Though Republicans’ anti-environment wing still seems loath to acknowledge it, the consensus on climate change has become virtually undeniable.
It’s not just the documentable rise in recent decades of rising temperatures and the severe weather events linked to global warming – unusually fierce storms, unquenchable droughts, vast wildfires, prolonged deluges, historic snowmelt and flooding, and retreating glaciers and rising coastal waters.
It’s also the convincing science that connects increasingly alarming weather patterns with the build-up of billions of tons of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – gases formed by the burning of fossil fuels and the deforestation of the earth’s largest forest systems, which have long served as carbon sinks.
A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences clearly states the connection: “Climate change is occurring, is very likely caused primarily by the emission of greenhouse gases from human activities, and poses significant risks for a range of human and natural systems.”
As the atmosphere warms, scientists see it pulling more warm moisture into the air, creating more volatile storms and unstable weather patterns, and driving these conditions further north into previously stable areas. The recent historic flooding in the Mississippi river basin, for example, was aggravated by heavy rains on record deep snow packs that were melting earlier than normal, along with unusually heavy rains in the lower parts of the river basin. Tennessee’s extremely wet spring fed directly into the dynamics of that rain-on-snow flooding. At the same time, Texas was unusually parched and plagued in virtually every county by record wildfires. The early melt of deep snowpacks is now spawning unusually heavy flooding in Montana.