Does anybody else here remember sleeping in the basement in hot weather, because it was the coolest place in the house? Or enjoying the cool breezes upon entering the subway or tunnel? More to the point, does anybody remember when that stopped? These days the basement is as warm and sticky as the rest of the house, only worse because it has less ventilation and no air-conditioning. Same goes for subways and tunnels. This has perturbed me for a while, so I finally googled “underground temperatures” and found several references to this phenomenon, such as http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGS02/02897/EGS02-A-02897.pdf
No, it’s not my imagination (or yours, as the case may be.) Yikes.
Other interesting developments, not necessarily related to climate change: the use of “climate change” instead of “global warming,” which seems to have originated as a conservative reaction on the theory that it would sound less scary. But in fact, it doesn’t. If global warming gets bad enough, one of the results could be a new Ice Age. (Look it up. It involves shutting down the Gulfstream.) So “climate change” is both more accurate and more scary.
The moribundity of Starbuck’s. I rarely visit any of them, though there are something like 7 in a 3-block radius of my office, and another one a block from my home. But, like Bud, I will miss not drinking their coffee. (One of the few correct uses of that phrase I’ve seen in a long time.)
And a bright idea for this month’s crisis—house-sitting services for foreclosed properties. One hears about abandoned homes being vandalized or turned into drug havens, at serious expense to the mortgage holder and the neighborhood. Why not rent the places out, at nominal cost, to otherwise homeless senior citizens? Solve two problems at once. (I will always admire Wendell Berry, BTW, for characterizing livestock feedlots as “turning a solution into two problems.” I wish I’d said that.)
CynThesis
I should link some of the oceanographic studies i have read coming out. The acidification of the oceans is overlooked as a major problem. Most organisms function well within a pretty narrow pH range. Corals, animals with algae symbiotes, are especially sensitive.
I think the global warming science is pretty good. What is not so good are the recommendations for actions that have come from the people involved in the research. This has led to attacks on the science also.
Homeless seniors in expensive foreclosed homes? What if they spill cat food on the expensive wood moldings?
Steve
Cat food versus ripping out all the wiring and pipes? I know how I’d choose if I held the mortgage.
While parochial me has never been in a basement, I’d still be more inclined to think that an increase in ambient heat-sink temps is more likely to be more directly a function of the human termite colony “heat island” effect, warming more immediately attributable to civil congregation than to general climate change.
That said, that same “termite colony” effect of human masses is probably the best a priori argument for climate change: with or without any other factor–solar, atmospheric, etc.–a growing mass of exothermic critters (not just hot chicks) exotherming in tightly contained proximities within the biosphere must itself add to overall systemic heating, unless there is some corresponding increase in the method by which that excess heat is transported off-planet. I don’t think there’s currently an extra-cool, extra planetary basement to provide such corresponding additional cooling.
There are, of course, caves. I didn’t check out any research on whether speleologists have noticed any temperature changes over the last few years. I remember Luray Caverns being really cool when I was there fifty-odd years ago.