The flames of autumn are falling to earth. Our beautiful run of clear, warm weather is slowly coming to an end. The millions of leaves now cover our yards and lawns and need to be blown to the curb. The turning back of the clocks foreshadows the cold darkness of winter. The beauty of nature in the fall assures us their must be a higher power responsible for this great show. Weather is universal. Having worked in local television news for decades, we knew the one story that interested everyone was the weather. There was no bigger story than a snow storm or nor’easter coming up the coast to have us mobilize round the clock coverage.
Weather can be violent and deadly. The names Katrina and Sandy will live on as terrible reminders of what weather can do. Recent wildfires and drought in California, and floods in Texas and South Carolina have affected millions more of us. There is great debate about climate change. Is it real? Are humans making it worse? Are the global greenhouse gases that are belching into the air heating up our planet to a dangerous degree? The Kyoto Protocol said greenhouse gases it measured increased by 80% since 1970 and 30% since 1990. The United Nations Conference on Climate Change meets at the end of November in Paris in hopes of getting an international agreement on climate change to keep global warming below 2 degrees C.
The stuff we are putting into the air does affect our weather and our lives. We should all be outraged when we hear Volkswagen deliberately cheated on emissions testing for its diesel power cars in the name of profit. The coal producing industry is fighting for its survival by resisting regulations that would reduce what they put into atmosphere.
According to NASA, the current global warming trend is likely caused by humans at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years. It says 97 per cent of climate scientists agree global warming is man made. The earth has been getting warmer since 1880, but most of the warming has occured since 1970. Twenty of the warmest years have occured since 1981, and the ten warmest have happened in the last 12 years. The number of record high temperatures in the United States has increased, while the number of record low temperatures has decreased since 1950. The warmer tempertures have increased the amount of intense rainfall we get, and reduced snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere. Global sea levels have risen 6.7 inches in the last century. In the last ten years, it’s double that rate.
The “greenhouse gases” that are trapping the heat in the atmosphere come from a variety of sources, burning fossil fuel, like coal and oil, landfills, fertilizers, and industrial pollution to name just a few. This is a real problem, and people who argue otherwise are just not seeing reality.
Climate change has come along with huge improvements and progress by society like the industrial revolution and the digial revolution we are all living through today. When we work toward a goal for the common good, we will never fail. There is no greater good than making the world a better place for generations to come.
I started by talking about the beauty and color of the fall. It comes every year in the natural cycle of things. It eases us out of the warmth of summer preparing us for the cold of winter. We have all said you can’t control the weather. Even the meteorologists get it wrong. But we have the power of human ingenuity to solve any problem we face and preserve all the seasons of color to come.
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