How’s the weather?

It’s perfect here for spring training, but worldwide, it’s getting wild. Here in the west, we’re in a persistent drought. To our east, it’s been brutally cold and snowy. In Alaska and Scandinavia, it’s been abnormally warm.

In Australia, they had to postpone Australian Open tennis matches because of the brutal heat. A wave of storms in England has brought widespread flooding. That polar vortex hasn’t been behaving itself and staying where it belongs, over the North Pole.

Is it climate change?

Not necessarily, as any scientist will tell you. We can’t yet link any single storm or season to climate change, but they will tell the weather we’ve been having is indicative of what we can expect as the planet continues to warm.

The signs are very worrisome. The arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, and that warming will probably accelerate as more reflective ice is lost and the ocean is able to absorb more heat from the sun. Some scientists now expect the arctic to be ice free in the summer sometime between 2020 and 2030.

At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, four scientists presented findings at a symposium called Santa’s Revenge: The Impacts of Arctic Warming on the Mid-Latitudes.

The debate over climate change should have ended a long time ago. I think now it’s too late, and we’re going to experience first-hand what all that extra carbon dioxide we’ve pumped into the atmosphere is going to do. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.