My Views on Climate Change/Global Warming and A Cool/Showery Forecast for the Next Week

April 15, 2022

Several readers of this blog asked that I provide a summary of my views on global warming.

To respond to these requests, I dedicated most of my Friday podcast to this issue--so please check it out (you can access the podcast below or through your favorite podcast service).

For those who don't like podcasts, let me give you my bottom lines:

1. Greenhouse gases (such as CO2 and methane) are increasing and human emissions are the main cause of the rise.

2. The planet has warmed about 1°C during the past century and most, but not necessarily all, of that warming is due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

3. Increasingly greenhouse gases affects some extremes (e.g., heat waves), but not others (such as the intensity of winter storms reaching the Northwest)

4. Changes in extremes due to global warming are relatively small today and generally eclipsed by natural variability. Changes in extremes (such as heatwaves) will increase later in the century.

5. Global warming is not an existential threat to mankind but will reduce the rate at which mankind becomes richer.

6. Mankind can make considerable adaptations to climate change, preventing most economic and human impacts.

7. There is great hope for reducing global warming using improved energy technologies (e.g., nuclear energy, renewables, replacing coal/oil with natural gas, better storage technologies) and pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere (sequestration).

8. Improved weather prediction and adaptation efforts have greatly reduced the vulnerability of humanity to global warming effects. Deaths due to extreme weather have declined 95% during the past century.

In short, global warming is a serious, but manageable, problem that should be amenable to technological solutions.

The Forecast (more in my podcast).

This weekend will be a mixed bag with showers on Saturday and dry conditions on Sunday, with temperatures remaining below normal. Showers and cool conditions will continue into next week.

A big change is that more precipitation will fall over California, something illustrated by the precipitation total for the next week (see below). More on the forecast in my podcast.