Perhaps at some future date it will be seen as a stroke of particular bad luck for the planet that the Eastern United States was one of the few parts of the world that wasn’t unnaturally hot in 2014—the site of “a temperature anomaly,” as NASA put it. The East Coast is where Congress and the main financial markets are, and so anything that contributes to climate-change denial has a systemic toxicity. But that would be a fairy tale, one which assumes that all politicians and businesses were waiting for was first-hand evidence, and that, if the evidence appeared—if they opened their windows and remarked on the unseasonably warm weather—they would have quickly acted. The warming of the planet has been easy for anyone to see. On Friday, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released the latest set of data: 2014 was the hottest year on record, and those records go back to 1880. The ten hottest days have all been since 1997 (and, if you don’t count 1998, the ten hottest have been since 2000). Congressmen may work on the East Coast, but some of them have to go back to California, which was wracked by drought and had areas that, as the Times noted, “had basically no winter last year, with temperatures sometimes running 10 or 15 degrees above normal for the season.” Neither Alaska nor Nevada has ever been known to be as warm as it is now.
The new numbers are so striking that they surprised even climate scientists; 2014 was, in science parlance, “an El Niño neutral year.” El Niño is one of those “natural” forces that climate deniers say can account for fluctuations and for warming the ocean up; a reply might be that man-made climate-change may come to affect even the oceans’ currents. (It already appears to have affected their level of acidification; add to that a new report warning of impending mass oceanic extinctions.) But that point doesn’t even need to be made. This past year was hot without any room for disingenuous excuses. The planet is changing, and we are close to the time when trying to check climate change will be like trying to redirect El Niño with canoe paddles.
It’s tempting to take good news in the climate-change story where one can find it. In West Virginia, for example, the state’s Board of Education had planned to adopt a national curriculum, called the Next Generation Science Standards, but the board member L. Wade Linger, Jr., pushed through some changes. The West Virginia Gazette spoke to Linger, who told the paper, “There was a question in there that said: ‘Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century …. If you have that as a standard, then that presupposes that global temperatures have risen over the past century, and, of course, there’s debate about that.” He got the other board members to agree to add “and fall” after “rise,” and to make other, similar changes that threw the question of climate change itself in doubt. (“We’re on this global warming binge going on here,” Linger told the Gazette.) This was a step backward even on the denial spectrum, which has moved more toward arguments about the causes of the rise, and whether it will continue, and not the well-documented rise itself.
West Virginia is a coal state, but Linger’s changes were a little too much for groups like its science-teachers’ association. Gayle Manchin (the wife of Senator Joe Manchin), who is president of the Board of Education, told the Times, “We listened, we learned and, well, I think, grew in our knowledge and understanding.” The board reversed the changes, though not unanimously—the vote was 6-2. That is what passes as a victory in the politics of climate change: a split decision in favor of not lying to schoolchildren.
Do we want to pretend that the problem is one of mere abstract numbers—scientific data, spreadsheets? At this point, we are hardly lacking in shimmering photo essays of melting glaciers, or of stories about tourists arriving in New Zealand or Switzerland and not finding the walls of ice they’d been led to expect. We are overwhelmed with anecdotes and uncanny scenes of habitat destruction. (Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s book.) But, even without the pictures and stories, there are some useful, and frightening, ways to visualize those figures, and few honest ways to look at them and say one doesn’t understand. NASA has a set of color-coded maps—one can see the East Coast’s lonely coolness anomaly, joined only by one in part of Antarctica—and the Times has a version supplemented with historical data. Bloomberg has put together a striking animation of the jagged lines of average temperatures rising in the course of the past hundred and thirty-four years, like the water stains on an seawall.
There are other numbers that, perhaps, need to be factored in—plummeting oil prices, for example. The climate is changing because of the burning of fossil fuels, and now one of the culprits is cheaper. An optimist might hope that the price decrease reflects some victories—energy efficiency and new policy decisions in China, for example (an actual piece of biggish good news)—but it also, as Michael Specter wrote recently, offers the possibility that businesses will have less of an inducement to look for alternatives as the planet gets hotter. At what point will indifference become as much of an anomaly as lower temperatures on the East Coast? One can’t blame denial on the weather.
