What is This World Coming to? 4

Okay, we’ve spent quite a bit of time exploring melting ice and (some of) the resulting changes to The Oceans As We Know Them. And last time, we touched on the Arctic jet stream, which brings us to the atmosphere. Let’s go ahead and explore (some of) the changes we can expect there.

I just heard on the news tonight that Hurricane Willa - born in the Eastern Pacific Ocean - will tear across the middle of Mexico (despite the mountains) and then hit the south and south-eastern areas of the US. It’s not expected to be a hurricane by the time it gets to the US, but I don’t remember hearing about any Pacific hurricane/cyclone/typhoon doing that before. And anytime hurricanes get mentioned anymore, there always seems to be a cat 5 hurricane that somebody is watching. Some of them have been so strong a cat 5, there has been talk of defining what would make a cat 6.

The average global temperature has risen 1.4° Fahrenheit (0.8° C) over the past 100 years. Now, that’s not 1.4° F for every single location on the globe. Temperatures at the poles have risen faster than other places. But that is a big change over a short period of time, when you are talking about the life of a planet.

Consider the northern plains of China, home to 400,000,000 people, and the place where much of China’s food is grown. It doesn’t get a lot of rainfall, when compared to southern China, so the fields are irrigated during the growing season. Research from MIT indicates that the temperature in this area of China will cross above 95°F several times between 2070 and 2100. At that temperature and with the added humidity caused by irrigation, even young and healthy humans would reach the point where their bodies could not cool off, and death would result within a few hours. And that’s the young and healthy. Old and frail wouldn’t last that long. Do you suppose they’ll farm at night? How would the plants they try to grow fare in that kind of heat?

Shanghai, on China’s central coast, would cross that 95° F threshold about 5 times, and approach it over 100 times during that same time period.

In the Middle East, many areas, especially coastal cities, are in the same mess. In 2015, Bandar Mahshahr in Iran almost reached that ‘death threshold’ when the temperature hit 114.5° F with 50% humidity. Only 50% humidity! But when the temperature gets high enough, the human body can’t function.

What else can we expect? Some areas, like northeast US, may experience an increase in rainfall, while in the northwest US, rainfall will decrease. Washington has been experiencing range fires the last few years, but I don’t remember hearing about them before that. Maybe I wasn’t listening. But I do know that California has been in a drought for several years, and they’ve had fires rampaging across the countryside.

Not a pretty thought, looking at the future and what climate change will do to us. I have a lot of thoughts to piece together for that book I’m thinking about.

I’ll be looking for information about what food will be able to be grown where in the next 50 years. If I find anything interesting on that front - or some other front I haven’t thought of - I’ll continue this series. Otherwise, I’ll wrap this up next time.

https://www.livescience.com/37057-global-warming-effects.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/31/chinas-most-populous-area-could-be-uninhabitable-by-end-of-century

What is This World Coming to? 3

So, what else is the Beaufort Gyre (which, you’ll remember, is north of Alaska) doing to The World As We Know It?

Well, it’s messing up the Arctic jet stream. Being from the midwest US, I’ve heard plenty of winter weather forecasts talking about the Arctic jet stream dipping below the Canadian border and bringing truly frigid blasts to the North American plains. Since I still have friends and family living in that region, I pay attention to the winter weather that happens there. Last year was particularly brutal, with that jet stream going much further south than I remember it doing in the past. It wasn’t just the northern states like the Dakotas, Michigan and maybe Nebraska hunkering down against Arctic-type temperatures, they were reaching into Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana...

How can that possibly mean the climate is warming? Let me remind you that climate and weather are not the same thing. Weather happens on a much smaller scale than climate. As for that Arctic jet stream coming south before returning north, that air gets (relatively) warmed up. Coming so far south, it gets a lot warmer than it normally does, so when it does go north again, it transfers the warmth it gathered to the area it goes; the arctic. More melting.

Earth’s polar ice caps serve a purpose; sunlight is reflected from their white surface, so they act as a ‘cooling’ agent for the entire globe. The more this ice melts and reveals darker-colored water and land, the less cooling is available for the entire planet. Get it? The more snow and ice melts, the more likely more snow and ice will melt. Until there is no more snow and ice to help keep Earth’s temperature moderated.

The really scary part is what happens to the land when all that snow and ice melts. If Greenland’s ice cap melts, the sea level would rise by 20 feet (6.1 m). At its current rate of melt, the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice free by 2040. That’s only 22 years! If all the ice of Antarctica melted, the seas would rise by 200 ft (61 m).

With a sea level rise of only 6 feet (1.8 m), most large cities would be flooded. So, where do you live? I currently live in the center of the Florida peninsula, which would still be here after 6 feet of sea level rise... but loooooong gone by the time all the ice melts. Maybe I should start cleaning out stuff I won’t be needing in my old age, so that it’ll be easier to move north, once that becomes necessary.

By then, New Orleans would be a bay reaching almost as far north as the Missouri boot. The Netherlands would be entirely below sea level, but much of it is now. Hope they have plans for building new, much taller dykes. Australia will be a doughnut, with land surrounding an inland sea. The Amazon rainforest will become the Amazon Sea, and Buenos Aires in Argentina will mean a huge bay. Those are the easy things to notice on the map.

At one time, I found an interactive map showing what parts of the world would be underwater, and the results would change depending on how much you chose to raise the sea level. It didn’t seem too alarming, but I think it only allowed you to raise the sea level by 9 meters.

Alas, I neglected to bookmark that page. When I went looking for it to link to this blog, I found lots and lots of pages with ‘interactive global sea level rise maps’. That means more and more scientists (and others) have been looking at this scenario seriously, and taking the possible sea level rise much higher. Much more ice than that covering Greenland has been and is and will melt, so 9 meters could just be a drop in the bucket.

Water isn’t the only thing that will change. Next time, I’ll examine something else from my research about climate change.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/9/5/1792312/-Warm-ocean-water-has-penetrated-deep-into-the-Arctic-interior-portending-year-round-loss-of-sea-ice

http://www.softschools.com/facts/environmental_science/polar_ice_caps_facts/2894/