Climate Change

The unseasonal weather in Sydney over the last few weeks got me thinking again about climate change, global warming, renewable energy etc...

Every year, as summer approaches, it seems that this summer is going to be the hottest of them all. I would have to say that until 2004/5, that was true from my experience. I skipped last summer (I was in India for four months, sweet tropical winter.....) but my family and friends tell me that it was undoubtedly the hottest summer ever. This year however, things have been a little bit strange. There have repeated cool changes throughout the spring months, and even the hottest days havent been all that hot. Also, it has been a rather humid summer; generally, the bushfire-prone summer months are bone dry in Sydney. So what's been happening??

I'm no meteorologist, but weather patterns are supposed to be complex, and this sort of aberration could be put down to pure chance alone. But over the last few years, there have numerous instances of unprecedented weather patterns around the world. Hurricane Katrina is probably the most famous example, but it is only of many hurricanes that have arisen from the Gulf of Mexico. Cyclone Larry wreaked havoc on the northern Queensland coast earlier this year. Rising sea levels have flooded vast tracts of the Bangladesh coastline. Europe has experienced three years of summer heatwaves, with temperatures rising as high as 35-40 C. Glaciers are disappearing in Nepal and mountain lakes are overfilling and rupturing their banks. The delayed monsoonal downpour has hit parts of India with unexpected ferocity and caused widespread flooding for two years in a row (I was stuck in the Chennai floods last year). And to add to all this, we have Sydney's strange weather.

I guess it's easy to put all the blame onto global warming. There is clear evidence that air and sea temperatures around the world have been on the increase as far back as the records stretch. Alarmingly, the rate of increase has closely followed global development trends i.e. energy consumption i.e. CO2 emissions. Satellite data shows that the polar ice caps have been receding adding further proof that temperatures are rising. Then there is the famous "hole in the ozone layer". I dont know how they actually measure that, but people claim its getting bigger too (there's supposed to a big one over Antarctica).

But there is a school of thought that global warming is fictitious and that the Earth goes through cycles, certain stages of which involve rising temperatures, sea levels, CO2 concentration etc. People who espouse this theory are ridiculed and sidelined by the mainstream scientific community, but I wonder if that is the right way to deal with these people. There is good evidence to support global warming and its link to human activity. There should be a legitimate way to discredit this anti-global warming minority, rather than resorting to bully tactics. I think the best way to achieve this is to show that taking measures to reduce CO2 emissions can reverse global warming. If this could be demonstrated then there would be no such questions raised. The problem is that tackling climate change is rather more easily said than done.

What I actually wanted to write about was ways in which we can reduce emissions and why we dont take up these practices, on a global, national and individual level. But this post is already too long, so I'll write another piece soon and continue from where I stopped...