If the planet is warming, then why have we been the ambivalent recipients of recurrent snowstorms and the coldest January in ten years? A brief tour of the globe via internet reveals just how much of a bubble we’ve been living in here in Princeton. While we had the 8th snowiest January in 120 years of record keeping, California has been suffering through a record breaking drought. Alaska has been unusually warm. Intense use of air conditioners during a 100 degree December heatwave in Buenos Aires, Argentina led to extended power outages, which in turn led to demonstrations. Australia, too, is suffering yet another extreme heat wave.
Our unusually cold winter was brought to us in part by the warming arctic’s apparent impact on the jet stream, whose increasingly erratic behavior allowed a bulge of arctic air to settle for a prolonged period in the eastern U.S. This bit of global weirding allowed for four days of skating on Lake Carnegie. Very pleasant, but the planet continues to warm overall.
Ironically, the increasingly erratic weather in NJ and throughout the world is being caused by the very fossil fuels that deliver consistency to our daily lives. We depend on them for clearing our streets, keeping our homes comfortable and delivering us to work each day. And yet the impact of that stability is a destabilization of weather and sea levels that will only grow more radical with time.
As well-meaning, generous people, we should not stand for this deepening contradiction that continually forces us to choose between present and future, and demand of ourselves and our leaders, in Princeton and beyond, a steady and expedited squeezing of these star-crossed fuels out of our lives.
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