Sunday 29 November 2015

Don't Forget About Thermal Lag

This weeks Climate Summit in Paris is yet another last chance for us silly humans to do something about the damage we are wreaking upon the planet but pretty soon we will run out last chances and it will be too late to do anything except literally run for the hills. 
After decades of warnings there are still some who fail to grasp the situation we find ourselves and a fraction of those who flat out refuse to believe the World is warming despite all the evidence to the contrary but they are such a minority that we could call it a cleansing of the gene pool if they found themselves without paddles when the creek overflows.
There is a misconception regarding the warming climate that we could just stop pumping pollutants into the atmosphere tomorrow and things would improve but unfortunately that isn't how it works, thanks to Thermal Lag.
Environmental Scientists estimate the time between the cause (increased greenhouse gas emissions) and the effect (increased temperatures) is 40 years which means that the average temperatures of this decade are a result of what we were thoughtlessly put into the air in the 1970’s.
It also means that the true impact of our emissions this decade will not be felt until the 2050's so even if we stopped putting another part of CO2 into the atmosphere tomorrow, temperatures would continue to rise until at least 2055.
Scientists say that we are committed to warming of 0.6°C minimum which doesn't sound a great deal but as the temperature has risen by 1°C since the onset of the Industrial Revolution and seeing the droughts, floods, hurricanes, landslides, fires, and other manifestations of climate change that we are undergoing now, we should be worried what the conditions will be like in 2055 with another half a degree thrown into the mix.
What should really send a chill down our spines is that according to the Climate Accountability Institute, half of all emissions have been produced in the past 25 years so if things are this bad with the pollution we created in 1975, wait until we get to 2030 and the stuff we recklessly threw up there in 1990.

2 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Falling on a bruise said...

Want to buy a paddle?