How Many Warnings Do We Need?

Tornado season's got a month to go, and we probably haven't seen the worst yet.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

Some clarification on a subject that's on a lot of our minds, via Good Environment:

This incredible satellite video from NOAA shows all of the vortexes throughout April as red dots. Watch the historically unprecedented month unfold:

For any concerned and conscientious soul, it's hard to mentally and emotionally put the pieces together of these connected, but distinct, disasters.

There's the climate change question, of course, which has been answered unsatisfyingly dozens of times already. Short answer: we don't really know. It's complicated.

Two essential reads on this subject are Andrew Freedman's take on the Capitol Weather Gang blog, and Joe Romm's on ClimateProgress, in which he concludes:

When discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented, including deluges, droughts, and heat waves.

Just because the tornado-warming link is more tenuous doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes.

In other words, it'd be irresponsible to make a straightforward connection between tornadoes and climate change. But it'd also be irresponsible not to discuss the potential for a connection and to work to better understand that potential.

Kevin Drum had a chart that doesn't seem to be scaring as many people as it should:

From the Arctic Sea Ice Blog, this chart shows the extent of (what else) Arctic sea ice by month since 1979, with trend lines drawn in. On current trends, the Arctic will be entirely ice-free in September by about 2016, and will be ice-free year-round by the early 2030s. Probably nothing to worry about, though. Who needs ice, anyway?

Just buy property in Utah and West Virginia, soon to become beachfront, right?

If you want to know what the real threats are, read Gwynne Dyer's Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats. Originally published in 2008, Dyer updated the 2010 paperback edition with the latest data. It reads like a thriller - or horror - yet addresses nearly the full spectrum of both catastrophic scenarios and ways to avoid them.

We really need this relatively fortunate time, when only minor issues like terrorism* disturb international peace and order, to continue for at least another twenty years while we all work to get global warming under control. Whether we will actually be granted the extra time, unfortunately, is impossible to say. There are many unknowns in the field of climate change, through the sheer weight of scientific effort now being brought to bear on them is rapidly shrinking the areas of uncertainty .... But the political, economic and straegic variables are even harder to calculate, and it is threy that will decide whether human beings manage to contain the problem. The proposed remedies are numerous, but they don't all match up, and they almost all require that scarcest of commodities - political will.

*Yes, compared to the likely scenarios of failing to act on global warming, terrorism really is minor.