So, thanks to record-breaking temperatures, more than half the nation’s counties are in a declared state of emergency—drought and heat waves, as you’re likely aware, have been the norm this summer. The hot-as-hell temps are wreaking all sorts of havoc—cattle are dying, wildfires are raging, corn isn’t growing, drought is holding, and nuclear power plants are forced to shut down.What’s that last one again, you say? It’s true; in some regions, it’s too hot to run nuclear power plants for the first time in their operating history—the water has grown too warm to safely cool the reactors, evidently.Here’s the New York Times:A reactor at the Millstone nuclear plant in Waterford, Conn., has shut down because of something that its 1960s designers never anticipated: the water in Long Island Sound was too warm to cool it.
Under the reactor's safety rules, the cooling water can be no higher than 75 degrees. On Sunday afternoon, the water's temperature soared to 76.7 degrees, prompting the operator, Dominion Power, to order the shutdown of the 880-megawatt reactor.
"Temperatures this summer are the warmest we've had since operations began here at Millstone,'' said a spokesman for Dominion, Ken Holt. The plant's first reactor, now retired, began operation in 1970.How about that. Now, if only there were some unifying theory for why record heat temps are sweeping the nation … ah, that’s right—climate change. This summer, some of the top climate scientists in the world made the unusual step of explicitly linking the excessive heat to climate change. In fact, NASA’s top climate dog, James Hansen, has released a paper that produces the conclusion that ""You would not have these extremes without global warming."Yes, conservative climate denial notwithstanding, we’re reaching the point where the impact of climate change is growing so great that we can say with some scientific certainty that it is directly causing the extreme weather events. And sure, that prospect raises red flags all over the place—scientists themselves have long been quite squeamish about drawing such a hardline link, and, largely as a result, the public remains skeptical about the notion. But we’re not necessarily skeptical because the idea isn’t correct or isn’t how a climate changed world works.Grist’s David Roberts has an important post on how we approach this thorny corollary:That's what the "did climate change cause XYZ?" questions are always really about: how proximate a cause climate change is, how immediate its effects are in our lives, how close it is … But I don't think that simply saying "climate change caused the fires" is necessarily false or exaggerated, any more than saying "drought caused the fires" is. The fact that the former strikes many people as suspect while the latter is immediately understood mostly just means that we're not used to thinking of climate change as a distal cause among others.Which is partly why it still feels unusual, even wrong to make a statement like ‘Global warming caused a nuclear power plant in Connecticut to shut down,’ while ‘record-hot ocean temperatures caused a nuclear power plant to shut down’ doesn’t. And yet, for all intents and purposes, the former is true enough to accurately describe what happened. If all of the greenhouse gas emissions humans have spewed into the atmosphere weren’t warming the climate and the oceans, that plant almost certainly wouldn’t have shut down for lack of cool-enough water.The sooner that we get more comfortable describing the new world we’re living in—one with a probably irreversibly altered and hotter climate—with an appropriately evolved vocabulary, the sooner we’ll be able to address the fact with clearer hearts and heads.
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