It's a bit weird being a long-distance weather geek. I can't be a stormchaser, because I'm in Europe being merely an observer. So what's the point?
Well, I think that it's more relevant to watch the weather these days than to watch politics. The whole "government" performance is just a shadowplay, a piece of dull puppetry. The only thing that can possibly come from it is negative and predictable, so i guess even I'd be better off watching one of those atrocious "reality" shows.
Weather, on the other hand, is signalling to us the truth about what we are doing with our planet, our lives, and our childerns' futures. I cannot imagine a bigger or more serious topic deserving of our attention. But - if you'd rather watch a rerun of "Idiots Undressed" -well, help yourselves.
I read a piece last week that said an event of more than 35cm of snow falling in Holland, only happens once or twice a century. (This is a very unsnowy land!)
It's happened twice this year.
Unfortunately, it didn't happen here last time, 2 weeks ago. but then, it did happen here in Alkmaar twice intwo days back in March, so we can't complain :-)
More seriously though, and going back to my post at the end of November; there was an article in Nature last week, that the North Atlantic Conveyor had weakened. This was widely reported, but as usual, the details seem to have been misinterpreted to provide the feather bed of security to the readers.
Basically - the North Atlantic Conveyor is part of the mechanism that creates a warm climate in Western Europe that is apparently inappropriate to its latitude. The article as reported in the newspaper, said that it has been faltering over the last 30 or 50 years. In fact, if you look a bit closer, the change might in fact have occured over the last few years. I haven't got the data to hand, so please bear with me. For something like this to happen over 50 years is climatologically speaking potentially disastrous. If it is actually happening on an almost visible level, then the results are catastrophic. To put it mildly.
If the movement of warm water from the Western Atlantic to Western Europe was failing, I believe the first thing we would see would be more intense, major hurricanes.
So, on that, the conclusions are prettily easily drawn.
It is though, one small example of what appears to be the gathering evidence that climate change is now not merely theoretical, but is happening ona scale that is about to inundate us. Here's the Independent, which in Britain is leading the newspapers' attempts to put Climate Change on the political agenda:
"It is as if we were living on two planets. Here, in the real world, the evidence that global warming is already doing immense damage to the earth is mounting with terrifying speed. In the past two weeks alone, we have learned that the Greenland ice cap appears to be on the point of irreversible meltdown, that the Kalahari Desert is to double in size, that sea and bird life has collapsed dramatically off the US Pacific coast and that the mighty Gulf Stream (which keeps Britain habitable) has abruptly weakened. This year is expected to be the hottest ever, and hurricanes are breaking all records. It is impossible to dispute the conclusion last week of the Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett, that this is "the greatest threat facing mankind".
The other world, that they refer to, is the "UN Climate Change Conference" that has just finished in Canda. That it was an absolute fucking joke is being circumspect in my judgement. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.
And this is led by America, who continues to deny the truth of climate change, whilst its oil platforms are receovering from the assault in the Gulf and its young people are dying in a genocidal war to protect the interests of the oil capitalists.
My mother-in-law just came back from Egypt. There, she could pick up fossils of sea creatures in the Sahara, which just 40,000 years ago was the bottom of the ocean. The Earth is in constant flux, and it seems that we've lived ina relatively quiet period, but that's all over now.
I guess we're going to have to get to La Gomera real quick, and try not to be one of the refugees trying to escape the cold and the unnamed storms and HN51.
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