I hope it stops raining before the Olympics. After all the effort put in by the country (and Atkins!) it is important that UK plc gets its moment in the sun.
These games will be the greenest ever – or as it was put at the snappily named ‘Green Building Council’s London 2012 Lessons Learnt Grand Finale’, perhaps we should say the least non-sustainable games in modern history.
So there will be a strong sense of irony if these become the first games disrupted by climate change.
New Scientist (7 July 2012) returned to its task of clearly showing that climate change is real and here. ‘Freak weather is fast becoming normal’, evidenced by not only this terrible UK summer, but the US’s ‘Summer in March’ with one weather station breaking its record by 17 degrees Centigrade (yep – not Fahrenheit).
One key issue it addressed was how “our weather is getting wilder – more variable as well as steadily hotter.” Decade by decade the land temperatures over the northern hemisphere (see graph below) show the bell curve both shifting and widening as the planet warms. Whilst the average has moved up by around 0.8 degrees Centigrade the bottom temperatures have remained similar, but the top of the range is up by almost two!
So how’s that going to look when the centre of the bell curve is 4 degrees higher? By pumping 30 Giga-tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually we are conducting the world’s biggest science experiment. And since we are pretty sure of the answer, and it is not good, why are we carrying on?
New Scientist finishes off with our new favourite weather phrase – the ‘Lazy Jet Stream’ that has so far wrecked our summer. Firm predictions of its movements seem difficult – apparently partly because the meshing on our climate change models is still relatively coarse at around 2km. Think about that next time you are meshing a flat slab for analysis!
Still the BBC seems to think the Jet Stream is going back north next week. After reading this article I fear that may be more hope than science.
Fingers crossed then! I hope it stops raining before the Olympics.
