It Used to Be Colder

Westerly winds this morning! We haven't had west winds for over a week. Luckily, there hasn't been much of an fog inversion layer for the past couple of days, and it has been mostly sunny and cool.

Speaking of cool, today marks the 57th anniversary of the coldest temperature in Hood River's official records. On Feb 3rd 1950, the low temp dropped to -21 degrees. Granted, the temperature has almost certainly been colder than that, since official records only go back to 1928. It was probably colder, say, in the last ice age, perhaps around the time of the Missoula Floods, which did a lot towards carving out the Columbia River Gorge as we know it today. There was an excellent PBS special a while back on the subject. Awesome stuff.

And speaking of awesome stuff, the IPCC's report on upcoming climate change has been released. There is now official international scientific agreement that:

• Increased levels of greenhouse gases in a planet's atmosphere tend to increase temperatures (duh).

• By rapidly releasing the geologic store of carbon (fossil fuels that took millions of years to accumulate) into the atmosphere over a relatively short time period (100 years or so now), humans have been directly responsible for most of the increase in greenhouse gases.

• If we want to do anything about this, we best be taking global action pretty soon.

My personal opinion is that, given human nature (and my own skeptical nature):

• Our species has a poor record of working together on issues of global magnitude.
  

• Our global economy (and our spectacular growth in population, infrastructure, and technology over the past 100 years) has been possible mostly due to the era of inexpensive fossil fuels, which is now drawing to a close.

• Since the biggest step in reducing fossil fuel use is to actually use less of it, and since that could severely impact the global economy's "need to continually grow", it seems unlikely that meaningful change is going to happen in a timely fashion. Such change is more likely to happen if fossil fuel prices stay high or go higher, but then again... the economy...
  

But I could be wrong. Maybe mankind will undertake substantial changes rapidly enough. And even though the science is pretty clear on the warming effect of increasing greenhouse gases, we don't know for sure the impact of all the positive and negative feedback mechanisms in the biosphere, and probably won't know until they happen. Not to mention climate tipping points.


In any event, if it were me (which it is), I wouldn't own or buy land less than 50 feet above sea level, and I would try my best to think globally and act locally. For better or worse, we are all in this together. We are indeed living in very interesting times.