It is hard to find anyone around today who does not accept that the world’s climate is changing in ways which are at least concerning and often frankly frightening. Some people may say that this is simply cyclic, and nothing to do with human activity. Even if that were true, we should certainly surely try not to make matters worse?
And in any case it has recently been shown that the Climate Change deniers are wrong. Scientists drilling core samples in the wake of the awesome disintegration of the Ross ice shelf in the Antarctic have shown that that ice has been there, holding back the immense quantities of frozen fresh water above ground, for several million years. And it has simply, quite recently, begun to melt away. The effect is going on at a much higher speed than any scientist predicted, and on parts of the newly revealed Antarctic land mass grass is, amazingly, growing all the year round. If the above ground fresh water is allowed to melt away, in Antarctica, Greenland, the Alps, the Himalayas and even tropical Kilimanjaro, it will push up sea levels, perhaps by as much as 20 metres (65ft). Even one metre will make London’s flood defences useless, and a British government policy decision has been taken to let the sea do its worst along vulnerable coasts around Britain. That’s a British perspective, making the classic retirement dream of a nice little seaside bungalow look more like a scenario from a horror movie.
But this is global Climate Change. The low lying islands of the Maldives are already disappearing one by one, most of Bangladesh, much of Florida, the Mississippi basin, in fact everywhere low lying is heading for submersion.
And we are doing it. The human race, starting with the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century and exacerbated by clear cutting the great tropical rain forests, has sent up, and continues to send up, so much in the way of greenhouse gases that the globe is warming at a frankly terrifying rate. This means hot and stormy summers, and wet, cold and stormy winters. No-one yet seems to have made any connection between our increasingly violent huge earthquake and tsunami disasters, but if a massive plate of the earth’s crust has been trying to dive under a second plate, but has not been able to wedge its way under for 150 years, and a mighty low pressure area lifts the sea level by a metre or so, then that easing of weight on the upper plate could allow the lower plate to jerk loose? And it has been scientifically proven that high atmospheric pressure pushes the level of the sea down, while low pressure lifts it up.
A wonderful but frankly terrifying series on British TV’s Channel 4 called “the War on Terra” (the Earth, that is) has shown that not only is the weather getting worse, but it is getting worse much faster than we ever expected.
And in a slightly more subtle assault on the world’s ways of life when, for example, the Kilimanjaro ice cap which, acting like a water tower, has historically gently released melt water through the summer, has gone, the local climate will change dramatically. There will be ferocious drought every summer and fierce floods through the winter.
However, one of the few useful characteristics of climate change is that in the last ten years or so there has been an increase recorded in the strength of the mean ocean winds, from an average of around 12 knots to as much as 15 knots today. This increase in wind speed of some 25% means, since wind energy varies as the square of the speed (1.25 times 1.25 equals 1.56) that there is more than 50% more energy in those clean free ocean winds available to be extracted by Wingsail wingsails and used to propel ships. And the upwards trend in ocean windspeed is apparently likely to continue until systems can be put in place to stabilise and then reduce global warming.
Nothing happens as quickly or as smoothly as we would like, and the recent atrocious weather, even if it is more evidence of global Climate Change, is certainly not helping. We have recently read with interest a scientific explanation for the fact, which has been confusing many people and used gleefully by the few Climate Change deniers left, that we are not only getting hotter summers, but also colder winters.
Apparently, the reason is that during these hotter summers much more water is being evaporated from the oceans, and from the Atlantic this water vapour is carried eastwards by the jet stream, to fall as snow over Siberia. Then, in the winter, when the lower altitude winds blow in a westerly direction, the air, refrigerated by passing through a huge bubble of extremely cold air over the Siberian snowfields, lashes northern Europe, with the frigid and dangerous results we have been experiencing. The surplus water vapour aloft continues eastwards to wreak havoc on South East Asia, bringing mudslides as well as flooding and, amazingly, is apparently also implicated in the catastrophic flooding in Australia.
This is an unusually strong La Nina year, when the warm Pacific ocean currents drive westwards towards Australia, whereas in an El Nino year the opposite is true. So the high altitude Atlantic moisture combines with La Nina's Pacific moisture, and an area of Queensland as big as France and Germany combined is inundated. But look a little northwards, and the Pacific currents are now heading east, picking up and carrying moisture towards the Andes, reinforced by the remnants of the jet stream's Atlantic moisture. The Andes push the saturated air aloft, and the resulting deluge falls on Brazil. A perfect example of 'what goes around comes around', I think?
This is an unusually strong La Nina year, when the warm Pacific ocean currents drive westwards towards Australia, whereas in an El Nino year the opposite is true. So the high altitude Atlantic moisture combines with La Nina's Pacific moisture, and an area of Queensland as big as France and Germany combined is inundated. But look a little northwards, and the Pacific currents are now heading east, picking up and carrying moisture towards the Andes, reinforced by the remnants of the jet stream's Atlantic moisture. The Andes push the saturated air aloft, and the resulting deluge falls on Brazil. A perfect example of 'what goes around comes around', I think?
And if matters are this bad now, what will life on earth be like in fifty years time or a hundred years time? When people who are young today are full grown, what will they think of us?
