It seems almost all of the snow has melted around here, in the Great Lakes region. There are just a few patches where the excess had been piled up. I don’t miss shoveling the driveway, even though it was good exercise. I am sure there will be plenty more to do yet. There is more water vapor in the atmosphere these days, you know.
It still surprises me every winter when people claim that the cold weather proves that global climate change is a hoax. Nobody said we were going to stop having seasons. The multiple gigatons of CO2 that we put in the atmosphere every year are hardly a hoax, and the fact that average temperatures have been going up has not changed a bit. That is, unless you are comparing January to July.
I know everyone likes pictures, so here are the CO2 levels recorded way out in Hawaii relative to the dates of the recessions (thanks to NOAA for making the data public). You have to blow up each section to see the correlation, but almost each time you can see a correlated delay in the rise of the CO2 levels. This means that CO2 levels correlate with human activity (not surprising, considering the gigatons of CO2 involved), and it means that when we have a recession, increases are delayed.
http://www.flickr.com/...
As you can see, when we have a recession the CO2 levels rise more slowly (The image must be enlarged to see the green line in each pink band). When global climate change becomes too significant, then we will either have a massive recession providing a feedback that limits the levels, or we will make changes so that our energy usage is not as dependent on the production of CO2 or that our economy is less energy intensive. And yes, I do think we still have a choice.
Things may get worse more quickly than has been anticipated, but it is also important to remember that every time you project a graph into the future you are making an extrapolation, and extrapolations are relatively unreliable, even with the best of computer models. We can see very well where we are and how we got here, but the future is ours to make.