Facility&Operations | By Rich Apuzzo
Figure 3.
Prepare for cooler
temperatures?
Another opinion
L
AST SUMMER I had the
privilege of speaking to attendees at an STMA Meeting in
Cincinnati and I imagine
that some were caught off
guard by the predictions I shared in my
presentation discussing turf management in
a changing climate, especially with regard
to drought potential and our cooling
planet…yes, I said "cooling."
You've certainly heard the non-stop stories about warming, record heat, melting
ice, polar bears moving to the south pole,
etc. but the fact is that we're not seeing anything that we haven't seen before on our
planet…and even much worse.
The warming, such as it was over the past
200 years, correlates well with solar and
ocean cycles but very poorly with carbon
dioxide. CO2 has been increasing steadily
(also normal and expected), but temperatures have been up, flat, and down during
that time and since 1998 we have observed
no warming…there have actually been periods of global cooling in the past decade.
However, the real surprise (for some) is coming in the next 5 to 10 years and we need to
prepare for the changes now.
Let me lay out my case and then you
can decide. I have been observing weather
and climate for nearly 30 years as a professional meteorologist, and before that for an
additional 10+ years as a young weather
lover who would rather be out in a powerful storm than hiding from it (though hiding is the smart thing to do!). In the past 20
years I have taken a special interest in climate patterns and climate change since it
started making headlines (as "Global
Warming"), and in that time I not only
learned that the entire movement was politically motivated, but that throughout history our planet has survived extremes that
we can only imagine, and those extremes
will return in good time. I won't go
through all of the science here since that
would take many pages of text and graphics
(otherwise known as a book) and honestly,
you didn't pay for a class in meteorology so
let's keep it simple.
Figure 4.
Figure 1.
18 SportsTurf | May 2013
www.sportsturfonline.com
