Destructive tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, destructive floods in Texas, unexplained earthquake in California, and in climate rain and storms across the South East justifiably re-kindle the climate change debate – and the energy industry-driven sound bites and spins – that have led many people to believe there is no climate change and that the unseasonal climate changes and extremes we are experiencing are just part of the “normal” weather cycle?
In a study published online in the summer of 2012 by the journal Science, Harvard University scientists reported that some storms send water vapor miles into the stratosphere – which is normally drier than a desert – and showed how such events could rapidly set off ozone-destroying reactions with chemicals that remain in the atmosphere from CFCs, refrigerant gases that are now banned.
The study showed how strong summer thunderstorms that pump water high into the upper atmosphere pose a threat to the protective ozone layer, drawing one of the first links between climate change and ozone loss over populated areas.
Ozone helps shield people, animals and crops from damaging ultraviolet rays from the sun. Much of the concern about the ozone layer has focused on Antarctica, where a seasonal hole, or thinning, has been seen for more than two decades, and the Arctic, where a hole was observed in 2011. But those regions have almost no population.
A thinning of the ozone layer over the U.S. and other populated areas during summers could mean an increase in ultraviolet exposure for millions of people and a rise in the incidence of skin cancer.
The year 2011 was a year of devastation, wreckage and warnings about the dangers of climate change. And the worst is yet to come!
The world’s biggest and oldest trees are dying at an alarming rate at the dawn of the New World Order. Research by universities in Australia and the U.S. published in Science in December 2012 warned that ecosystems worldwide were in danger of losing forever the largest organisms on the planet, the giant 100-300 year-old trees that harbor and sustain countless birds and other wildlife.
The study showed that trees were not only dying en masse in forest fires, but were also perishing at 10 times the normal rate in non-fire years. It said it appeared to boil down to a combination of rapid climate change causing drought and high temperatures as well as rampant logging and agricultural land clearing.
Meanwhile, the Arctic sea ice has shrunk to its smallest surface area since record-keeping began, taking the world into “unchartered territory” as climate change intensifies, U.S. scientists warned. Scientists use Arctic sea ice extent as a gauge of the overall climate. Whereas most of the ice previously stayed frozen through several summers, much of it now melts and freezes each season.
Hurricane Sandy was the wake-up call America needed. It even got President Obama to acknowledge that climate change is an issue that must be addressed.
The reality is that the Arctic Ocean will probably be ice-free by 2030. This is not the main worry, however, as this is floating ice. When it melts it does not raise sea levels. The real worry is the Greenland ice shelf, which is also melting at an unprecedented rate. If this disappears too, the effects will be catastrophic.
When predictions were made a few years ago, scientists said it would all be more or less OK if we limited the rise in average global temperatures to two degrees celcius. We have missed that target.
“Without change, we are now heading for a four-degree rise, which will take the earth’s average temperature back to levels seen 40 million years ago. This will cause the Antarctic to melt too, with sea levels rising 60-70 meters. The droughts and floods we would experience along the way would make the planet virtually uninhabitable,” says Graeme Maxton, a fellow of the Club of Rome. The biggest threat to our existence is not the lack of economic growth or terrorists – it is climate change. It is something I encounter frequently when I travel across the U.S., especially in winter. The thousands of travel advisories and flights canceled is a nightmare for frequent fliers like myself.
I was delighted to read that one global warming skeptic, prominent physicist Richard Muller, who was on the payroll of the energy companies, had come clean and in from the cold, reluctantly admitting after two years of trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong that they were right and that temperatures really are rising. Muller’s study was partially funded by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analysing the data. He was spurred to action because of “Climategate,” a British scandal involving hacked e-mails of scientists.
Yet he found that the land is 1 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. He said he went even further back, studying readings from Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
Photo by NOAA