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TODAY Thursday 19 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Thursday 19 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Stormy Weather
There is something of a semantic tension on the question of climate change these days. Take the very words "climate change." People in the business of analyzing -- or denying -- the effects of human activity on weather like to talk about "climate" (which might be described as patterns revealed when you look at a lot of weathers) because everybody knows that you can't just take one day's conditions and extrapolate. Everybody knows that, but everybody does it anyway. Ordinary people experience weather, not climate, and it provides the basic feedstock of conversation for encounters between strangers and between co-workers. Weather is the environmental issue that people talk about and care about the most, and they're usually not reluctant to describe (authoritatively) changing patterns of weather that make them amateur climatologists without saying so.
Focus groups tell us that people don't like the term "climate change" because: 1) it's unfamiliar; and 2) it sounds like technical jargon. They generally prefer the term "global warming." They're also very interested in local and regional events that can be associated with global warming: floods, droughts, heat waves. They're interested in health issues (though the threat of a malaria outbreak doesn't seem to arouse much anxiety) and they worry about human-made ecological imbalances that will loose unpredictable forces upon the world. They also want to hear about solutions.
Our side hasn't quite figured out how to talk about solutions. A carbon tax is a good idea, but we don't want talk about a tax right now, not in a loud voice, not before the Senate ratifies whatever treaty comes out of the Kyoto negotiations this December. We tend to concentrate on the economic attractiveness of energy efficiency and the near-horizon technological breakthroughs that will allow for economic growth and energy/materials conservation at the same time. Win-win.
In the meantime, though, we're still trying to figure out how to make sure that a larger fraction of the public understands that "global warming" means more than just increased temperatures. It is now generally conceded by climatologists that there is an enlarging pattern of already-wet places getting wetter and already-dry places getting dryer (this is rough news for farmers in North and West Africa). Moreover, there is a tendency for the precipitation in the wet places to fall in more intensive episodes. Flooding is a natural consequence of that pattern, and it is almost certainly no accident that Americans have seen lots of "hundred year" floods recently. When President Clinton visited the inundated valley of the Red River of the North, he felt emboldened to point this out.
Now there's evidence "suggestive" (as they say) of a connection between global warming and hurricanes. A new federal study establishes a definite correlation between the temperature of the ocean and the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. That's a correlation, not a cause-and-effect, and it's not certain how and when changes in atmospheric temperature translate into changes in saltwater temperature. But still, the new study certainly invites reasonable speculation that the new climate of the planet will feature a high number of killer storms.
Which will cause a lot of damage on the ground, which makes the insurance industry very nervous. In private, insurers talk about climate change a lot; in public, none of the leading American companies has gone on the record. Whether and when this silence will be broken is an important question of environmental politics for the next twelve months.
For there is another important factor that people on our side are not yet comfortable talking about through the mass media. Insurance specialists and environmental activists know that much of the recent property damage from floods and hurricanes came not from the intensity of the weather events themselves but from human settlement patterns and inappropriate human interventions, from draining wetlands to building levees. Hurricane Andrew, for example, was not really an all-time whopper of a hurricane, but its path across South Florida covered a dense human population (living in flimsy structures) that simply hadn't been there in decades past. The same is true for other storm-prone areas, from the Gulf Coast of Texas to the Carolina barrier islands to Suffolk County in New York. While the near-horizon warriors on our team gird loins for the runup to Kyoto (and maintain a tactful silence on shoreline overdevelopment), the rest of us can ponder how to talk about the fact that, once again, the exercise of American freedoms seems to get us into an ecological jam.
TODAY ON THE SITE
At Liberty Tree World Headquarters here at the corner of Broadway and 26th Street (in the heart of the baseball-cap-and-cheap-perfume district), we're particularly fond of the new Works In Progress feature of our Newsroom section. This week we've introduced text and drawings from the architectural firm of William McDonough and Partners, who have designed what is going to be an astonishing and influential new building for Oberlin College in Ohio. Supremely energy-efficient, built of recycled and recyclable materials, lit mostly by the sky, the new Environmental Studies Center will make a mark in architectural history. More modestly, the two of us here will once again undertake to work in a New York office without air conditioning. Dress code allows for gym shorts.
This week's "Today" columns:
6/18: Nostalgia
6/17: Air War
6/16: Pray for Swelter
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