Global Warming

For at least the last 6 years, and probably longer, I've held the opinion that humanity doesn't have the capacity to "stop" global warming, so the best place to put our efforts would be in mitigating the effects of global warming. The Miami Herald article Rising sea comes at a cost for South Florida cities reminded me of this last week. This article points out that Miami Beach is taking into account projections of sea level rise from global warming in their storm water planning. Fred Beckmann is quoted as stating that this is the first time that any community in Florida is taking into account sea level rise in that planning. (This statement was also highlighted in James Bruggers - Watchdog Earth blog entry Miami starts to brace for sea level rise.)

Then I started seeing reports of the record melt-off of Arctic Ocean ice. I first noticed Record Arctic ice melt 'a trend', say scientist on google news. This turned out to be an article with very little meat to it, so I looked further. It turns out that the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal had looked at this 10 days earlier, before the melt had officially hit record levels, in The Mystery at the Heart of This Year's Record-Setting Arctic Ice Melt. Madrigal followed up with How Low Can You Go pointing out that there is significantly less remaining ice than in 2007, and there may be even more melt in the next week before ice starts to reform. Weather Underground's Jeff Masters blogged that Half of the polar ice cap is missing: Arctic sea ice hits a new record low.

Of course, the HuffPo devolves into green hyperbole in describing the disappearing Arctic ice in Arctic Warning. Perhaps Donna Henes missed the US Energy Information Administration announcement that U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion dropped to the lowest level in 20 years and that U.S. carbon emissions have declined in four of the past six years. You can read for yourself in U.S. Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 2011. A tip of the hat to Gregg Easterbrook's TMQ - something else the Donna Henes - and everyone else - should read. The US is reducing global warming emissions, but because we don't have a Stalinistic bureaucracy overseeing the reductions, they don't count, I guess.

Finally, to my point - if we aren't going to stop global warming (and we aren't) we need to figure out how to deal with it. The inappropriately titled It's too late: Arctic veteran dears for global disaster after latest trip, points out that there really isn't much we can do to stop the ice melt at this point. The action that is needed is to mitigate where we can and move out of areas that are too difficult to control. My cynical side tells me that we won't even start until it becomes an emergency.