RebebaBlog

Esta e unha conversa que tiven cunhos colegas por email por mor das altas temperaturas rexistradas neste inverno e todo o que se fala arredor a ver qué vos parece. Non dí nin deixa de dicir nada pero quería compartilo con vós para ver os vosos comentarios (deixeino en inglés porque… mmhh… bueno, por vago) :

Colega1 dende Groningen, Países Baixos (Xanerio 9 de 2007):

Hi all,
Its been a long time we discussed about something. While I was driving back home just now (midnight) I saw the temperature reading and it said 13 degrees!!
I mean this is sort of the peak of winter in this part of the world. And many scientists recon this year (2007) to be the hottest year ever on record.

What is the problem? Is it really global warming, some crazy solar activity or is it some normal fluctuation in the behaviour of our planet??

It would be nice to know if the weather in the places you are staying equally abnormal.

Cheers
[sinatura do Colega1]

Colega2 dende New Brunswick, Canadá (Xanerio 10 de 2007)

hiii

yeah…thats true…some say it is due to alnino [quere dicir El Niño], some say global warming… but i dont think…it would be a sudden change as we are seeing it now if its due to a global warming…

i dont know how many of you saw the inconvienient truth….algores movie…he has a point to make about global warming…other than these 2…what else can be there…colega1 you should say if there is any unusual activity on the sun…

india is having severe winters..water pipes freezing…etc..and europe is having worst winter…so something should be wrong with the circulation…and i guess that would be the al nino effect…what you say…

[sinatura do Colega2]

.

eiquí ven o meu dende Noordwijk, Países Baixos (Xanerio 10 de 2007)

I’m sure that the high temperatures in 2006 and 2007 so far are due to global warming, first because the temperature is warmer, and secondly because it happens basically everywhere (this was meant to be a joke). What I’m not sure if this global warming is increasing monotonously or we are just in a peak or if this is due to greenhouse effect gases and pollution of the kind only. Undoubtedly these pollution is extremely harmful for the planet but, as colega2 mentions, the degree of relation between them and the high temperature records this winter in northern latitudes is not completely clear to me.

Right now, the typical parameters used to measure solar activity are quite normal, and nothing very weird seems to be happening in the solar processes that scientists somehow understand well. NASA and other scientists claim that next peak of solar cycle, around 2011 will be higher in terms of solar activity, according to some semi-empirical models. There are other scientists claiming exactly the opposite thing using other models with arguments that seems to be just as valid as the former ones. But there might be something else happening that they haven’t even considered and that have strong relations… Anyway, the effect of higher solar radiation or number of sunspots on climate is not clear either (we are now at solar minimum and with very hot winter).

What I’ve noticed is that, unfortunately, there’s a lack of understanding on how our planet works and this should be a very important concern. The increase of temperatures at least is starting to motivate governments to develop programs to study Earth system processes (and now it comes some advertisements from our sponsors), such as the GMES from ESA and the European Comission ( http://www.esa.int/esaLP/LPgmes.html , http://www.gmes.info/), and I’m sure many others from USA, Japan, and perhaps China, India, Canada, Australia, … if you know about them please tell me.

But there are still lot of resources (manpower, money) devoted to some industries like weapons, automotive or IT, just to mention 3 examples, that have brought huge technological advances to our “civilisation” but that I would set below (or out) in the list of priorities.

We still don’t understand exactly how the Earth system evolves and the climate is changing, and this should be a priority for the research roadmap globally, together, of course, with other priorities like reducing pollution, becoming Kyoto compliant, stopping wars, stopping starvation, being nice persons… and a big list of good wishes, very typical of the beginning of the year. All these priorities and wishes are difficult to achieve if we call ourselves a civilisation while we still discuss about preserving human rights instead of taking them for granted, try to get owns benefits at any price, follow extreme religious ideas that doesn’t respect common sense and a long etcetera.

Using a simile, some economical models are real wonders of mathematics, but when put in practice, at some point all of them fail (well, I’m not an expert, economists don’t take this statement to the dot), and in my opinion this happens because of the human uncertainty factor. In economy, as in good willing for understanding and changing our planet to a better place, as well as for life, in general, I think that the uncertainty of the behaviour patterns of the people, where even common sense cannot be assumed, is the missing factor that always fail and it is a curse of our society very difficult to redeem.

Just to conclude, I’ve been jumping from one topic to another raising points without saying nothing concrete, so my final recommendation is that when you want to say something: FOCUS on the issue in order to avoid so long emails.

And just to be a bit optimistic and sarcastic, one advantage of global warming, compared to global freezing, is that at least we don’t need to use the heating system so much, thus saving some energy.

Cheers!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 19:46 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.