Bill Giles O.B.E
Former BBC Senior Weatherman
The climate of the Earth is continually changing. The big difference this time around is that the major component of the change is not the natural variation but the activities of the predominant animal on the planet, namely the human race.
The Earth’s gravity enables it to maintain an atmosphere in which the oxygen enables animal life to exist but it also contains many other gases including carbon dioxide and methane. These gases have the property of allowing the sun’s short wave radiation to pass through almost unhindered but are only translucent to the returning longer wave terrestrial radiation reflecting some back to the Earth.
Far from being detrimental to life on Earth the naturally occurring greenhouse gases maintain the average global temperature at around 15 C. This is an ideal temperature for the human race, amongst others, to breed and to develop. Without this naturally occurring greenhouse shield it has been estimated that the average global temperature would be some 33 C lower at Minus 18C which, almost certainly would have inhibited our development and probably made sure that it didn’t even start.
However, by burning fossil fuels at an escalating rate, we are putting more and more of the greenhouses gases into our atmosphere which in turn heat up the atmosphere to such an extent that the last decade was the warmest ever recorded. As far as the average temperature for Central England is concerned (and this is the longest continuous meteorological record in the world dating back to 1659) it did not vary very much from 9.1 C but in the last ten year has jumped dramatically by 1C to 10.1C-a significant change.
Assuming this to be mainly due to the increase of carbon gases and methane there is no reason why this trend should not continue and this is the basis of all the predictions from the International Panel for Climate Change.
Now it really matters little about whether the predicted increase in global temperature is 5 C by the end of the century or 8 C because there will be wide regional variations and even if we drastically cut back our carbon output we will still warm up since once in the atmosphere carbon can last up to 100 years. It has been suggested by a Royal Commission that the UK would have to cut back its carbon emissions by 60% to stop the warming getting out of control and the rest of the world would have to follow suit. Unless there is a radical change with a clean substitute for the industrial combustion engine and cleaner power stations this decrease in carbon output seems most unlikely.
So how is this going to affect the climates around the world?
