Global warming or just Big City warming?

  • Amaz­ing. It’s not even March, but we’re get­ting April weather again. Squir­rels are out, the lawns are try­ing to green up and we seem to have a pair of robins in our holly bush.

    And when I drove through Kansas City and Jef­fer­son City today for a long-distance meet­ing, it was just plain hot. I had to turn on the a/c, which is a big deal for me, since I have lizard blood and like noth­ing bet­ter than bask­ing in a car. (Weird. I know.)

    So is this global warm­ing? Well, mmm­maybe …

    I guess that’s back in the news a lit­tle bit, because I’ve been hear­ing minor squawks in the news from peo­ple who got pissy that George Bush had Michael Crich­ton to the White House. Who? What? I know. We all have big­ger things to talk about now with Iraq civil war and Dubai ports, but some peo­ple found the time to be indig­nant that the pres­i­dent invited Crich­ton — who authored “Juras­sic Park,” “Androm­eda Strain” and a host of other science-almost-nonfiction books like that — as a guest. So what’s the big whoop? Well, Crich­ton most recently wrote “State of Fear,” which more or less says that almost all the global warm­ing talk is baloney and its per­pe­tra­tors are eco-terrorists. (Chances that Spiel­berg will make this book into a movie: Exactly zero.)

    And while I still believe (as I said back here) that the book is a lit­tle heavy­handed and preachy, I was reminded of one of his most inter­est­ing argu­ments by a cor­rob­o­rat­ing arti­cle I hap­pened to come across in the Farmer’s Almanac, of all places.

    They had a sec­tion about the pur­ported cli­mate changes, and I would think if there’s any­body that doesn’t have a polit­i­cal ax to grind about all this, it would be The Farmer’s Almanac.

    How much man-made green­house gases heat the entire globe is con­tre­ver­sial; the fact that these green­house gases are turn­ing cities into urban heat islands is not.

    We all know that build­ings, streets and side­walks absorb solar heat; they also absorb heat cre­ate by man’s energy use. As cities have grown and energy use has increased, urban areas have grown warmer — .9 degrees Fahren­heit warmer in each decade since World War II. This has resulted in urban heat islands, places where the tem­per­a­ture range of a cen­tral city dif­fers from its rural sur­round­ings. this dif­fer­ence has been shown to be from as lit­tle as 4 degrees Fahren­heit in St. Louis, Mis­souri, to as much as 18 degrees in Mex­ico City. How hot can a city get? Recent satel­lite obser­va­tions have shown us that tem­per­a­tures in south­ern and west­ern U.S. cities are reach­ing as high as 150 degrees on inner-city rooftops and 120 degrees on streets and park­ing lots.

    Heat islands warp nat­ural rain­fall pat­terns. Hot air dur­ing the day reduces rain­fall on the cities and their sur­round­ings. Then, at night, warm air radi­ated from the urban cen­ters rises and mixes with pol­lu­tion aerosols. Mois­ture col­lects around the pol­lu­tion par­ti­cles … form­ing clouds of tiny droplets that are then blown away by wind. Through­out the U.S. Mid­west, storms tend to be heav­i­est east of large cities, where the hot urban air, car­ried on the pre­vail­ing west­erly winds, col­lides with cooler rural tem­per­a­tures. Sci­en­tists have reported that along the East Coast it rains more on the week­ends, because most cities gen­er­ate fewer pol­lu­tion aerosols on Sat­ur­day and Sun­days. (The fact that there are fewer aerosols means that each par­ti­cle can absorb more mois­ture. These larger droplets fall rather than blow away.)

    Skep­tics claim that much of the global warm­ing we have seen reflects the increased use and rera­di­a­tion of energy in local heat islands and is not a world­wide phenomenon.

    (And by the way, the empha­sis is mine, in case you can’t tell.)

    Well, now really. Doesn’t that seem like some­thing that we should all talk about first? Shouldn’t we begin with know­ing that if you choose to live in a city, you’re going to have to accept that you’ll be deal­ing with ele­vated tem­per­a­tures, but that they’re a sim­ple fact of city-dwelling life and NOT a rea­son to tell the whole dang world to open a win­dow? Maybe there are some other fac­tors to look at, but I think it’s incred­i­ble that the urban folks can’t be more hon­est and take the heat (ha ha) for their pre­ferred environment.

    I think that peo­ple are basi­cally fair-minded. I don’t think I’d tell them that their prob­lems are their own. But telling every­one that the prob­lem is world-wide is just annoy­ingly over­stated, and we ought to turn up the heat (ha ha again) on them to stick to the facts, no mat­ter how inconvenient.

    *****

    Follow-up:
    I couldn’t find a link to the story about peo­ple being irri­tated about the president’s Crich­ton visit, but in surf­ing around, I came across this quote from Crich­ton at a Sep­tem­ber, 2003 speech that I thought was worth a repeat:

    “Envi­ron­men­tal­ism seems to be the reli­gion of choice for urban athe­ists. Why do I say it’s a reli­gion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look care­fully, you see that envi­ron­men­tal­ism is in fact a per­fect 21st cen­tury remap­ping of tra­di­tional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. There’s an ini­tial Eden, a par­adise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pol­lu­tion as a result of eat­ing from the tree of knowl­edge, and as a result of our actions there is a judg­ment day com­ing for us all. We are all energy sin­ners, doomed to die, unless we seek sal­va­tion, which is now called sus­tain­abil­ity. Sus­tain­abil­ity is sal­va­tion in the church of the envi­ron­ment. Just as organic food is its com­mu­nion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right peo­ple with the right beliefs, imbibe. Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the com­ing dooms­day — these are deeply held mythic structures.”


    Related posts:

    1. The White City and us
    2. The Bat­tle for New Orleans
    3. Sto­ries you won’t see in the NYT
    4. Yes, Vir­ginia, there is a St. Nicholas
    5. Lovely San Diego

    February 23rd, 2006 | Grace | No Comments |

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