Some MIT researchers posted an important announcement regarding the debate on whether the increasing intensity of hurricanes is caused by global warming. Their position is that this argument is distracting us from a much more immediate problem: The continued rapid expansion of building in coastal areas. Whether we caused the hurricane intensity is not as important as the fact that we’re continuing to build homes and condos in places where that intensity will cause destruction.

It’s the lemming effect. Even though we know its dangerous, we take the gamble so we can enjoy being by the water. The problem is that the people whose waterfront homes are destroyed by hurricanes expect the government to rebuild them, at everyone’s expense. This gets debated but no one ever suggests that maybe we should ban all building within a certain distance from the shorelines. My suggestion would be that it be based on altitude above sea level, since we all know you need to go to the high ground in a flood.

Of course there’s no chance this is going to happen. Washington, DC itself is built on a swamp that is close to sea level and essentially a part of the Chesapeake bay basin. This spring we saw floods on the Mall closing government buildings and public transportation throughout the capitol. Yet we heard no warnings in congress or elsewhere that we should consider the consequences of building our capitol in such a vulnerable spot.

So, while I salute the MIT geniuses for their effort, realistically I doubt anyone is going to pay attention- its just too nice out there by the beach.

Gardeners are the first observers of changes in climate. Their intimate knowledge of how plants respond to changes in temp, light, humidity, micro-climates and more gives them a sense of environmental change earlier than most of us. Most serious gardeners base their planting choices on hardiness maps that divide the planet into Zones which indicate average low winter temps.

Because we are near Lake Ontario, our climate is moderated by the slower changes in temperature of the water in the lake. It acts as a heat sink, stabilizing temps through seasonal changes. As a result our hardiness zone is warmer than those to the south of us. However, in recent years, our zone has changed to the next level warmer which cannot be explained by proximity to the lake. This change is graphically shown by this hardiness map comparing changes throughout North America in the period from 1990-2004. The striking thing about this is how the entire range of warmer zones is moving northward.

For my girlfriend, who is a plant fiend, this means we are increasingly able to plant semi-tropical plants in warmer areas of our garden without worrying about them wintering over. It’s not just us: municipal arborists in England are now replacing dying street trees with species that can survive warmer climates. Given the lifespan of a tree, this indicates a committment on their part to acceptance of warming.

Watch the gardeners….

First post on something I’ve been thinking about for a while. To put it bluntly, the weather has been weird around here lately. ‘Here’ is Rochester, NY on the shores of Lake Ontario. For those who haven’t seen the Great Lakes, they’re not lakes in the common understanding of the word. Technically they are inland seas, in fact one fifth of all the fresh water on the planet is concentrated in the lakes.

I grew up with Lake Ontario a few hundred feet from my front yard. The lake is 65 miles across at its shortest point from here to Canada. Its over 650 feet deep just offshore and it can get stormy fast. As kids we watched storms ome in across the lake and it helped turn me into a weather freak, which in turn got me interested in climate change. And the climate, IMHO, is definitely changing, fast.

This January we had practically no snow and many days in the fifties. Contrast this with our normal snowfall of 100 inches plus. Last week we went from one day with 3.5" of rainfall to 95 degree heat, both abnormal. Thunderstorms have been increasingly violent and occur almost daily. Last month Binghamton, which is about 150 miles southeast from here, got 12 inches of rain and 8000 houses were flooded. 150 miles of the NYS Thruway were closed for flooding. Today in France, hundreds are dying from excessive heatwaves (AC is very uncommon in Europe). The West Coast is experiencing heatwave after heatwave and fires are raging, fed by dead timber killed by infestations from insects that have migrated because of warming conditions.

I could go on with these horror stories. Instead I intend to provide a personal view of how climate change is affecting my personal and world views. In spite of the out of control situation in the MIddle East and North Korea, I believe that climate change is the biggest story in our lives going forward.