Mike Nichols: Warm it up: Wisconsin's in for a heat 'wave'

Feb. 11, 2011  |  Comments
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The Wisconsin scientists who just put together the big report on "Wisconsin's Changing Climate" don't like to talk about "predictions."

They like to talk about "projections."

The word "prediction," I guess, has some negative connotations associated with soothsayers, palm readers, Steelers' fans and Romanian witches - who, it was reported the other day, are now being threatened with fines and imprisonment if their tarot cards fail and their predictions don't come true. The witches, in response, are said to be dumping poisonous mandrake into the Danube and putting curses on the government.

A projection, on the other hand, has a basis. It is, according to my Webster's, "the carrying forward of a trend into the future."

The projection of our scientists is that statewide annual average temperatures in Wisconsin are likely to increase by six to seven degrees by sometime around 2055.

That is both an alarming and astounding projection - alarming because that sort of permanent heat wave would dramatically alter everything from our lakes to our forests to our farms to our health, astounding because temperature trends in the recent past do not appear to foretell that sort of dramatic, upward surge.

I say "recent past" because there is a ton we don't and can't know prior to 1950. What we do know, according to the report by the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts, is that between 1950 and 2006 our annual average temperature here in the Badger State rose by a single degree - 1.1 to be exact.

(That is, by my count, approximately one-tenth the temperature spike in the state just during the frightening third quarter of the Super Bowl - but I digress.)

There are, just for the record, some differences between various places in our state. The average increase in far western or northern Wisconsin, around the Twin Cities or Superior, has been closer to two degrees since 1950, for instance. Parts of Forest or Florence counties, in the meantime, have actually gotten slightly colder. While there's been an average annual increase statewide of 2.5 degrees since 1950 in the winter, moreover, fall has actually seen "a slight cooling trend" across the state.

But just wait. All hell - or something nearly as warm - is about to break loose. Even Wisconsin's autumns are projected to be four to 10 degrees warmer by the middle of the current century.

Bottom line: in the 56 recent years preceding 2006, the average annual temperature went up 1 degree. In the next 44 years, according to projections, the average annual temperature will likely increase six or seven degrees.

Past, in other words, is not prologue. It's actually downright deceiving, a small gradual incline in temperature that is apparently about to turn upward at about the same slope as the Eiger.

I asked Dan Vimont, a UW-Madison professor involved in the study, why they think warming trends are going to accelerate so much quicker than they have in the past. He mentioned expectations regarding accumulated levels of greenhouse gases and what scientists believe the impact will be.

In addition to data collected since 1950 at 176 Wisconsin weather stations, future projections are also based on the "downscaling" of global climate models typically constructed by supercomputers that simulate interactions of the atmosphere, oceans, land and ice, according to the report.

In other words, unless you're a supercomputer, or somebody who programs one, it's impossible to definitively refute what the scientists are projecting. It's also impossible to wholly embrace it.

They are basically asking us to trust them and the supercomputers and the projections that, we're told, are much more than mere predictions. That would be a lot easier if there were some obvious evidence in recent temperature trends that we really are at the base of the Eiger instead of just peering into tarot cards.

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