Holy Solar

Currently the Pope is visiting the UK. Speaking on BCC news after her brief meeting with him in Edinburgh today was Stephanie Hilborne who is the CEO of 47 Wildlife Trusts. She spoke about the importance of the influential catholic church supporting our pressing need to combat climate change whether it be by getting people, businesses, governments to act on reducing carbon emissions or preparing people to accept and adapt to the inevitable changes that lie ahead. Apparently the Vatican has now solar panels on the roof which is indicative of their commitment to fighting global warming and to recognising their role in our plight. Wildlife trusts are particularly concerned about our warming planet and the growing dislocation between people and their environment. For this reason I am delighted to be connected with Wildlife Trusts via Kindnessday UK – a project I founded with David Jamilly to raise awareness of the importance of consideration to others. Of course this begins with taking essential care of the very planet we inhabit and the air that we breath.

There are a million benefits to developing our world materially whether they be greater comforts, life saving medical facilities or increased knowledge of the universe. But one of the downsides would have to be that we have lost touch with essential benefit often by the natural world. Our very existence on earth.

Black Carbon

Black carbon! It sounds like bad news...and it is and, as far as the Arctic is concerned..it is very bad news - probably responsible for half if not more of the increase in the warming in that region over the past 120 years.

Are we considering black carbon seriously enough? Well, what is it? It's a form of soot, a product of the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels or the burning of coal..wood..dung.. That sort of thing. The Arctic is particularly sensitive to it. It darkens the ice and the snow and this in turn affects the Arctic's ability to reflect light. Therefore the ice absorbs heat and this all has been contributing to the reduction in summer ice we are now seeing. As well as that black carbon in the atmosphere absorbs solar radiation and converts that to more heat. So it contributes to our changing climate in at least two ways. And it is no surprise that black carbon is the second leading cause of global warming after CO2.

Now ...unlike carbon dioxide .. black carbon remains in the atmosphere for days or weeks at the very most but with the melting of the Arctic ice much quicker than previously expected - and this melting of the ice being one of the climate "tipping points" ...and with black carbon known to be responsible for much of this damage some scientists are now suggesting that this problem should be addressed.

So… immediate reductions in black carbon could indeed be the white knight of climate change - even a rescue plan. Because...at least this would bring about a more immediate result in the Arctic . And quick responses are just what we need right now!

Don't Snow Down on Kyoto

“How can we be experiencing global warming,” people ask , ‘When we have conditions like this and we are searching around for warm scarves and boots?”

Right now in the UK we have had the coldest snowiest spell for twenty years. But there are those who believe that despite these cold spells climate change is real and is our responsibility and we should be taking extreme action now and they say that the pattern of warming is long term and that there is obviously short term natural variation and in fact the tendency to look for signs of climate change in the form of temperature rise from year to year can play into the hands of climate sceptics who have used the recent cooler world temperatures as their evidence that global warming stopped in 1998 and that our heating globe is no more than a fantastic myth perpetrated for a dozen or so different reasons. ..but the fact is that we do know we are experiencing extremes in weather right across the world and possibly this is because of the distribution of the energy that has built up as a result of our heating up our globe.

Blown Away in UK

When we think of hurricanes or cyclones we automatically think of the tropics. But Powerful winds could threaten both UK and Europe with the potentially destructive force of a tropical category four hurricane. And all because of global warming.

Why is this happening? There have been large scale changes in the atmosphere itself for example the boundary of the troposphere – where all the weather occurs - has moved higher by 900 feet.

Also the Hadley Cells – the circulation pattern – rising near the Equator – polewards motion in higher up and then descending in the subtropics - have expanded towards the poles by one degree of latitude or 60 nautical miles over the last thirty years.
That change represents a huge volumetric increase in stored heat energy which must be recycled to the poles one way or the other’. It is as if the extra tropic cyclones are part of the planets way of redistributing it.

Last Summer the Global Warming Alliance held a conference at the Institute of Physics Our research has shown an increase in total energy of tropical cyclones of seventy percent, while wind strength itself has increased by fifteen percent. Such an increase in velocity plays out as a doubling in aeronautical force and even more in destructive damage..

The deadly storms that pounded southwest France and northeast Spain this past week end took at least 12 lives. Should these winds hit more densely populated countries and in particular those who are not accustomed to dealing with them these numbers could be greatly increased.

Over the past ten years eighteen ETCs made landfall. We are also seeing typhoon twins or two storms one following another within a day or so. Uk for example, the geographical position where polar air masses meet tropical ones coming up from the equator makes it in particular a fertile breeding ground for tornadoes.

During the half century from 1948 to 1997 thirteen windstorms hit Europe, an average of one every three point eight years.The two most catastrophic in terms of human life, the storms of 1953 and 1962, had almost identical core pressures. Now we are getting extra tropic cyclones with pressures 12 millibars lower than that.