This picture has apparently gone viral in the web and is supposedly in Michigan. The water supposedly froze in mid wave. The picture, according to a website called TruthOrFiction.com, was taken by a researcher at a French research station in Antarctica and the shape was caused by wind and time.
Climate Change at work?
An important questions getting attention in the last few days is the degree to which the weather we are currently experiencing including Ice storms in the North East and drought in the Western United States, Flooding in England, and the unseasonably warm weather at the Sochi Olympics, are the result of climate change or just bad weather.
As discussed a few weeks ago in this blog, climatologists do believe that the Earth’s slight temperature rise has put more water vapor into the earth’s atmosphere and thus created more energy for severe weather to occur and thus the term Global Weirding is often used to describe what is going on.
A progressive website, Think Progress, take a relatively balanced view of the current weather patterns but clearly ties it to climate change and supports President Obama who appears to be getting ready to propose further cuts to U.S. emissions on greenhouse gasses.
We will have Bjorn Lomborg at IESE in a few weeks as part of the Doing Good Doing Well Conference and I will ask him about this wrinkle on the climate change issue. He has argued that climate change mitigation is too expensive and that the money would be better spent on solving other, more pressing, human problems.
A rose by any other name
A side issue this week is that it seems that the name “Pax” was made up by The Weather Channel, and not by the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization as they only give names to tropical storms and hurricanes. On Live Science, a website run by Tech Media, Tia Ghose explores the degree to which naming a storm is pubic service or just marketing spin.
The Weather Channel, of course, defends the practice arguing that naming storms will “raise awareness”. Founded in 2000, the Weather Channel was sold to NBCUNiversal and its partners in 2008, and now is part of Comcast, the U.S.’s largest cable operator which just announced a $ 45 Billion acquisition of Time Warner’s cable business.
Weather, and especially bad weather, gives higher television news ratings than anything else.
Who to believe?
For me, the challenge is to stay informed by sources I can trust. Should I believe a blogger or a picture sent to me? Should I believe a news organization owned by a cable company? Do I have time to sort out what’s true from what’s not? Do I have to read relevant scientific reports myself such as the latest from NOAA to form an opinion ?
In the end I just called my Cousin in New York to see if his son was enjoying the snow.
It is very hard to work in the climate is changing every minute. It will affect the consditions of the workers.
-cody