"It’s been a season of broken records, according to Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Meteorology. In Rochester, N.Y., the temperature hit 58 degrees on Thursday. For the month of December, the university said that Rochester had the highest deviation upward from normal temperatures, while Miami came in second and New York third."

This quote from this afternoon’s NYTimes verifies what anyone here in Rochester knows from sticking your head out the window: It’s really warm here at a time when we’re usually hunkering down for two months of cold, snowy isolation.

As the article also notes, flowering trees are blooming all over the northeast. This is not good. No one here is complaining except Kevin Williams, our NBC affiliate chief meteorologist who, though a great weather guy, is also a denier. I know, its awful in the west, midwest and northwest, but look at some of that weather: springlike ice storms and tornados. These are not normal for this time of year.

It’s getting to the point where simply covering warming events from the news would be overwhelming- polar bears declared endangered by the Bush administration? Unthinkable a few months ago.
Now we have conculsive proof of the collapse last year of a 41 square mile ice shelf in the Arctic. The shelf, which became an island an hour after the event is in danger of floating into sea lanes and becoming a major hazard- imagine a 41 square mile ice island suddenly appearing where there was nothing a year earlier.
According to Luke Copeland, an ice researcher and head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, it is the speed of change which is startling:
“Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly,” he said.
There have been recent predictions that all Arctic ice will begin to disappear seasonally in the next few decades. Things are changing and it is accelerating.

Like many who have an interest in climate change, I have been seduced by the technology and promise of alternative energy. After all, it can relieve our dependence on fossil fuels and provide clean, renewable energy. What’s not to like? Nothing, except it is not the most critical change we need to make right now. Becoming more efficient is the most immediate action we need to address while we build our alternative infrastructure.

As this article in the NY Times describes, the lack of capability to store energy provided by alternative sources like wind and solar is a major technological problem. This factor alone means that the costs of this energy will always be high and the environmental impact must still factor in the need for carbon-based fuel sources (to fill in when the sun isn’t shining) until we solve the storage problem. The market has a lot of headroom pricewise before these technologies become viable.

The Political Will To Change Won’t Embrace Energy Efficiency

Politicians are becoming big advocates of alternative sources, but not because they are wonderful technology. They like them because they allow the politician to embrace the populist energy issues while not having to confront actual change while they are still in office. Announcing that 20% of our energy needs will be provided by alternatives by 2020 is a wonderful sound bite for an elected official- especially since they will not have to account for that promise 23 years from now.

Energy efficiency is a different political animal. The President and Congress could mandate significantly higher gas mileage in a very short timeframe and send a huge message to oil producers and energy companies that they were leveling the playing field. They won’t however, because the entire auto industry would take a short term hit and these are major political influencers. Even a five percent mandatory improvement in three years would take a huge load off of our economy as a whole and the environment. Instead, this obvious step is being sold out for short term gain by industry. The Japanese, particularly Toyota, have a longer strategic view. They understand that, by including efficiency in their strategy, they’ll eventually own the market worldwide. In fact, they will own the US market sometime in 2007. As a capitalist, I have no problem with fighting regulation to protect shareholder profits, however I do have a problem with sticking to an outdated model and using political power to level the playing field for short term gain.

Efficiency Pays both the Consumer and The Environment

What will change this attitude? We will. You see, buying efficient products actually saves us money. A car that is 5% more efficient saves more and more money as fuel prices rise. Likewise with home heating and energy efficiency, electric bills and new low power lighting, etc. The point here is that you are the voter. You mandated change in Iraq last November. You can and should mandate immediate change on energy efficiency. You can tell your elected officials, local and national, that this is critical now. And you can vote with your pocketbook, choosing efficiency over short term savings. The market is still good at listening to that kind of input.

Here in Rochester we’re experiencing our warmest December ever, averaging nearly 20 degrees higher than average temperatures for the month. As I noted in this post, I may live in one of the few areas of the world where warmer may be better- I certainly have had enough conversations around town with people who are not complaining about our weather!

We’re also experiencing much lower precipitation. One snowfall so far this winter- just a few inches. One of the interesting, and potentially scary, things about a closed complex system like the planetary climate is that small changes can manifest themselves in big ways, a la chaos theory. A warm Pacific begets El Nino which creates a flow of warm air diagonally across the US which displaces the usual jet stream flow, resulting in a 20 degree warm-up here. All because of a few degrees increase in ocean temps. Imagine what happens if they go up more?

Meanwhile the Pacific Northwest has 70 mph gale winds and torrential downpours.