Vocal Voices

In action.

This storm came in from the pacific, fuelled by an overly warm and overly ice free pacific side arctic.

That is Barrow Alaska, being battered by the storm. Apparently, out to sea, there are 9ft waves every 8.5 seconds. Enough to founder boats smaller than 30ft.

When this storm is over, we're going to see a lot more of that vanishing ice, well, vanish. Never a dull season....

The Buoys tell an interesting tale. Check out the wind speed on the weather tab and the images in the Cameras. 12 is either on it's side or it's back right now. Not surprising looking at the wind it's being hammered by.

I have gone back to the ecology and environmental side in the past few months.

The climate argument is too nebulous for many to understand. There are no concrete observations that people can work with. Everything looks theoretical, and in the future.

But current environmental changes are in the here and now. I mentioned the Ogalalla and Punjab the other day. These things will affect us in our lifetimes. It could take decades or centuries for climate change to have similar effects.

Don't get me wrong, we need to do something as we approach the precipice at full throttle, but we need to work on what we are doing today.

The point is the climate has already changed. It's changed 15,000 years worth in the last 200. That is what is driving the environmental changes.

Can't have one without the other but the Scientists are having trouble learning how to communicate it.

Hansen was right. When asked whether the Punjab or the ogalalla are a result of climate change almost every scientist will say the same thing. "You can't show one event or one change to be directly related to climate change". The press are wonderful at specifically asking these questions.

What Hansen said was this. When asked that question answer in this way. "If you were asking me if these events would have happened without the presence of Climate Change; the answer is almost certainly not". And this is an answer that 99.999% of the Scientists would give without a qualm.

That is what people need to hear. That Climate Change is here. That it is driving (note not necessarily "directly" causing ), weather and environmental events which are already causing lives, refugees, wars and huge levels of immigration.

Just one more decade on the same track and it's going to get a lot worse. I'm now really interested to see how the storm will affect the remaining ice and the winter re-freeze and the over winter temperatures. A storm of this magnitude can cause Ekman Pumping which can suck up warmer water from as much as 50m below the surface. This warmer water never really exchanges it's heat with the atmosphere, it just lays trapped down there.

When this kind of thing happens, as it did in 2012 with the GAC (Great Arctic Cyclone), which went on for weeks, it drives late onset melting. The more ice melts, the more heat is lost from the ocean before it freezes up again. The more heat transferred, the more the atmosphere stays warm and the later the re-freeze is. Leaving younger thinner ice for the next year.

I hear what you are saying and I do not disagree, but what I was trying to get across were things that have happened in living memory for many of us. These things can be seen, they are tangible and they can all be explained by what we (humans) have altered.

The Aral sea is now 10% of its size in the 1960s because its feedwaters were rerouted to the steppes because we need to irrigate the wheat so that we would have food to eat. It was not a climatic event: we did it.

The Punjab farmers are drilling deeper and deeper wells because we need the water to irrigate the what and rice fields for the food we need to eat. It is not a climatic event: we are doing it.

The Ogalalla could effectively run dry in my lifetime because its waters are being used by us to irrigate the wheat and soya so that we have food to eat. It is not a climatic event it is what we are doing. The Great Plains evolved to cope with the climate, one which has never offered a great deal of annual precipitation. Its natural flora was able to cope with periods of drought and plenty. It was from about the 1860s that the plains became converted into arable and grazing land, but the new crops and grasses needed more water and so the irrigation began and goes on. We are doing it to get the food we need.

The Yangtze and Yellow river events are not climatic, they are the results of what we are doing to get the energy and food we need.

These things are happening. They can be seen, visited, touched. They are not lines on a graph or pie charts or spreadsheets. They are not opinion or mathematical models, they are real. That is why I want them to be covered in schools and colleges.

I see NASA has released data showing that sea rises of a further 1m by the end of the century on top of what is already happening will begin within the next 20 years.

OK I see where you are going. I totally agree with much of it. But, also, the changes in the climate have driven some of this irrigation and drilling too. Where it was dry at times it is now dry most of the time. China loses 140 odd villages to desert each year. That is climate.

But, yes, it's tangible visible physical things we are doing to damage and change our environment around us.

The main thing is that CO2 is actually 10,000 times worse than these small events, is likely to kill 1,000 times as many people when the impact hits and is less visible, less tangible and people just ignore it.

On the + side, whatever physical environmental damage we do today will recover naturally once the planet kills most of us off. It's got around another billion years before the sun goes unstable so it's fairly OK....

Workingman wrote:I see NASA has released data showing that sea rises of a further 1m by the end of the century on top of what is already happening will begin within the next 20 years.

Yes the glaciers of Greenland ad WAIS are accelerating again. Lots and lots of water in them... Also the land based glaciers are on the move again.

Finally average temperatures have exceeded the 100 year event of 1998. Which is pretty tragic.... The next 100 year event is going to be disastrous....