U.S. Midwest Freezes, Australia Burns: This Is the Age of Weather Extremes.

In Chicago, officials warned about the risk of almost instant frostbite on what could be the city’s coldest day ever. Warming centers opened around the Midwest. And schools and universities closed throughout the region as rare polar winds streamed down from the Arctic.

The Lake Michigan shore in Chicago on Tuesday. Overnight
temperatures in the city dipped to minus 21 degrees
Fahrenheit, or minus 29 Celsius, near the record low.

At the same time, on the other side of the planet, wildfires raged in Australia’s record-breaking heat. Soaring air-conditioner use overloaded electrical grids and caused widespread power failures. The authorities slowed and canceled trams to save power. Labor leaders called for laws that would require businesses to close when temperatures reached hazardous levels: nearly 116 degrees Fahrenheit, or 47 Celsius, as was the case last week in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia.

This is weather in the age of extremes. It comes on top of multiple extremes, all kinds, in all kinds of places.

Read the story from The New York Times by Somini Songupta - “U.S. Midwest Freezes, Australia Burns: This Is the Age of Weather Extremes.”

2013 slips away and the urgency of 2014 arises

With the end of 2013 less than five hours away, it seems reasonable to say something that recognizes the occasion.

The year just past was less than encouraging for those of us concerned about issues that are impacting of the health of our atmosphere.

Ideas proposed by Swedish Scientist, Svante Arrhenius, explained the link between carbon dioxide and global warming in the 19^th Century, but had he predicted our current plight then, that would have been considered “wild-eyed alarmism”.  

The thought about “wild-eyed alarmism” was suggested by David Archer in his 2008 book: “The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100 000 Years of Earth’s Climate”.

Archer, a computational ocean chemist and a Professor at the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, said: “The potential climate change in the future is not subtle. If humankind burns all of the coal, the new climate of the Earth could be the warmest in tens of millions of years, since long before our evolution as a species. The transition from the natural climate to the new one would be the most severe global change since the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary 65 million years ago that brought a close to the 150-million-year era of the dinosaurs”.

The final gathering Beneath the Wisteria for this year less than a week ago, considered the question: “Is it worth it?”

The rhetorical question was answered, without hesitation, in the positive and in fact those among the 12 who attended, felt that each of us needed to boldly spread the message about the need for climate change abatement.

In fact our January gathering (Saturday, January 25) will concentrate on defining our purpose.

So the struggle to implant the idea of a need among our fellows to seriously think about and act upon ideas to mitigate the effects of the causes of climate change takes on a new urgency in 2014 and so our responsibility increases, rather than decreases.

It is almost a cliché to say “Stay safe” and although it might be a cliché, I do urge you to have a safe 2014 and join me in doing what we can to ensure that when we say “stay safe”, it is an intergenerational hope; a hope that will become a reality as we work to help people understand that only changed behaviour will ease the certain difficulties ahead.

-      Robert McLean.