Severe Weather Warning

By Mark Hertsgaard Copyright 1998 New York Times August 2, 1998

Ten years ago, a nasa scientist famously warned that global warming was for real. It looks as if he was right, and hotter temperatures aren't the only result.; Mark Hertsgaard is the author of the forthcoming "Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future."

BODY:
   The year 1998 may be remembered as the time when weird weather became the norm. From the storms that pounded California over the winter to the drought that fed Florida's fires this summer, the one constant of the weather has been its bizarreness. In March, New York City experienced record-tying spring heat a few days after late-season snow. Santa Barbara, Calif., received 21 inches of rainfall in February, a once-a-millennium event. Texas endured weeks of 100-degree-plus July heat, resulting in scores of deaths.

Mischief from El Nino? In part. But extreme weather is also consistent with global-warming scenarios. The scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group, expect a two-to-six-degree increase in global temperature by 2100, with a result that sea levels could rise as much as two feet. As temperatures go up, it is expected, more frequent and severe storms and droughts will occur. That's because a hotter planet experiences greater rates of evaporation. More evaporation leads to more rain and snow in some areas, even as arid regions like the American Midwest, breadbasket to the world, become drier. In effect, global warming reinforces El Nino's heat and storms. But even without El Nino, global warming, extra storms and droughts promise more floods and fires, like the recent blazes in Florida, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia. To make matters worse, such fires also intensify global warming by releasing the carbon dioxide locked up in trees into the atmosphere. The Indonesian fires released more carbon in three months than all of Europe's industry does in a year. Brazil's fires received less foreign media attention than Indonesia's, but they destroyed even more rain forest -- forest that, by definition, is generally quite difficult to ignite.

It has now been 10 years since "global warming" became a household term in the United States. It happened during the brutally hot summer of 1988, when James Hansen, a climatologist and director of NASA's Goddard Space Institute, described the problem to a Congressional committee and then told journalists: . . . the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here. Skeptics lambasted Hansen for speaking too soon, but seven years later, the I.P.C.C. reached the same conclusion, declaring in a 1995 report that there was "a discernible human influence on global climate."

Global warming is often thought of as a danger for the year 2050, not today. But 8 of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have been in the last decade; the first six months of 1998 rank as the world's hottest months on record. "The scientists are telling us that global warming means more extreme weather," says Daniel F. Becker of the Sierra Club, which helped assemble the map shown above. The weather is telling us that global warming is here.


GRAPHIC: Photos: Williston, N.D.: Average temperature is 15 degrees above normal for February; the mercury drops to 26 on June 4.
 
Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho: Snow falls on June 16, five days before the official start of summer.
 
Portland, Ore.: The temperature hits 90 degrees on April 30, an all-time high for the month in 127 years of record keeping.
 
Lead, S.D.: Thirty-two inches of snow on March 1, almost twice the normal amount for the month.
 
Glasgow, Mont.: For the first time on record, the temperature never dips below zero in December.
 
Gardiner, Me.: In January, an ice storm knocks out power for nearly one million people in the state.
 
Rio Nido, Calif.: Torrential rains in February cause devastating mudslides in Sonoma County.
 
Southern California: Repeated deluges bring on an excess of rodents, insects and snakes.
 
Bullhead City, Ariz.: February rainfall of 3 inches is four times higher than normal.
 
Tucson, Ariz.: Heavy moisture helps generate a swarm of pale-wing grasshoppers.
 
Colorado and New Mexico: A warm, wet winter causes a population explosion in hantavirus-carrying rodents.
 
South Carolina: Winter rainfall for 1997-98 adds up to 36.75 inches, a record.
 
Little Rock, Ark.: Average temperature for the month of May is 76 -- the hottest May on record.
 
Daytona Beach, Fla.: Here and elsewhere in the state, wildfires cause hundreds of millions in damage to 720 square miles of residential and rural land.
 
Dallas: Springtime haze from fires in Mexico is followed by weeks of 100-degree-plus summer heat.
 
Shreveport, La.: Less than an inch of rain falls in April and May, half the previous record low.
 
Nashua, N.H.: The thermometer hits 85 on March 29.
 
Britt, Iowa: On June 15, six inches of rain falls in only two hours.
 
Lake Erie: The lake doesn't freeze once during the winter of 1997-98 -- only the third time this has happened.
 
New York City: On March 22, snow falls in Central Park; nine days later, the mercury hits 86.
 
Columbus, Ohio: In June, Ohio River flooding leaves 30,000 people without power.

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