Studies come and go as Earth heats up

Iwas throwing things away in the home office when I grabbed — and nearly tossed — the Report of the Pennsylvania 21st Century Environment Commission.

I decided not to throw the 90-plus page report in the recycling pile because I remembered billionaires were just then assembling in the eastern Alps to pontificate on saving the world. Maybe they could use a copy.

This report came out in September 1998. That seems a long time ago. Two presidents have been impeached since then. The teen Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was not yet born. But in planetary terms, a score of years is barely the wink of an eye.

Back in ’98, people were making predictions about our climate future. Some educated guesses have proven wildly overblown since, and a certain kind of conservative (that subsample whose biggest fear is conserving anything) loves to quote those misses.

But we no longer need predictions. The Earth is getting warmer. The decade that just ended was by far the hottest ever measured. It had eight of the 10 hottest years on record, according to the National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The other years in the top 10 are 2005 and 1998. Last year was the second-hottest year in the 140 years of record-keeping.

Closer to home, the past decade in Pittsburgh was wetter than any decade on record dating to 1920, according to the National Weather Service. Last year’s 52½ inches of rain were the third most on record since 1871. It was topped only by 2018, with nearly 58 inches, and the Hurricane Ivan year of 2004, with nearly 57½.

Coincidence, some might say. Others say that with the Arctic warming faster than the tropics, the jet stream that used to pass quickly through Pittsburgh instead dawdles hereabouts. A couple of times in the past two Septembers, Pittsburgh had more than 3 inches of rain in a single day.

“It’s not necessarily more rainy days, but more volume in those rainy days,” said Josef Werne, a professor in the department of geology and environmental science at the University of Pittsburgh..

The old Charles Dudley Warner line, often attributed to his buddy Mark Twain — “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it’’ — is still true. Only now, a lot of people talk a lot about doing something about it.

In Davos, Switzerland, President Donald Trump said the United States would join the Trillion Tree Campaign, a wildly ambitious plan that would roll back atmospheric carbon dioxide and cool the Earth some. Some have already figured that the U.S. share, while doable, would bring us back to as many trees as were growing here in 1630. And who doesn’t like trees? I, for one, am as confident that this will happen as I am in the Mexicans paying for building the border wall.

That’s an earned skepticism because political promises mostly collect dust. Flipping through the 1998 study, endorsed by Republican Gov. Tom Ridge, I found little that has been realized. Recycling has actually stumbled into reverse in some areas of late, and the problem of combined sewage overflow into our rivers is still billions of dollars and decades away from a solution.

As for metropolitan sprawl, the reason commutes on the parkways keep getting worse even as the metro population remains stuck in neutral, not much has changed.

While there has been quite a bit of infill building in the city, helping the median age trend younger and keeping the population relatively stable compared to decades past, changes in the way commuters get around have been minimal. Exhibit A is the bikelash by some motorists against even 40 miles of bike lanes in a city of 1,200 street miles.

Exhibit B is that most of the climate talk in Switzerland has been bumped off the front pages by the commencement of the impeachment trial in the Senate. While that’s understandable, one wonders if, 20 years from now, that news judgment will be questioned.

We already pretty much know how the vote in the Senate is going to go. Whether the average temperature will keep inching up, and whether we can or will do anything about that, is a lot iffier.