A Kaleberg
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

I think it’s a surprise to climate scientists because they expected global warming to move more slowly, perhaps with a few short term (3–5 year) reversals. The saying is that climate is what you expect, but weather is what you get, but in this case the weather is following the climatic predictions all too closely. We should be getting a few El Nino related cooling spells, but we aren’t. We shouldn’t be setting temperature records three years running.

Fossil fuels are a big chunk of the problem. I don’t they are the only driver, but scientists have been warning about rising carbon dioxide levels increasing global temperature since the 1930s. By the late 1970s, the first global climate flow forecasting models were coming on line, and two big predictions emerged. One was about nuclear winter, a long term drop in global temperature caused by atmospheric debris from a full fledged nuclear war. The other was about global warming, a long term rise in global temperature caused by rising carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas levels.

In other words, we had lots of warning. In the 1970s, soaring fossil fuel prices led to a push towards alternative energy sources, but the US dropped the ball in the 1980s when oil prices came down. We spent the 1980s propping up the USSR when we could have been making fossil fuels irrelevant. It wasn’t until the 2000s that wind power started becoming economic, and it wasn’t until China poured tens of billions into solar energy as a strategic manufacturing asset that solar power became economic. We blew a 20–30 year lead.

I was a climate change skeptic back in the 1970s. In the 1980s, New England summers started running past the end of August, but I waved this off as a local thing. We don’t have “Indian summers” anymore, not because calling them “Indian” is politically incorrect, but because we don’t get the late August cooling sometimes followed by a brief September warm spell anymore. September is still hot. By the 1990s, I was half convinced about global warming, but I had been long convinced that we needed to move from fossil fuels. Global warming was part of it, but I didn’t like fossil fules because dropping them would hurt the goons running various energy rich dictatorships. Take your pick. They are all lovable guys.

By 2000 I gave up and accepted global warming. The world was getting hotter, and the original nuclear option of nuclear power wasn’t going to be the answer. The other nuclear option is still there, but even the craziest lunatics running the major nuclear powers haven’t been proposing a nuclear war as a way to stop global warming, at least not yet.

)
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade