If you said it was May, I'd believe you

It's about 65 degrees this morning and I'm sipping my caffeinated beverage of choice, a chai tea latte, thinking maybe I should have gotten an iced coffee. I mention this to Guy, who's working the counter at the local coffee shop I go to. Nodding his head, he says he had already gotten some orders for iced drinks today. "Global warming," chimes in another worker behind the counter, "I did my run in just shorts today!"

On my walk home from the coffee shop, I overhear a conversation about cherry trees in Brooklyn blooming. Later I go for my own run in Central Park where I see a small crowd taking pictures of a tree that thinks it's spring.

New York City is abuzz about the weather. And it's no wonder, with the temperature hovering around 70F and the humidity above 80%, it feels more like May than January. It's hard to be down about it. A couple of days ago I was talking with a contractor who works predominately outdoors. He said, "If this is global warming, bring it on!"

The unseasonably hot weather seems to make the idea of global warming real. But if public acceptance of its validity is dependent on the local weather forecast, it might not last. I can recall during the serious snow storms from the last couple of winters folks holding their shovels saying just the opposite, "What global warming?" or "Global warming, my ass!" Who's to say that if we see temperatures in February that put Antarctica to shame, the public opinion of global warming won't end back up in the, "yeah, right" pile.

One problem with believing or disbelieving in global warming based on current outdoor temperatures is that the phenomenon is geographically global not local. The northeast US is having a mild winter, but Denver is getting clobbered by snow storms. Another problem is that global warming is also a long term trend, not something proven in a season, a year, or even a decade. It is not about sporadic temperature rises of 40 degrees F in New York City. It's about the average temperature of the entire planet creeping up by a couple of degrees over the next couple of decades, and about 10 degrees in the next century.

Attributing local heat waves solely to global warming could jeopardize the credibility of the theory, which in turn could jeopardize sustained support to address the problem.

Picture: 6Jan07 - Folks in NYC's Central Park taking pictures of a tree in full bloom.
Sources:
Wikipedia on Global Warming
UNEP Climate Statistics
International Herald Tribune 4Jan07