Time to get a new thermostat

There were a few days this past summer when I questioned if I had died in my sleep and awakened in hell. Only hell, in this case, was an alternate universe where Seattle’s famously cool weather report sounded more like Phoenix. On July 29, after a weeklong heat wave, the National Weather Service reported the hottest day in Seattle’s recorded history. That day I learned the limitations of my thermostat: It can only report temperatures inside my house up to 99 degrees Fahrenheit.

The thermostat may deny triple-digit temps, but they happened just the same — in my living room and across the Pacific Northwest. My lawn died, my water bill spiked, and I found myself staring at empty store shelves when I went looking for a portable AC unit. I cursed myself for buying a house with westerly Phinney Ridge views as the sun pounded in through my single-pane windows, and I found myself, like many other Seattleites, wondering whether this record-breaking heat wave was a fluke or a sign of things to come.

Are we seeing the effects of global warming and global climate change right here in our region? Is this the new normal? The short answer, not surprisingly, is yes.

This summer’s triple-digit heat led to some bizarre complications: flash-flood warnings, urgent air-stagnation warnings, power outages and lightning fires, including one in central Washington that forced 140 families to flee their homes. Seattle experienced not one but two notable dry spells, with no measurable rain for 29 days in May and June, and again for 26 days in July through early August.

Stranger still is that this all came after a winter full of weather records on the other end of the spectrum. In December, Seattle had the coldest morning on record for the past 44 years, while Spokane was hit by a record six feet of snow, breaking a record set in 1950.

“The question so many are asking when we experience an extreme weather event is, ‘Is this the smoking gun or not?’ That is the wrong question to ask,” says KC Golden, policy director with Climate Solutions, a research and advocacy organization in Seattle. “This is not the smoking gun. This one event alone does not signal the arrival of global warming. It can never be linked exclusively to one event. However, you can say very conclusively that global warming is occurring and it will increase the frequency of certain extreme weather events, more Katrinas. It’s just that this one past Katrina — or one singular event — cannot alone signal the arrival of global warming. Climate determines the frequency and probability of a weather event. It does not exclusively determine any one particular weather event.”

In June, the White House and the U.S. Global Change Research Program issued a report saying climate changes are clearly under way in the United States and projected to grow. The changes include rising temperatures, rising sea level, more heavy downpours, rapidly retreating glaciers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows.

Karin Bumbaco, an assistant state climatologist at the University of Washington, says that another report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, removes any doubt about the reality of global warming. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, the report says, as evident in rising global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average temperatures.

Furthermore, the panel’s “Fourth Assessment Report” concludes, most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

“Anthropogenic is just a fancy word for ‘human-caused’,” says Bumbaco. She further clarifies the IPCC report saying that, “the phrase ‘very likely’ in the IPCC report equates to greater than 90 percent certainty.”

Simply put, there is a problem, and mankind is the cause.

While weather extremes may become the norm, however, the long, white winter we experienced last year should remain a rarity, according to Phil Mote, a respected longtime Washington state climate scientist who recently became director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and Oregon Climate Services in Corvallis. “We should expect that in a warming world a big, snowy winter will be less common,” Mote says. “Last winter was more of an aberration that anything else. As the global climate continues to warm it will become even more of an aberration, while hotter, drier summers will happen more often.”

Golden explains the global warming trend and that of the more erratic short-term events as a rather simple visual diagram. “If I were to draw this out, I would draw a fairly straight line that is slowly on an upward incline. Over the first line I would place a second line that wiggles around more, going up and down at various annual intervals, as events like El Niño and La Niña affect individual seasons. The end result is that the primary line is still slowly moving upwards and that would demonstrate the global average climate.”