Los Angeles Times

Bill Patzert: SoCal's weatherman





Why do people obsess about the weather?



Did you grow up in a place with real weather?


How young?









L.A. is almost 5 degrees warmer than it was a century ago, essentially because we've done an extreme makeover. Urban heat islands. [Irrigation] makes it warmer. A lawn or a golf course captures heat. We used to have a couple of days a year above 95 degrees. Now we have two-week heat waves. So anybody who thinks that Californians haven't had a profound impact on the climate . . .

Make your best and briefest case for taking global warming seriously.

Simply, the amount of greenhouse gases has measurably and dramatically increased. They're higher now than they've been in the last 600 million years. The atmosphere is warmer; the oceans are warmer. The great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, the Arctic ice cover at the end of summer, is less every year -- about 40% of what it was 30 years ago. The evidence is pretty overwhelming: We're living in a melting world and a warming world. And it's just a preview. The sea level has risen 8 inches in the last century.

Most of that sea-level rise is melting ice. It's new water coming off the land mass. So the projections are for global sea levels to rise: more people, more greenhouse gas. Sea levels will rise almost a meter in the next century -- a meter. About 3 feet. L.A. Harbor and the [Long Beach] Aquarium will be underwater. Broad Beach is toast.

So it's clear, if you read back in history. Look back at the period we call the Medieval warming, from about 800 AD to 1200, when the world was almost a degree and a half warmer. All kinds of things happened, including hundred-year droughts along the Colorado. And that was followed by the Little Ice Age, from about 1300 to the mid-1800s. And on top of this evolved these monster El Niños.

The problems we have now -- the deficit and war and poverty -- will be dwarfed by climate change, sea-level rise, a warming world, change in agricultural and rainfall patterns. What happens when you have nearly 60 million people in California and no water? In the old days, the Anasazi just dispersed throughout the Southwest. Now we're 95% urban. So we're definitely not going to put L.A. in a backpack and move to British Columbia.

The question is, how to deal with it? With a sensible energy policy and something about constraining global population. Perhaps we'll still get hit in the head with a whiffle ball, but if we don't [act], we're going to get hit in the head with a hardball.

The study of global warming is no longer an ivory-tower pursuit. It's a political battlefield.

My parents always had a great social conscience. In my whole life I've been a pain in the tuchis -- for water conservation or climate issues. [You can't do] science without being involved with the community or the globe. To me it all goes together.

On the Internet I found the dire sentence, "Bill Patzert in the e-mail loop of Climategate scandal," although it did acknowledge that you were only listed as copied on some e-mails. What do you make of the tempest?

The much-maligned Climategate scientists are solid and their results unequivocally correct. These are the most important issues the planet will face in the new century.

People are afraid of change. I do a lot of public speaking to explain that global warming is real, what the consequences will be. Some people cannot be talked to. The skeptics will try to back you down, so you waste all your time and effort. This Climategate thing -- these poor [scientists] have stopped their productivity just so they can defend themselves. That's the way they bog you down. So you'd better be able to shout as loud as they can. Rush wants to debate me; I'm here, because I'm definitely no shrinking violet.

Do you carry an umbrella?

I have three of them in my car. If I had a buck for every umbrella I've lost, I wouldn't be talking to you. I'd be in Tahiti.


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