It’s
cold here in Oklahoma, though not as cold as in many other parts of the
country. Of course this would be the day on which I began teaching my general
bio class about global warming. Could I have chosen a worse time?
Actually,
it was a good time to teach about this subject. Yesterday (Sunday January 26)
it was quite balmy, in the 70s F. Overnight the temperature dropped 40 degrees
F. So the weather of these last two days perfectly illustrated my point that
weather is not climate. You can’t just stick your head out the window and tell
whether global warming is occurring or not. You need long-term and large-scale
temperature data, which is what the IPCC has accumulated and continues to
accumulate.
So
where is global warming now? I told my students that this is a good question, one
that critical thinkers should be asking, but I have two answers. First, it’s
somewhere else at the moment. Down in Australia, where they are having a big
tennis competition, some of the tennis shoes of the participants started to
melt on the court. Australia is having a record heat wave. Second, it’ll be
back. Oklahoma had record heat waves in 2011 and 2012, but not 2013. But the
high temperatures will be back. With global climate as well as local weather,
the temperatures go up and down and up and down…but they go up more than they
go down, and they go up more often than they go down.
Also,
I showed the students some of my data regarding tree budburst times in southern
Oklahoma. During the period of 2008-2012, the buds of some tree species opened
between 2 and 3 days earlier each year. This period is not necessarily typical
of all recent time periods, but it really did happen. I have data from lots of
trees of numerous species. The advantage of using budburst times is that the
plants integrate the weather conditions. They open their buds in response to
the overall effect of warm and cold days in the winter, and also in response to
lots of other factors, such as drought damage or disease that may have affected
them the previous summer. Four hundred budburst data can integrate the effects
of thousands of meteorological data for any given year.
So
the “polar vortex” created a teachable moment for me today.
Stan Rice, president
