12 August 2010

        The excess greenhouse gasses trap the heat near the ground so at high altitude the air gets colder. Warmer air currents are now rising into colder air, therefore updrafts are intensified. Storms, hurricanes, tornados, etc. are all just fast rising air currents.So everything gets more violent and downpours are significantly increased.

       Meteorologists predict tomorrow's weather from what happened previously. Now we can't predict what's going to happen, nor where, because we have no examples to go by.

       The only certainty is storms go higher and wind speeds are greater.

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The Impending Tide

In the last century, the sea level around the world has risen a total of 17 centimetres through melting polar ice and the increasing temperatures of the water. As the water heated, the increase in volume submerged 20 metres of beach from the east coast of the United States. In the next century, scientists predict an overall rise in sea levels of around one metre. The water is heating faster, resulting in faster melting of the polar ice and greater thermal expansion of the water.

Not only would this drastically reshape the coastlines of the world, but according to Nicolas Stern  of the London School of Economics, within this one metre lies eight of the 10 world's largest cities, much of the developing world and 200 million people. All of whom will need to be relocated as the sea approaches their homes.

Greenland, Antarctica and mountainous ice sheets contain enough water to raise sea levels by a huge 65 metres. Unless global warming is stopped they will eventually all melt away. Science suggests that it will take centuries to melt such a large quantity of ice, but sea temperatures and water levels are already rising faster than predicted.

Only recently have we discovered the effect the gravitational pull ice has on the water surrounding it. Large areas of ice pull large amounts of towards them, so the melting of Antarctic ice will result in a much larger sea level change in the northern hemisphere. Melting in Greenland will have a larger effect on water levels in the southern oceans. 

The melting of polar ice lags behind the increase in temperature caused by global warming. So therefore, even if action is taken today to stem climate change, continued melting (and the some resulting rise in sea levels) is inevitable, and them re-forming afterwards is not. Just how high the sea levels rise is up to us. The above is information taken from what David Biello said recently in Scientific American 302, 45 (2010))

This is just a start. There is so much death and destruction now from climate change it's hard to pick what to talk about.