— by Eugene Linden
PARADE Magazine (June 25, 2006)
As we learned last year in New Orleans, weather can be a weapon of mass destruction. With the 2006 hurricane season now upon us, scientists say the climate is changing in ways that could produce many more superhurricanes, as well as extreme floods, droughts and heat waves that could threaten our way of life.
Still, it's easy to ignore the signs of global warming because we've always had crazy weather. Unfortunately, many of the predicted changes have begun, and they already affect our health and pocketbooks. Here's what we know:
Look Outside: The Weather Already Is Changing
Every year since 1997 has been in the Top 10 list of hottest years, and 2005 set a record. The Earth has warmed about 1.4°F since the late 19th century, and the warming has accelerated during the past four decades.
That increase sounds small, but it has been sufficient to make weather records fall by the thousands. Studies by Kerry Emmanuel at MIT and others have documented that hurricanes are getting more intense. Extreme storms like the one that flooded New England with more than 10 inches of rain in May are becoming more frequent too. Birds are migrating earlier. Trees are blooming, and flowers and crops are popping up unseasonably early across the country.
The warming has produced clear winners: pests. Mosquitoes love the warmer weather and are celebrating by bringing infectious diseases to new places. A recent Duke University study found that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has led to out-of-control growth of poison ivy (常春藤), as well as increased levels of allergy-producing pollen (引起过敏的花粉). Beetle populations have exploded in evergreen trees. Why should we care about beetles？ It was beetles that killed the trees in Southern California, which provided the dry fuel for the wildfires that destroyed hundreds of homes in 2003.
Higher temperatures also are causing glaciers (冰川) to melt fast. Mount Kilimanjaro (乞力马扎罗山— 非洲的最高山峰), for instance, has been topped with ice for at least 11,700 years. Within the next 15 years, however, its summit might be ice-free, according to Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University. The fastest warming is taking place in the far north, where glaciers are receding. You may think this isn't relevant to those of us farther south, but snow and ice play a big role in balancing Earth's climate by reflecting sunlight back into space. Melting snow and ice could push climates everywhere past a tipping point: As the Earth warms, melting snow and ice expose dark surfaces such as land and oceans, and the switch from heatreflecting to heat-absorbing surfaces could turbo-charge further warming.
We're Making It Worse
"I'm changing the climate! Ask me how" reads a bumper sticker that activists have been plastering on SUVs. Their point is that gas-guzzlers (耗油量大的车) contribute to climate change. In a more sober way, the great majority of scientists are saying the same thing: Burning gas or oil in engines and furnaces has pushed carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere far above where they've been for hundreds of thousands of years, and the debate has ended over whether these emissions are making the planet hotter. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of more than 1,500 scientists from 60 countries, asserts that some portion of the recent warming is the result of human activities.
Last year, the world's leading scientific j
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