Of March Ides Beware the

Today is March 31, 2010. This is not a news report; neither is it a weather report. It is a personal narrative of a one half-hour moment in climate change history. As the story goes, I’m at a coffee shop in my hometown of Manhattan, KS. I’m on my laptop reading the news. Despite Sen. James Inhofe helping his grandchildren mock Al Gore by building a snow igloo near the Capitol, climatologists are claiming that January 2010 is the hottest January on record. (I could direct you to the horse’s mouth, but you’d be better served hearing skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer concede, “The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly soared to +0.72 deg. C in January, 2010. This is the warmest January in the 32-year satellite-based data record.”)

Suddenly my cell phone rings and it’s my good friend, Ed Brown. Ed is the director of Care of Creation. His latest blog on SustainLane (3/17/10) is entitled “Weird Weather Around the World.” We talk business for a bit, and then in saying goodbye, Ed says, “Well, I hope you get a chance to enjoy the nice weather. It’s nice here in Madison [WI]. What’s it like in Manhattan?” I told him that temperatures are supposed to reach up in the 80’s.

The coffee shop has a flatscreen TV on the wall, set to the Weather Channel. “You know that it’s snowing right now in Salt Lake City,” I inform Ed, referring to an earlier clip I had caught.

“Did you hear about the flooding in Rhode Island?” he asks. Ed lived in Rhode Island for a number of years. Such flooding has never happened before. A shopping mall that he used to frequent is now under three feet of water.

That’s when I tell him about the hottest January on record. At this point, our conversation has redirected my attention to the flatscreen TV and I’m now standing in front of it, cell phone to my ear. I begin to sound like a play-by-play sportscaster as the Weather Channel flips through stories. I report to Ed, “A tornado has hit the Bahamas and killed three people. There’s a blizzard in the U.K.”

Ed and I say our goodbyes. I pack up in order to go back to the office. I step outside into the warm air and in the parking lot I meet the wife of a friend and her teen-age daughter. This is a conservative, home-schooling family who happen to run the best gardening cooperative in the region. I’ve never engaged them on climate change, but they are in my “presumed skeptical” category. I greet them and ask, “So what’s cooking in your garden today?”

“Oh nothing yet,” the mother answers. “But we’ve got plenty of flats ready to go out.”

My next bit of small talk goes something like this: “The weather today sure makes me want to get busy in the garden.” I look to the blue sky.

With what I swear is a hint of horror in her voice, she says, “But it’s too hot. It’s too hot.” Is she worried about her tomatoes, or about her teenage daughters?

Okay, I’ll agree not to let thirty minutes of global weather-watching on March 31, 2010 stand as a proof of climate change, so long as Sen. Inhofe’s granddaughter doesn’t claim a bad snowstorm in D.C. as evidence of a global warming hoax. Weather is NOT climate. Although actually, the inverse is not also true. Climate IS weather, albeit weather aggregated, averaged, regionalized, viewed through the big picture. I have two ready-made Spring icons as examples. Weather is the fact that 10 days after our local college team had to cancel weekend baseball games due to snow, today’s temperature is 80°F. Climate is the fact that the back of the vegetable seed packets that my conservative friends use, show a USDA/National Arbor Day Foundation map of the U.S.—their famous plant hardiness zones—where the hardiness zone for northcentral Kansas has shifted nearly one full zone over the last twenty years!

Terminology is important. One sign outside the Inhofe igloo read: “Honk if you love global warming.” First, the Inhofe clan overlooked the meaning of the word “global” in their statement, but secondly they failed to understand that “change” (as in global climate change) is the main phenomenon, of which global (average) warming is an intermediate cause. Other scientists claim to prefer climate destabilization as their terminology of choice, highlighting the unpredictability of the change. This would explain Kansas exporting tornadoes to the Bahamas, and Wisconsin exporting rainfall to Rhode Island. I’ll let Ed (“weird weather”) and Thomas Friedman (“global weirding”) translate climate destablization into the vernacular. It’s just plain weird. Even Dr. Spencer writes, “I figured I was in for a flurry of e-mails: ‘But this is the coldest winter I’ve seen since there were only 3 TV channels! How can it be a record warm January?’ Sorry, folks, we don’t make the climate…we just report it. But, I will admit I was surprised.”

Dr. James Hansen calls 350 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the condition "in which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." My civilization includes baseball, seed packets, and cute little sayings about March that I've recited since kindergarten. More's the pity.