Some Thoughts on Climate Change
Whatever It Is, It Ain’t New
Go back just a couple of thousand years or so and the dense jungles of the Congo were open plains, Egypt was lush and verdant, the Romans grew vines in the far North of what is now the United Kingdom. Go back a few thousand more and the UK was buried under ice.
Go back a few million and even the land masses are scarcely recognisable. Notice how the present outlines of Africa and South America look as though they might fit together?
That’s because they once did fit together but have slowly moved apart due to what is known as Continental Drift.
In all the time that has elapsed since the first Dinosaurs discovered chat-up lines, what was once desert has become tropical swamp and vice-versa, thick forests have traded places with mile-deep ice sheets and the global temperature has swung from freezing cold to much, much hotter than today.
Stuff Happens
Variations in the levels of Carbon Dioxide can be found in the fossil records for all these previous climate changes, but whether they were a cause or effect is not at all clear.
We can however be completely certain that mankind had absolutely sod-all to do with it. There were not enough of us and industrialisation didn’t begin until over a century ago.
So, you see, things do indeed change all by themselves regardless.
This begs an obvious question or several, such as how can we determine what effect humans are having upon the climate if we don’t first account for the changes that would have occurred anyway? And what would these “normal” changes have looked like?
Now, I’m no apologist for the Climate Sceptics - I happen to think that the evidence we have screwed things up big-time on a lot of fronts looks pretty damming. But I’m also well aware that the Climate Change lobby have a piss poor record of predicting outcomes (or hitching carts to horses in the correct order for that matter).
New Ice Age anyone? That was the 1970’s I believe. The reasoning behind this particular gem might have been a Mammoth short of an Ice Age, but the outcome itself may not be as wide of the mark as is generally assumed these days.
Really Rather Scary Stuff
Enter Stage Left… Abrupt Climate Change.
The link above and this from the always thought provoking and highly readable William Calvin give a good background to this very real phenomenon.
In brief, abrupt (by which is meant just a few years) climate change is triggered by changes in thermohaline currents, more commonly referred to as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt.
The Conveyor carries salt (as saline) in a huge loop right around the globe. The Gulf Stream for example is driven by the Sun heating and evaporating fresh water in the Atlantic. The result is warm salty water on a colossal scale that drifts toward Northern Europe.
As the Gulf Stream hits northern latitudes the colder winds cool it and the now cold salty water, being heavier than fresh water, sinks with staggeringly massive heat loss to the atmosphere which is what keeps Europe temperate.
The sinking cold water effectively pushes down on what is already there and so cranks the conveyor along.
When global temperatures rise, as they appear to be doing now, melting ice from the Polar Regions dilutes the sea water at the “sink” points. Since the water then becomes no longer heavy enough to sink, the conveyor stops turning and the Gulf Stream is switched off.
This has happened many times in the past. When the Gulf Stream shuts down, Europe cools almost immediately and quite severely, sometimes resulting in what we identify as Ice Ages. Yes, that cold!
All We Know For Sure Is That Nothing Stays The Same
So, one minute its all Global Warming and rising sea levels, in the next breath its glaciers all over again. Isn’t it at least just possible that nothing at all will happen; that we can all simply get on with whatever it was we were doing before all this palaver got started?
Nope.
Like it says in the heading above, all we know for sure is that nothing stays the same.
Change is normal. Happens all the time. We just don’t especially like to be confronted with it, particularly when it might very well turn out to be cataclysmic.
Like death and taxes, shit happens and we might as well get used to that idea. The world we know today is not some set-in-stone sanctified golden-age with inviolate rights to continue as it pleases for evermore.
Like quantum physics, where you can never know the exact position of an electron but you can very accurately state the probability for its being at any given place, I have no idea how things will pan out, but I am quite certain they won’t look anything like now.