https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ignoring-climate-change-hasnt-made-it-go-away/2021/05/13/b1cfa376-b413-11eb-9059-d8176b9e3798_story.html
Opinion: Ignoring climate change hasn’t made it go away
Eugene Robinson
Debris from damaged homes floats in floodwater after Hurricane Delta landed in
Creole, La., in October. (Callaghan O'Hare/For The Washington Post)
But now, in the reality-based Biden era, our government is once again in the
business of honest — and honestly reported — climate research. The result is
new EPA data and analyses showing that the massive impacts of human-induced
warming of the atmosphere and the oceans are happening faster, and in more
extreme ways, than when the agency was last permitted to publish “Climate
Indicators” data in 2016.
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The United States experienced an average of six heat waves — “extreme heat
events” — per year during the decade that began in 2010, the EPA recently
reported, using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That compares with an average of about 4.5 such heat waves per year in the
decade that began in 2000 and fewer than four each year in the 1990s. Today’s
heat waves last longer and are more intense than they used to be.
For those who suffer from seasonal allergies — like me — it will come as no
surprise that pollen season is also lasting longer and getting worse.
The ice sheets covering much of Antarctica and Greenland were shrinking only
slowly until the 2000s, when rapid melting began, the EPA reported. This
melting accelerated sharply in the 2010s. While that may seem a distant
phenomenon, it has measurably raised sea levels — which makes our coastal
cities increasingly vulnerable to storm surge from hurricanes.
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The oceans are warmer now than at any time since systematic measurement began,
and because warmer water occupies more volume than cooler water, this also
raises sea levels. “Every site measured has experienced an increase in coastal
flooding since the 1950s,” the EPA says, with the effect being most pronounced
on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. And while it is difficult to attribute any
specific weather event to climate change, scientists say that ocean warming has
made hurricanes generally bigger and wetter. Last year, there were so many
Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes that meteorologists ran out of names
for them and had to resort to the Greek alphabet for the first time since 2005.
Perhaps the most important sign that the White House has taken a new approach
to these worrisome indicators is that the EPA is able to make this simple
declarative statement:
“The Earth’s climate is changing. Temperatures are rising, snow and rainfall
patterns are shifting, and more extreme climate events — like heavy rainstorms
and record high temperatures — are already happening. Many of these observed
changes are linked to the rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases in our atmosphere, caused by human activities.”
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It’s those last four words — “caused by human activities” — that the previous
administration tried its best to squelch, pretending there was some sort of
“debate” about what almost all climate scientists regard as a long-settled
question.
As the EPA climate website notes, for the past 800,000 years, the concentration
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere oscillated between roughly 180 and 280
parts per million — until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Over the
past 250 years, a blink of an eye in the history of the planet, the carbon
dioxide concentration leapt to 411 parts per million in 2019, an incredible
increase. Atmospheric carbon traps heat (as do methane and several other
industrial gases). We are baking ourselves.
Before you can even begin to solve a problem, you have to acknowledge its
existence and its cause. The United States government is no longer enforcing a
policy of willful ignorance, and that is a beginning.
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It will not be easy to persuade China, by far the world’s biggest carbon
dioxide emitter, to cut back its use of coal and other fossil fuels quickly
enough. It will not be easy to persuade India to follow a clean-energy path to
development, rather than use the perhaps quicker and definitely dirtier route
taken by rich countries. And it will not be easy to wean the U.S. economy from
coal, oil and natural gas — even though the potential economic benefits of the
change are becoming increasingly clear.
But under President Biden, we will try. And we will proceed with our eyes and
ears open, for a change.
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