I’d like to offer a perspective that I don’t see often shared by people discussing climate change so couple of points as you surely know all evidence gathered from many branches of science point to human induced changes in the climate of Earth since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution so you’ve heard that this contributes to the greenhouse effect the greenhouse effect is where visible light hits Earth’s surface Earth’s surface absorbs it and then reradiates it in the infrared and it’s that infrared that gets trapped in the atmosphere raising the temperature that’s the greenhouse effect in a nutshell there are multiple kinds of greenhouse gases uh water vapor is a greenhouse gas that’s why uh humid environments the temperature doesn’t Plunge very much at night when the sun sets look at the temperature range between midday and midnight in humid environments compared with very dry environments you can have a 40 degree Fahrenheit shift from daytime highs to nighttime lows in desert climates when you have a warmer Earth you can sustain more water vapor into the gas into the atmosphere you may have remembered from chemistry the warmer a solution is the more you can dissolve into it the more it can hold and we ask what are the consequences of that and everyone is saying I don’t see any change what’s a couple of degrees warmer there’s a lot of that talk that’s not the issue here I’m not here to debate with anybody whether the models that predicted a temperature rise were bang on low or high that’s not my point my point is when you alter the climate in any way you are changing what Earth’s surface experiences compared with historical averages so when Earth came out of its last ice age oh by the way I voiced a character in Ice Age 5 the film but billions and billions of years ago anyhow after the Ice Age our nomadic ancestors trying to not die from a Frozen Earth finally see an earth that warms up Naturally by the way but over thousands of years warm up and become relatively stable and they say to themselves this is pretty good and I don’t I’m tired of wandering and I know how to control crops and I can control distribution of food goods and resources I’m going to build a city where you going to put a city you’re going to put it on the water’s edge be it ocean lake on a river typically why oh because it enables Transportation Commerce uh irrigation if you have crops all the greatest cities of the world were built on the bers edge now that you have a city there and you have this sort of long run of relatively stable climate post Ice Age what does that even mean oh stable climate doesn’t mean nothing changes it means over the decades even over the centuries the city will see variations in the weather that are contained within a Zone within a band of variation so you measure that range within the city and then the city accommodates this fact how oh well if there’s a period where there’s a little bit of a drought you have a you build in water supply that’ll help get you through a drought if it’s get a certain amount of snow in modern times we you have a store of salt to put salt on the ground to melt the snow down to certain temperatures right if it’s a little too hot you make sure that people have air conditioning do you realize the population of Texas went up significantly only after air conditioning became widespread and available what’s going on here is for every city especially those built on the water’s edge there is life experience of the records of that City that tell people what is the range of weather that they can experience in snowfall in rainfall and in temperature especially and the City Works to accommodate that range and you know something that’s the range it has been in for thousands of years as these cities rose up to fit into the environment in which they were embedded you go to Los Angeles there’s the LA River when I was first told it was an LA River I said that doesn’t look like a river it looks like a cement Basin the LA River was built to accommodate flash floods which was in the knowledge of residents and in the range of expectations for the weather of the region if you’re unfamiliar with the LA River it made a cameo in the Terminator series Terminator 2 especially arold is riding his motorcycle in and out of the LA River because it’s just a little trickle which it is most of the time unless it rains heavily that is a protection system against what we knew are the ranges of rainfall that La would experience all right we are changing the climate climate change when you change the climate what happens is no longer is the life experience of everyone who’s ever lived in your city the full measure of what is possible in that City and why that city was built climate change around the world will take you out of that stability Zone you could get less rain than ever before more rain than ever before temperatures can get colder than ever before hotter than ever before we are broadening the climactic experience that anyone has ever seen as we go forward we need to widen our expectations and understanding of what could possibly happen what happened in New York City a few years ago we had Hurricane Sandy by the way it wasn’t even hurricane status by the time it came to New York but it had conditions that we had never seen in the history of the city the water level Rose so high it was higher than any previous level breached in the history of the city Waters spilled around the entrances to all to our tunnels oh my gosh major points of egress and Ingress between Manhattan and the rest of the world outside of our range outside of the life experience of the city so what did we do we had to pump out the tunnels that took a while all right there are these huge doors now that can close off the entrances and the exits to the tunnels that’s a response to a new normal where the water levels might get higher than anyone had ever seen not only in our lives but in the life of the city itself so as we go forward yeah cities are going to have to do this you’re going to have to be ready for climactic events that fall outside of your experiences the effects of climate change will not impact everyone equally around the world consider for example there whole countries Island countries in the Pacific where their average land elevation is low compared with sea level as the world warms and we lose our ice cap from Antarctica and Greenland which are the two major ice caps in the world that melts back into the oceans it’s going to change the water levels and flood those countries the military knows about this they’re called climate refugees people whose country is gone because the warming of the earth changed the water levels that surrounded their countries and England it’s getting warmer in England a little bit outside their Zone okay there’s rumors that they’re now making champagne in England okay that’s different for their economy that’s also a consequence of climate change and in one of the airports in England a couple of years ago during one of the heat waves the tarmac was melting planes couldn’t land and the recent cold wave that emerged out of Canada down into the United States it reached the Gulf States shattering records for snowfall in Alabama Mississippi Louisiana so I just wanted to add some perspective to what it means when we talk about climate change get ready for the new normal and in most places on Earth it’s not going to be pretty
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