
More heat means more turbulence, which means more extreme weather events, which have clearly been on the rise -- more wetness, more droughts, fiercer storms. In that category, 2011 was definitely a year for the record books, with an unprecedented 14 weather events that each caused $1 billion or more in damage. More extreme weather means more human misery, relatively predictable globally, but reasonably unexpected when it actually hits locally.
The urge not to believe that we are despoiling our own planet has meant that we’ve been slow to develop alternate energy sources, but not slow to grow economically. What that means, of course, is that the search only intensifies for more fossil fuels, ever tougher to get as time goes on and ever “dirtier” (in greenhouse gas terms) to produce.
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