Climate issues can’t be faced without the facts

Opinion

March 2, 2007

Asheville Citizen-Times The Daily Southerner Fri Mar 02, 2007, 11:33 AM EST

There’s an old saying about the weather in North Carolina: If you don’t like it, wait five minutes.

Talk about climate change generally involves discussions of decades or centuries, but in these mountains a given day, particularly in the spring or fall, can bring the risk of hypothermia or sunburn within hours of each other.

So yes, people around here know a thing or two about changing weather.

Weather is a hot topic these days. There is no lack of alarming predictions concerning global warming.

On the other side of the equation, there are also a number of people who absolutely refuse to acknowledge any change in the planet’s weather patterns.

Pollyanna and Chicken Little can be found working the fringes of the climate change discussion.

But reliable information is critical to assessing climate change, and critical to charting a path to deal with it. And few know more than the scientists laboring in relative anonymity in Asheville at the National Climatic Data Center. And few play a more important role in the complex issue of global warming and climate change.

Climate change may well be the issue of our age. For all the technological prowess of this modern age, we are often at the mercy of weather. Beyond the daily grind of celebrity missteps and war overseas is the constant theme of how weather affects our lives every day.

From jets stranded by storms to tornadoes to the more subtle fluctuations in the prices of the food we eat every day, the weather is there.

Weather even intruded this week at unexpected places like the Academy Awards ceremony, where former Vice President Al Gore took home an Oscar for his documentary about climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The truth, inconvenient or not, can be an elusive thing when it comes to a discussion of climate change. More to the point, it can be an elusive creature when discussing what our response should be to climate change because of the twin factors of money and lifestyle.

Anything involving these dynamics will be controversial, but the issue is also clouded by conflicting claims about global warming. Some of those claims themselves seem to be far more public relations than science.

For example, earlier this month the British newspaper The Guardian reported that economists and scientists were offered $10,000 apiece by an American think tank funded heavily by ExxonMobil to produce articles casting doubt on a report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

No pun intended, when the issue of climate change is being clouded, the need for straight talk about the weather is needed more than ever. And that’s where the NCDC comes back into the picture.

Mark Padilla, on leave at the University of North Carolina at Asheville to examine ways past cultures have dealt with climate change, says the attitude at NCDC is up to the challenge. “The mind-set around here is not apocalyptic. It’s practical. Change is coming, but it is something we can prepare for.”

By the numbers, the work under way at the NCDC is mind-boggling. Nearly 200 employees have 150 years of weather data to examine, and another 72 million pages of data are added on a daily basis.

The chief of the Climate Monitoring Division of the NCDC, Jay Lawrimore, said, “There’s a lot of things we know. There’s a lot we don’t know, but we have to take the potential changes seriously.”

That’s simple common sense.

In charting a path, it’s useful to know where you came from, where you are and where you are heading.

A firm grip on climate change will be invaluable in planning the economies of the future. For example, you wouldn’t want to put a ski resort in a locale that’s going to be balmy in 10 years. On the flip side, you want your state’s DOT to have plenty of salt on hand if the climate is expected to turn wetter in the winter months.

That recalls of another saying about the weather: Everyone complains about it but nobody does anything about it.

Actually the good folks at the NCDC are doing something about it. They’re helping to provide the critical frame of reference from which the right decisions can be made.

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