Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
5-4, Shibaura 4-chome,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0023
Incidents like what are reported in the Jan. 26 articles “Cold winter weather takes hold of Western Europe” and “Northeastern U.S. digs out from snow” are interesting to read about. But it bothers me when some people spin reports of such weather to smugly dismiss the global warming model of climactic change by using it as a wedge to facetiously question its veracity, as if spates of cold weather like this definitively end the debate against global warming. They do not.
Instead, severe weather like this is proof of the veracity of the global warming model. The Earth is an engine powered by heat. The more things heat up, the more the engine revs. The more the climactic engine revs, the more severe weather will occur - extremes of heat as well as cold. That means that some places that are cold will get colder, and some places that are cold will get warmer. In addition, some places that are warm will get warmer, while others that are warm will get colder.
Global warming can trigger a deep freeze and cause an ice age. This is not the world disaster fantasy of the script writers of “Day After Tomorrow.” This is the basic outline of the facts of the global warming model taught to me by my high school science and geography teachers in the 1970s.
Does the recent weather in the United States and Europe make nonsense of the global warming model? Not at all, because the model predicts severe and unstable climactic conditions on the way towards an overall temperature rise. So is global warming a disaster? That depends on who and where you are.
Published on Wednesday, February 23, 2005 as “Global warming model lives.”
There is so much confusion about global warming and what it means that opportunities to discuss it more in public are good. I believe in the accuracy of what I was taught in high school, because I trusted my teachers. But the global warming model of climate change teaches that as the ambient temperature rise some places that are warm will get warmer, while others that are warm will get cooler. Similarly, some places that are cold will get warmer, while others that are cold will get colder. Similarly, some places that are wet will get wetter, and other places that are wet will get drier, while some places that are already dry will get even drier, while other places that are dry will get wetter. Weather will become more severe and more irregular. This is not just mumbling jargon meant to fill space on a page. This is the language necessary to accurate state the case. So, unusual extreme cold is a smptom of global warming, or ambient temperature rise.