The State of Fruit Flies

"[T]he thing we’d like to think distinguishes us from the animal kingdom is our ability to anticipate problems and head them off. Fruit flies just keep going, and when they hit the wall, millions die and they crash. I’d like to think that we’re better than fruit flies."

-- Eugene Linden, American Prospect

Donald Kaul finds the State of the Union delusional:

Perhaps the most glaring omission was his failure to so much as mention global warming, let alone lay out a high-priority plan to deal with it.

It’s time to get real: the jury is no longer out on global warming. It doesn’t need any more study to see if it’s happening. It’s happening. The Arctic icecap is disappearing, glaciers are melting, coral reefs are dying, storms around the world are becoming increasingly violent and average temperatures keep going up.

While there may be a cyclical element to this, the scientific community---with the exception of a few quacks and scientists on the payrolls of energy companies---is agreed that it’s being hurried along by the burning of fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide into the air, producing a “greenhouse effect.”

Yet the president continues to turn his back on this potentially cataclysmic problem and instead offers tax incentives to oil companies already bloated with profits.

Meanwhile, the State of Pensacola this weekend will be frozen.

This January was the 14th warmest on record in Pensacola since officials began keeping weather data in the 1880s. This year, the month only had one day of freezing temperatures.

"We had a warm January, and now, it looks like we'll make up for it in February," said Keith Williams, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mobile.

The Weather Service expects the low to reach 30 degrees inland Pensacola by Friday morning, with lows in the mid-30s along the coast. A low of 25 to 29 degrees is expected overnight Saturday, with colder temperatures inland. AccuWeather.com forecasts a low of 42 in Pensacola by this morning. Freezing weather is forecast for Saturday with a low of 31 degrees.

So, does that mean the State of the Globe isn't warming? Not at all, replies Time Magazine's veteran environmental reporter, Eugene Linden, author of the new book Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations:

Climate change and global warming don’t mean it gets warm every day everywhere from this point on. You can’t point to one event and say, that’s because of climate change. What you can say is that as the planet warms, these things become more likely. All sorts of changes begin to come about. You get warm winters. Yet things are warming up. The signs are everywhere. I don’t think anyone disputes that. Call it for shorthand, "global warming." But the danger for us in the near-term is more likely "climate chaos."

When climate changes states rapidly and abruptly, it tends to flicker back and forth. It can get warm, it can get cool, and you can get droughts. You can get all kinds of weather extremes as climate tries to find a new equilibrium. That’s the real deal, because that could ruin the entire world economy.
* * *
Climate’s changing. You can get past a point where you get these runaway effects. We don’t know what the tipping points are. * * *

The only way we’ll know the tipping point at this point is once we’ve passed it. That to me is a call to action. * * * A certain degree of warming has occurred. To the degree that it’s our fault, it’s locked in.

I’ve written a lot about animal intelligence over the years, and in the past the thing we’d like to think distinguishes us from the animal kingdom is our ability to anticipate problems and head them off. Fruit flies just keep going, and when they hit the wall, millions die and they crash. I’d like to think that we’re better than fruit flies.