This is grumpys doodling page.
I hope to help anyone struggling to understand all this. It is my understanding of what we are doing to the climate. We cannot avoid some scientific words, so i hope i am doing this in easy reading style to understand the big picture.
Facts are under attack…
Climate change is one of todays most serious topics. Unfortunately for anyone wanting to understand a bit about this subject, politics has buried it inside very sophisticated misinformation, really plausible fake news! This problem is everywhere, caused by people flooding media with alternative half truths to downright bad lies. It is mostly the politics from very powerful large interests who do not want their wealth compromised.
CO2 is carbon dioxide = smoke from a fire!
Thats what we are burning off into the sky from fossil fuel. This is bad
Google Milankovitch Cycles. This explains the CO2 levels going up and down.
CO2 has been going up and down between CO2 180ppm (parts per million) and 280ppm for the past million years.
We have put it over 415ppm, enough to roast us like a turkey in the oven!
CH4 is methane = stink from a sewer or smelly farts!
Can you imagine all that frozen tundra land in Canada and Russia thawing, all the frozen bogs releasing methane. It is really big sums.
A classic today 2021 distraction is blaming cows for producing methane and bombarding the media with data on this. True, cows do produce methane, but thats all part of todays carbon cycle. We must avoid getting bogged down in information overload to be able to stay focused on the simple big picture.
Two bank accounts…
Fossil fuel usage burns off carbon that belonged to a long gone historic carbon cycle and we are putting it into todays carbon cycle. But these are different time bank accounts! Fossil fuels belong to a historic climate and it should not be transferred into our current climate unless you want to change its behaviour.
We are taking heat producing carbon from an old bank account and putting it into our current account. The cows can fart and burp as much as they like from the grass they eat. That grass grew by absorbing carbon from the current account and the cows burps from both ends are just putting it back in.
This is why we call it a bl🤧dy cycle! 🤦♂️
Yes methane is a stronger greenhouse gas, but its still of our current carbon cycle. Do not get distracted from this simple fact. Note, am not complicating things by adding, -
(cows have displaced other bio-diversity, because (they all fart) thats also another story)
Accidental distortion of facts…
A simple example of facts distortion comes from the way technology gathers information and prioritises it. If we had a flood, thats bad. If we had a catastrophic flood thats worse. So people writing will add impact priority words to get their stories upgraded in importance on search engines. That means we don’t get anything normal, as normal doesn’t get ratings to ever be seen. So everything we read is devastating, catastrophic, worst in living memory, etc. That is an unfortunate point that must be taken into account. No wonder what we read is difficult to believe.
Scientists speak about tipping points. One is Arctic Ocean melting. If you fill a pan with ice cubes and put it on a hot cooker ring, the water will not heat till the ice is all melted first. The energy is absorbed by the ice till it is melted. Then the water heats up. It is the same in the Arctic. The ice there is melting and shrinking just now. When it is melted, thats the tipping point! It is only then that the Ocean then heats up.
361 Gt is 1 ml sea level rise...
Climate scientists are often talking about Gigatons. What perspective can we make from Gigatons? One day i worked out an easy way to help answer this. All you need to do is remember one simple number...361. Then,….
One Gigaton is written as 1Gt, or also explained as one billion tons, or one thousand times one million. It is also one cube kilometre of water, from melted ice, or evaporated and condensed back into rainfall. Water is quite a nifty traveller on the planet. It is invisible when it is water vapour gas, so it floats (invisibly) high in the sky, yet it can push down the land under its weight when it is snow and ice, and it can wash away a world in a tsunami. If it is not there, the droughts are a most effective game changer too. It has an awesome power and requires our most sincere respect!
361Gt of added meltwater from the cryosphere ice worlds of Antarctica, Greenland and the many glaciers rivers of the world would raise the sea level 1 ml.
Thats because there are 361 million square kilometres of ocean surface.
Scientists calculated 280Gt (280 billion tons) of meltwater net loss came from Greenland in 2019, yes thats 280 cubic kilometres gone in one year. So, keeping 361 in mind as 1ml sea level rise, one should now get a little perspective when you read anything about Gt numbers.
1 x Gigaton (1Gt) = a one kilometre sized cube volume of water. Try to imagine the size of that cube. Look up into the sky, It is an awesome volume of water.
Scientists recon that Hurricane Harvey, Aug 2017 dropped more than 120 of these cubic kilometres, 120 billion tons of water on Texas. So i hope you can now get some perspective to all this, it was a really big major event.
The power of warm Ocean surfaces.
Oceans absorb 90%+ of excess (global warming) heat. The Oceans burp out some of this heat in El-Nino events. That means every decade or so an Ocean event called El-Nino ups the global temperature a little bit. The other phase is La-Nina, and it is the cooling phase. They basically swing back and forth every 7/10 years or so. Misinformation manufacturers like the downward numbers, but the long term average is always upward.
Hurricanes, Cyclones, Typhoons, these monsters require a minimum ocean surface temperature of 26 degrees before they can gorge energy and grow nasty. The waters in the Mexican Gulf, Florida, New Orleans, Houston, where USA Hurricanes are a big problem, the surface waters there in Summer are 29/30 degrees. Thats Nuclear fuel for Hurricanes.
Adding one degree global temp’ puts 7% more moisture into the sky. We have added well over one degree, which means there is about 10% more moisture in the atmosphere than there was a few generations back. Of course this does not spread itself evenly around the planet. It all clumps into big black nasty localised weather events.
Do you start to see a picture building in this? From Cuba to New Orleans is good 600 miles. A storm slowly crossing from Cuba can turn into a huge monster very quickly. Hurricane Harvey during its journey across the Gulf sucked up and then dumped 120Gts, 120 billion tones of water over Texas, so these monsters really are truly horror sized events and you should be really concerned at the thought of them getting even bigger and stronger.
I hope you can visualise hurricane Harveys power now. There is plenty info on it to google. We certainly do not want these monsters to get more energy. If they do get more they will be even bigger. It is that simple.
So what can we expect from not addressing the climate crisis?.... If in the next decade or so we add another one degree of heat into the atmosphere, we certainly will get an unwelcome increase in the climate drama. We will have added another 7% more moisture on top of the 10% we have already done in the sky which increases low pressure storm sizes and their rainfall flooding events. We will certainly loose the white North Pole completely, that is in the process of happening just now anyway so it will become an ice free Ocean. This would be an event not seen for a million years. It would be awful! That will create havoc to our North Atlantic weather and our Gulf Stream. We don't want lots of Atlantic winter storms with hurricane attitude wrecking havoc every winter!
The hot climate hurricanes will be sucking enough extra surface energy to be reclassified into category 6. They will be levelling everything in their path.
Really horrible heat dome events will become a regular nightmare for many areas.
There is sure to be shocking unexpected surprises,🤐 i press pause!
If we see no significant change in our carbon usage now, as in abracadabra, expect a quick transition into this climate during the next 10/30 years. One or two more El-Nino periods is what i think will really test our resilience.
A very up to date letter to the young people of the world from one of the most knowledgeable scientists on climate change, James Hansen, can be seen here
It is a heavy read, but very factual.
A very informative video by a clear speaker. Please take time to listen to it.
He has more videos.