Late last winter I wrote a brief post about what I called the Age of Global Weirdness in relation to climate change. If there is any good that comes from the recent megastorm Sandy that has wrought havoc on the Caribbean and East Coast of the U.S., it is that it has once again brought a spotlight of attention to the topic of global climate change (a topic that has been noticeably and amazingly absent from the U.S. presidential campaign). Mark Fischetti has a nice post at Scientific American on the question of whether climate change can be implicated, specifically, in the case of Hurricane Sandy:
Here’s where climate change comes in. The atmospheric pattern that sent the Jet Stream south is colloquially known as a “blocking high”—a big pressure center stuck over the very northern Atlantic Ocean and southern Arctic Ocean. And what led to that? A climate phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)—essentially, the state of atmospheric pressure in that region. This state can be positive or negative, and it had changed from positive to negative two weeks before Sandy arrived. The climate kicker? Recent research by Charles Greene at Cornell University and other climate scientists has shown that as more Arctic sea ice melts in the summer—because of global warming—the NAO is more likely to be negative during the autumn and winter. A negative NAO makes the Jet Stream more likely to move in a big, wavy pattern across the U.S., Canada and the Atlantic, causing the kind of big southward dip that occurred during Sandy.
Climate change amps up other basic factors that contribute to big storms. For example, the oceans have warmed, providing more energy for storms. And the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed, so it retains more moisture, which is drawn into storms and is then dumped on us.
Warmer climate means warmer seas which mean changing patterns of energy transfer on the planet which means more extreme weather. But extreme is a relative term, defined in relation to a set of expectations. One of the curious things to realize is that human expectations for normality are very narrowly defined. Humans have only been systematically recording climate observations, for example, for a few hundred years, a small scale in the context of the geological and astronomical forces that help shape patterns of climate change.
In contrast to the relative long cycles of climatic processes, humans operate on very fast cycles. The human world as we know it is primarily a product of the past several hundred years. Most of the world’s population lives in urban centers, a huge fraction of those urban centers are along coasts, and most of the construction and infrastructure development within those urban centers is a product of the past fifty years. The result of (more frequently occurring) extreme weather then becomes stories like this (from The Scientist):
At New York University’s Smilow Research Center, on the eastern edge of Manhattan, which lost power shortly after Sandy struck on Monday night, hundreds of biological samples were destroyed as freezers thawed and refrigerators warmed. And as animal care facilities in the basement flooded, hundreds of mice and rats were killed—animals that had been painstakingly genetically engineered for use as disease models.
“Animal resource staff was on site continuously to mitigate the damage from the storm, but due to the speed and force of the surge, animal rescue attempts were unsuccessful,” NYU officials said in a statement released on Wednesday (October 31). “We are deeply saddened by the loss of these animals’ lives and the impact this has on the many years of important work conducted by our researchers.”
Gordon J. Fishell, associate director of the NYU neuroscience institute told The New York Times that his lab alone had lost about 2,500 mice, including 40 different strains. “These animals were the culmination of 10 years of work, and it will take time to replace them,” Fishell told the NYT, which reported a total of some 7,500 more rodents lost from other labs in the Smilow building.
Humans have a phenomenal, technologically-enabled, ability to adjust the world around them to our needs and our expectations of reality. Our expectations of reality, however, are not necessarily an accurate assessment of reality given the narrow scale of human existence. Global climate change and a greater number of extreme weather events (i.e. global weirdness) are only likely to increase our awareness of the discrepancy between our expectations of “normal” weather and the reality of a dynamic global climatic system.
