This video is from the YouTube channel of Yale Climate Forum.
It pulls together images and facts in an effort to explain the cold wave and ice and snow in the context of the heat wave occurring in the Arctic, and the fact that globally we are experiencing continuing and increasing global warming.
Published on Jan 28, 2014
It’s that time of year, the perennial “It’s snowing so it can’t be warming” season – or, as scientists call it, “winter”. Depends on where you’re standing, actually — I stood on a frozen lake with Dr. Jeff Masters to discuss the current planetary changes, but at the same time, in Alaska, historic warm temperatures were unfolding, and across the west, the deepest drought in decades…
Viewers and denialists especially are invited to review the record breaking hot and dry weather in Australia.
They are in the middle of summer. And it is hot as Hades. Temperatures at one point were topping 122 degrees F every day. Whole ecosystems such as bat colonies being killed off by the heat. Imagine 10’s of thousands of bats falling from the skies dead a few weeks ago. Similar high heat patterns are also happening in South America in some areas.
Last year was in the fourth hottest years globally on record since the satellite era and extensive global measurements have been undertaken. We are frying the planet; disturbing ecosystems; breaking up weather patterns that have been stable for millennia and longer.
Yet we will find no solutions, which ultimately I suspect will require emergency technological solutions to geo-engineer heat dissipation, reflection, or atmospheric carbon sequestration, because the wealth and the corporations and the politicians prefer hanging on to power, and blinding themselves to the consequences of our industrial atmospheric emissions on the planet.
In other words, my children and grandchildren are faced with a very bleak future. We have ignored this problem until we are past the tipping point. And the future is looking grim for our planet, its biodiversity, and weather patterns.
We are in fact in the anthropocene age, the anthropocene mass extinction, and it is due to anthropogenic climate change, including out of control global warming.
