NOT GLOBAL WARMING --"WEATHER INTENSIFICATION"

NOT "GLOBAL WARMING",

LET'S CALL IT "WEATHER INTENSIFICATION"

HUMAN INDUCED GLOBAL WEATHER INTENSIFICATION OR "HIGWI"

My mother-in-law is a Fox News addict. That "news" station is her primary portal to the world from her isolated perch on the lower flanks of Bromley Mountain, here in Peru Vermont. A secondary portal is the view from her kitchen window. Down below she can see Stratton Mountain, the valley and Route 11 snaking across the countryside with its seasonal traffic. She also keeps a keen eye on her woodpile, located just beyond her kitchen door. This last winter has been called an "old-time Vermont winter" by the locals. In the Greens past events are often obscured by mists of both the meteorological and mental kind. The "old days" are often the only yardstick by which the present is gauged. But by any measure this winter was truly unusual. The snows came heavy and often, and Momma Schmidt's neatly stacked woodpile came perilously close to being used up well before the spring thaws and warm weather arrived.

The weather is a common topic up here. But one must keep mum about global warming. Whenever I use that phrase to explain the underlying cause of my mother-in-law's winter discomfort, this feisty elder woman responds with a harangue about university types "who don't know what's going on in the "real world" and have their "bald" pointy heads buried in arcane data "which don't mean a thing". I find a lot of similarity in tone and key phrases between her responses and the talking points dialog on Fox News. But the facts of a cold and snowy season are hard to dispute when she clasps my ear between her bony thumb and forefinger and drags me over to the window to view that empty place in the snow where her woodpile used to be. "Where's the warming, huh sonny?" she would cackle in my ear. With the mercury hovering just above zero, it is a difficult task explaining global warming to a cranky old lady. After all my efforts she could not or would not understand the term "global warming". Her "pals" on Hannity and Fox News were no help in this matter either.

One day riding down the bumpy, potholed dirt road from her place,after a visit to mend a frozen pipe, I thought about her and the host of other U.S. citizens who can not or will not understand the grave climate threat we face. One jarring bump in the road rattled the ancient frame of my pickup and must have had a similar effect on a bundle of cranial neurons because the word "intensification" suddenly popped into my head. I thought, global "warming" is a terrible misnomer which leads some people to an erroneous concept---. We should rather be talking about 'global weather intensification',I mumbled to myself. So I coined a new term. I have abandoned global warming and now refer only to "Human Induced Global Weather INTENSIFICATION". My hope is people like Mamma Schmidt might grasp the concept better.

Reaching the well-maintained, smooth asphalt surface of Route 11, I began to think more clearly about how I could expand on my pothole induced brain storm and win over Momma Schmidt (or if not her, some of the other die hard climate deniers in this part of the nation).

So here it is. To understand this we need a few facts. Let's establish first that there is little question about the underlying climate data. Greenhouse gases have been,since the industrial revolution, increasing steadily in the atmosphere and as they accumulate atmospheric temperatures have been rising almost steadily. No question about it. The atmosphere is getting hotter. But how do you relate that fact to the doubters when we experience more snow, cold snaps and other weather phenomena which do not seem to be relatable to higher temperatures?

"Understand first that the earth is a sphere. Oh well not exactly a sphere but close enough anyway (a slightly flattened (or oblate) sphere-like body (or oblate spheroid)). When heated by the sun, it is the earth's equatorial belt which gets the most direct radiation and therefore becomes hotter than the sloping mid latitudes and the polar regions. This unequal heat is transferred to the overlying atmosphere and causes the fluid atmosphere to respond by moving to disperse the heat to achieve a more equitable distribution. This process of spreading heat from the equator over the globe's atmosphere is the phenomena we call weather. Weather is the means by which the excess heat of the equatorial zones is spread both north and south. The atmosphere's cloudy vortices or mid-latitude storms and tropical storms are the manifestation of this process. It is the unequal heat distribution which cause masses of air to have different temperatures, and pressures. The wind, clouds, rain, snow, hail sleet, etcetera, etcetera are only different ways of disseminating the excess heat from the equator. (The effects of these weather phenomena over longer periods are termed "climate". ) The more excess heat, the more of these weather phenomena we should expect and the more intense they should be. What we are saying is that it is the poorly distributed heat which causes weather...rain, snow, wind etc., thus more heat, a hotter globe will produce more of these phenomena, more rain, more snow, more weather. A hotter planet will generate more weather and more intense weather.

To transfer heat, the atmosphere moves air from warmer places to cooler places, just as air may circulate in your home. In the atmosphere we call these movements wind. But even more significantly this same atmosphere can also move heat around by evaporating and condensing water. Water is found on earth as a liquid, solid and gas and as it changes from one phase to another it can carry heat from the hotter equator to the cooler poles. Enormous amounts of heat are absorbed when equatorial sea water at the ocean surface is evaporated. That heat enters the atmosphere as a gas. That solar derived heat is carried by gaseous water molecules in the circulating atmosphere into the northern and southern hemispheres where the air cools and condenses into droplets to form clouds. As the water vapor changes from a gas into a liquid it releases heat it had stored over the tropics. The droplets form clouds which are warmer than the surrounding air as a result of the released heat. Clouds when cooled further can produce snow sleet and hail and in changing to ice release even more heat. So the weather phenomena that we see each day are simply the earth's means of transferring heat energy from the equator toward the poles. More heat, from a hotter earth would mean a greater need for heat transfer, and result in more rain, snow, sleet, hail and winds. A hotter earth will have more "weather" more rain, snow, more hot days, more windy days, more tornadoes, more droughts, more flooda, more hurricanes, more snow up up in the Greens and everywhere more intense weather.

Yes Momma Schmidt, what the scientists call "global warming" and I am here now calling GLOBAL WEATHER INTENSIFICATION can and may cause more snow, cold snaps, deeper drifts, stronger winds, more rain, more flooding, more frequent and more intense tropical storms, more and stronger tornadoes, or simply put..MORE INTENSE WEATHER . So please let's abandon the term "global warming" and use "global weather intensification" it's much more descriptive and valid.

Though she claims she doesn't know it or will not admit it, Momma Schmidt IS doing her part to reduce Human Induced Global Weather Intensification, or HIGWI. It is well known that she still burns only local wood in her Big Bear wood stove to heat her place. She is not adding any fossil CO2 to the atmosphere for heating. Back in 2005 she had solar panels installed on her roof to lower her electricity bill and those panels work fine. She uses very little gasoline since she hardly drives that 1998 caddy Coupe D'ville kept in her dilapidated garage. She carefully covers the front hood with a tarp on real cold winter days. I tried to explain to her that it has no effect...but you go try and tell her. The caddy goes to Manchester a few times a month and back! that's all. So that's how it goes up here in Vermont. Some progress being made.

Now if we could only get some of the dunderheads up here to rethink the excellent plan (sadly rejected a few years ago by the townsfolk) to put a string of electric generating wind turbines along the ridge of Gleib Mountain. Believe it or not they objected to the "visual impact". What further damage could be done to old Gleib, I don't know. It is a mountain horribly scarred and carved up by ski trails and ski lift structures. I guess no one up here sees those features as ugly anymore. People would soon get to look fondly on wind mill turbines too. The lowered electric bills would make folks forget any visual impact and put a broad smile on any Vermonter's face.