Global warming is often in the news. While it seems to me that most folks now believe it is a real thing, there are still deniers around. The scientific perspective, to the chagrin of many, keeps evolving and seemingly towards the more dire.
This summer, the Midwest and Northeast of the US, and of course Eastern Canada, suffered from the poor air quality, haziness, and the faint odor of burning wood or leaves. This was due to the huge fires raging in the Eastern Provinces of Canada. Depending on the wind direction, the fires have made the air quality in American cities, from New York to Chicago, amongst the worst in the world.
For years, we have been hearing about global warming, climate change, the thirty year drought in the Western US, and their role in the increase in frequency and intensity of wildfires. It was easy for anyone paying attention to attribute the two month long Canadian wildfires to climate change.
On June 13 2023, The Wall Street Journal had an article: Canadian Fires Signal New Frontier in Climate Change. From the article:
“The pattern of a rapid onset of drought, considerable wildfire and then air quality impacts associated with it are all consistent with global warming,” said Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth College, and co-lead of the drought task force at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This is a pattern we’ve seen in the West.”
On the same was another article, Canadian Wildfires Came From Rotten Luck, Not Climate Change: Canadian Wildfires Came From Rotten Luck, Not Climate Change. Rotten luck? Not climate change? The author of this article, Clifford Mass is a professor of atmosphere sciences at the University of Washington. He acknowledged Quebec has experienced a 2 degree Fahrenheit increase over the past fifty years. His perspective is the following:
The recent intense New York smoke event is a good illustration of the underlying origins of many extreme environmental and weather events. The atmosphere is a chaotic system, dominated by random natural variability. Such variability is like a game of cards—rarely, by the luck of the draw, one is dealt a full house or a straight flush. Climate change’s effects on weather are relatively small compared to random variations inherent in a hugely complex system.
How could both of these articles, with headlines that give somewhat opposite messages, be in the same newspaper on the same day? No wonder people are confused by the science of climate change. We experienced the same thing during the Covid Pandemic. People wanted simple answers that explain what is going on and what should be done. We needed more ventilators at the onset. Then we learned that ventilators increased deaths rather than reduce them. Science learned and adapted. Many people were confused. The void from the confusion was easily filled by the pseudo-science and wishful thinking of politicians and social media influencers.
Professors Mankin and Mass both make excellent points. They agree on the temperature change of 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The are both looking at patterns. The article in which Mankin was quoted noted that “an expanding range of insect pests that are making forests more susceptible to fire…” This makes sense and no doubt a contributor to the fires. The question is how much of a contributor percentage wise? Mass’s conclusion appeals to me even more. There is a lot of variables in the complex system that is geography, ecology, and climate. These variables are mostly stochastic which complicate any models even more.
Addendum: I could have just stopped with the last paragraph. But, there was another article I read this week in Scientific American: Rampant Groundwater Pumping Has Changed the Tilt of Earth’s Axis. The subtitle of the article is “Human depletion of groundwater has shifted the global distribution of water so much that the North Pole has drifted by more than four centimeters per year.”
This passage in the article illustrates a bit how scientific thought evolves:
Shifts in water masses can cause smaller but still measurable changes in the tilt of Earth’s axis. Until recently, researchers thought that these water-driven effects would be caused mainly by the melting of glaciers and ice caps. But when Seo and his collaborators tried to model the Earth’s water content to account for how much the axis has tilted, they could not fully explain the data. Adding the effects of changes in surface reservoirs did not help, says Seo, “so I just scratched my head and said, ‘probably one effect is groundwater’”.
Note that quotes are from Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University.
While fires are not as prevelant in the Western US this year due to the voluminous snows in the Rockies this past winter. But, if the growth in population and farming in the west consumed more water than was being replenished… um… wouldn’t it make sense that ground water was depleted creating a drought and conditions for higher frequencies of wildfires. It turns out it also contributes to axis tilt of the earth. Is this tilting of the earth temporary or permanent? What are the positive or negatives consequences of this? Basically, we don’t quite know yet. But, we are learning.
It is clear that the scientific method alive, well, and in-play here. There was one theory supported by evidence and analysis. New data and analysis had an expert in geophysics scratching his head and provided evidence that the prevailing theory might not sufficiently explain the physical phenomena. As a result, the theory is revised and will be vetted through the collection of even more data and analysis.
The more complex the system, the more often this problem happens. We learn by bits and bytes and thus are continually cycling through the scientific method.
Everyone is exposed to this in like 5th grade but I have a theory that most of us never really full learn how it is works in practice.
It is just a theory.
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