While most of the country baked under an unprecedented heat wave last week that shattered over 40,000 heat records, killed at least 46 people in the United States, and now threatens most of the US corn crop, the legendary right-wing columnist George Will appeared on ABC’s This Week (full video in link) to announce that in his “expert” opinion, the cause of this weather can be reduced to “one word: summer.”
Every time mother nature produces a somewhat freakish weather occurrence (be it the recent Mid-Atlantic derecho wind storm, the 2011 Texas drought, or Hurricane Katrina) the ever shrinking club of prominent climate change skeptics crawl out of the wood work to proclaim that this was not the work of global warming. While they are correct in a very narrow line of reasoning (no one weather event can be blamed on any one other event), there is no denying that current climate trends are disturbing. The 10 hottest years on record have all been since 1997, and June 2011-June 2012 ranks as the hottest 12 month period since accurate records were first kept. Continued warming will likely result in devastating flooding from sea level rises, and “Dust Bowl” like desertification of huge areas of farm land from “megadroughts.”
The deniers are out in force this time with the standard George Will “I grew up in central Illinois in a house without air conditioning” this is just summer line, the novel, “I will produce a graph that makes it look as if the weather” is not warming tactic, or, my personal favorite, the “Global Warming exists, but it is good” approach.
