Newsweek Science Editor on Global Warming: This Year’s Weather Extremes ‘Reached Biblical Proportions’
NewsBusters readers are quite familiar with the frantic hyperbole that often come from the keystrokes of Newsweek's so-called science editor Sharon Begley . On Saturday she penned another breathless doozy with the Hitchcockian sub-headline “In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future”: Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began. From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. The climate has been stable for the last 12,000 years? Yeah, that Little Ice Age between the 16th and 19th centuries was the picture of stability. And though this has been a very active tornado season, it's hardly biblical as well as likely caused by this year's La Ni
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on May 30, 2011. Filed under