Weather extremes becoming the norm
Share your Thoughts
Posted on June 20, 2008
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
One person reading my book commented that what I’m saying sounds like, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!! Except that it’s really falling.”
That’s how some see the scenario laid out in the book (Living Beyond the ‘End of the World’) 
in the context of this year’s weather disasters, earthquakes, the rise in carbon emissions, the high gas prices, the escalating national debt (approaching $10 BILLION!!), population growth that will add another couple of billion people to the planet in the lifetime of, oh, for example, my niece Deanna.
Another reader said, now that she had read the book, all these crazy events suddenly make sense, are not just random or irrational disasters, but now fall into a framework where one says, “Oh, that’s what’s going on.”
The last two chapters are the crucial ones — how we come to ‘ecological hope’ in the midst of these crises, and then, “what kind of human beings will we be as we go through the crisis?” That for me is the crucial question that will decide if we go through the crisis/transition of this and the next couple of generations with utter catastrophe or with seeds planted for a new way of life out of the chaos that can renew, regenerate, heal life and all the planetary systems that support life.
Listen to George Bush. I know it’s hard, but listen to him. He charts the path of catastrophe in almost everything he proposes, from oil drilling to threats to attack Iran to undercutting the rights guaranteed by the Constitution (today, aided and abetted by Congressional Democrats) to refusal to impose mandatory carbon emissions and on and on.
But the path he lays out has a great deal of support and manipulates the fears and anxieties that rightly exist in the society right now to try to force us in that direction.
Yet another study telling us how much trouble we’re in. The way it was reported last evening on NBC Nightly News was stark — a new study regarding climate change in the U.S. no longer predicts extreme weather for the continent sometime in the future but confirms that this is already happening, that the weather that has stunned and amazed us over the past decade or so is here to stay, and will get worse. [I have embedded the video here. If you cannot view it, click here.]
Report on Climate Predicts Extremes: More Droughts Likely in North America, reports the Washington Post today in a brief article by Juliet Eilperin. The story is short but is on page A02.
The study was led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and “provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of how global warming has helped to transform the climate of the United States and Canada over the past 50 years — and how it may do so in the future.”
From Eilperin’s article:
“This report addresses one of the most frequently asked questions about global warming: What will happen to weather and climate extremes?” said one of the report’s two co-chairs, Thomas R. Karl, who directs NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.. He added that the report, which synthesizes the findings of more than 100 academic papers, “concludes that we are now witnessing and will increasingly experience more extreme weather and climate events.”
The NY Times today only mentioned the new study in an article about the Mississippi River floods. However, the couple of paragraphs were stark:
Though no single period of flooding rains or other extremes can be ascribed to the growing global influence on climate, the odds are tipping toward a continent with more, and more intense, climate extremes, said Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., and a lead author of the report.
“To fully grasp the ramifications of the surge in extreme droughts and floods that is forecast in this report, one need only look at the widespread devastation across the Midwest,” said Richard H. Moss, head of the climate program of the World Wildlife Fund. “We need to start making substantial reductions in emissions to minimize how much and how quickly the climate changes, and, just as importantly, we need to begin a serious program of national preparedness to respond to these increasing threats.” [emphasis added]
It’s the scenario we know so well, the one of our actual experience — severe and permanent drought in the Southwest, rain falling in deluges which means floods becoming part of our common experience, deeper and longer heat waves in the mid-Atlantic and across the Midwest.
Just to mention again our local experience — 100 inches of snow in the Milwaukee area this past winter, about twice the average, and record June rainfall totals that amount to nearly our entire average for the summer (just two-tenths of an inch to go, could happen in the next couple of days). And then, of course, there is the second ‘500 year flood’ along the Mississippi in the past 15 years.
George Bush, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, and Co. want to make sure there is enough oil to burn for us so that we can continue heating up the climate and adding more energy to feed these extremes. They want you to keep doing what you’re doing rather than change your way of life. But I don’t see them on the sand bag line or watching the foundations of their homes crack and collapse. Instead, I see them and these corporations getting richer.
Honestly, it is time for a whole new moral framework for this society. I’m getting pretty scared — not just for me but for my grand niece and nephew, for Francesca and Elliot and Maya and Maura and Aidan and Carly — all these little, 
or at least quite young, people in my life who have to live in this world we are making, or rather re-making, or rather making over into something else.
Can we change for them? Can we find this new moral framework in which to live, one that sees this ecological crisis — not just the weather but living way beyond the capacity of the Earth to sustain us — as the most important reality to address in our daily lives?
There is a new mission for the human. It is already too late to save us from very difficult times. But then, most of the world lives in difficult times. Only the affluent few in the developed countries could ever shield themselves from that — and we have done that at great cost to the planet, by extracting what we wanted to support our affluence and then spewing a whole lot of waste out into the biosphere, the air, water, soils, all we need to live.
So it is time to prepare ourselves from within, to dig down deep for the religiosity, the faith, the spirituality that can help us be honest with our situation and address it as it needs to be addressed. It is time to find in those ‘deep wells within’ the sources of a new creativity, vibrant, fiercely committed, that can help shape a new way of life out of the old, or beyond the old.
———————————————-
U.S. climate change chart, Washington Post today:
This is the world we are making. Maybe we should try another path.
Technorati Tags: extreme weather, noaa, national oceanic and atmospheric adminstration, juliet eilperin, midwest floods
Photo credit:
Flooding near Winfield MO, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Photo by J.B. Forbes and Laurie Skrivan [copyright]
Comments
Leave a Reply
