Face The Nation Faces The Reality Of a Warmer World

Is the mainstream media waking up to the reality of climate catastrophe just as our climate jumps the shark? Earlier this week on CBS’s Face The Nation, Climate Central’s Chief Climatologist Heidi Cullen, American Meteorological Society President Marshall Shepherd, WFOR-TV’s Chief Meteorologist David Bernard, and TIME Magazine’s Jeffrey Kluger discussed recent extreme weather events, the upcoming hurricane season, and the role of climate change in recent disruptive events. This is the best discussion of the science, and reality, of climate change that I’ve seen on a mainstream news channel. Here’s a few excerpts:

Dr. Cullen: “…But when it comes to things like heat waves, when it comes to things like heavy rainstorms, drought, wild fires, we know that the atmosphere is on steroids… We live in a country that has always seen extreme weather, but we are moving in the direction that we are going to see more and more of certain of these extremes, and as  we’ve heard before that stuff is really expensive…The statistics, the likelihood, of seeing certain kind of extreme increases just by the virtue of the fact that the planet is warmer, and also when it comes to storms there is more moisture in the atmosphere, those storms can rain down more heavily. And there are more people in harm’s way… It basically increases our vulnerability across the board.”

Bob Schieffer: “Are we doing something here on earth to cause the weather to change, or is it a cycle that we go through?

Dr. Sheperd “This is a question I often get Bob. Of course, it’s amazing to me when somebody comes up to me and says Dr Sheperd the climate change is natural. Of course it is,  I should send my degree back to Florida State University if I didn’t know that. But what’s most important about that is on top of this natural variability that Heidi mentioned we now have a steroid [effect]. Think of a basketball player…a Basketball net 10 feet high. Think of it this way, climate change is actually adding about a foot to the basketball floor so that more people can dunk the basketball. There’s just more amplification, that warmer and more moist climate is amplifying the weather systems that we see…the scary news is that we’re talking about an additional 3 to 10 to 14 degrees in some models in the next 100 years.”

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