DarrenBarefoot.com

Chris Mooney is an author, and the Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect (I’m not referring, though, to the other Chris Mooney, also a writer).

He was in Vancouver this week and got a tour of the storm damage to Stanley Park. He had some interesting things to say on his site about why we shouldn’t associate global warming with extreme weather events:

And there’s another problem when it comes to using individual weather events, however extreme, to mobilize people around global warming. When this subject came up on the panel last night, Hadi Dowlatabadi–UBC Professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability–pointed out (if I remember correctly) that it’s dangerous to tell the public that they should make sacrifices to curtail global warming and thereby stave off storm destruction. What happens if people do make sacrifices, and then due to the whimsicality of weather, they get hit by another devastating storm anyway? Isn’t this then setting the stage for members of the public to turn around and say, I want my SUV back?

And the science is mixed on this point, too. Apparently global warming ought to lead to “less excitation of extratropical storms.”