New York Times sounds an alarm: “Extreme weather rages worldwide”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0130
This photograph appears above the fold on the 11 January New York Times front page.
Following the news that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the US for the 48 contiguous states, the New York Times is accelerating its promotion of the judgment that human-caused climate disruption afflicts the planet now, not just in the future.
At top center on the 11 January front page, the Times presents a photograph of a snow scene that startles because the snow covers palm trees. ‘Snow blanketed Jerusalem on Thursday,’ says the caption, ‘an example of weather extremes that are growing more frequent and intense.’ Online, a slide show offers another 25 startling photos.
The front-page caption directs readers to page A4, where four of those photos illustrate an article summed up by this call-out line: ‘Climate change is not just about rising temperatures.’ A dozen reporters from around the world contributed examples of the extreme weather that the Times headline says is raging. Here’s an illustrative excerpt:
China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing—minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting—that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.
Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.
‘Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,’ said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. ‘The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East—it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.’
Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr. Baddour said, a sign that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds.
The Times‘s extensive anecdotal compilation also attempts to bolster the case for climate alarm by adducing
* Rain intensity in the UK.
* Snowstorms in southern Italy.
* Reservoir depletion in Brazil.
* A storm in Jordan ‘packing torrential rain, snow, hail and floods that are cascading through tunnels, sweeping away cars and spreading misery in Syrian refugee camps.’
* The eight inches of snow in Jerusalem.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.