Global Warming Alarmist Call Comes True

From Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming by Anthony D. Barnosky : [A] major hurricane . . . coming out of the Caribbean ... of near-record intensity ... [would] ... hit ... with storm tides as high as 4 meters (12 feet), bringing devastation.... Advance warning and prompt evacuation [would] keep loss of life to less than a hundred, but property damage [would be] in excess of $1 billions. That was a scenario offered by climatologist Stephen Schneider in a book he published in 1989 to raise awareness on the climate change issue. Think of Schneider as the Bob Dylan of climate science. Just as Dylan was writing songs and rousing the civil rights crowds in the 197os, Schneider was studying how to calculate the probabilities of specific kinds of climate events, and reaching out to policy makers with his conclusion: namely, that global warming was a threat whose effects would become increasingly evident in the next couple of generations. And, just as Dylan worked his crowds in the ensuing decades, so did Schneider in congressional halls and meeting rooms where national climate policy was discussed at the highest levels, such as at that Senate committee hearing in 1988. Seventeen years later, in fact, Schneider's scenario proved overly optimistic. The prediction was pretty close on the storm tides (4.3 meters versus 4), but when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans (not to mention entire communities in Mississippi), there was no prompt evacuation, nearly 2,000 people were killed, and property damage was in excess of $81 billion-all from that one storm. Debate ensued in the scientific literature as to whether or not the record number of hurricanes that year-28-was attributable to global warming, but a couple of facts were indisputable: warmer ocean waters fuel more-extreme storms, and the ocean, as well as the rest of the earth, had been getting on average warmer and warmer for five decades, and especially the preceding decade. The ten warmest years that thermometers had ever measured occurred from 1990 to 2005. While there were some year-to-year ups and downs, on average each year was successively warmer than the last, with 1998 claiming the dubious honor of the hottest year ever known, and 2002, 2003, and 2001 taking second, third, and fourth place, respectively. In short, by 2005 global warming had not only arrived, it had literally taken the world by storm and had given us a dramatic sneak preview of what to expect from a different Earth.

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