Bloomberg Businessweek: ‘It’s Global Warming, Stupid’

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The cover of the year goes to Bloomberg Businessweek, "It’s Global Warming, Stupid”.

The story opens:

Yes, yes, it’s unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us—and they’re right—that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.

Clarity, however, is not beyond reach. Hurricane Sandy demands it: At least 40 U.S. deaths. Economic losses expected to climb as high as $50 billion. Eight million homes without power. Hundreds of thousands of people evacuated. More than 15,000 flights grounded. Factories, stores, and hospitals shut. Lower Manhattan dark, silent, and underwater.

The piece goes on to provide much-needed clarity — and our favorite climate metaphor:

An unscientific survey of the social networking liter moodature on Sandy reveals an illuminating tweet (you read that correctly) from Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. On Oct. 29, Foley thumbed thusly: “Would this kind of storm happen without climate change? Yes. Fueled by many factors. Is storm stronger because of climate change? Yes.” Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund (and former deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek), offers a baseball analogy: “We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”

In an Oct. 30 blog post, Mark Fischetti of Scientific American took a spin through Ph.D.-land and found more and more credentialed experts willing to shrug off the climate caveats. The broadening consensus: “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.” Even those of us who are science-phobic can get the gist of that.

More at Think Progress.
Bloomberg/Businessweek It's Global Warming, Stupid.

ETA this scary graph from the end of the Think Progress piece:



Ye old climate change denier heavy country USA is a large part of the continent that's seen the greatest increase in natural disasters. Seems sort of fitting, no, for a country held back by corrupt politicians & corporate-guided refusal to make the changes necessary to stem the continued onslaught of climate change? Sadly, those of us who know the changes must be made and made now and who are doing what we can to lessen our carbon footprint are being taken down with the rest of the world by greedy scum for whom profit and more profit is all that matters.

Seminal Study Finds ‘Climate-Change Footprint’ In North America, ‘Continent With The Largest Increases in Disasters’]
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/21/1054571/seminal-study-climate-change-footprint-in-north-america-the-continent-with-the-largest-increases-in-disasters/