I’m not a scientist, but since June 2007 I’ve been gathering evidence for climate change from various sources and speculating as to the possible future outcomes indicated by that research. As the months have passed I’ve become increasingly concerned that we’re heading for a sudden, catastrophic climatic event.
 
 
By “sudden”, I mean just that: not a gradual change over centuries or decades — something to which we might, if we’re lucky, be able to adapt — but an event that will overwhelm us over a matter of a few years or even a single year or season. I’m searching for any evidence that underpins that view and narrows the time-frame so we might know when to expect the change. I’m not preaching about what we as individuals should be doing, I’m warning about what I’m increasingly convinced will be the consequences for us all, no matter how much or how little we each do to minimise our individual energy/carbon footprints. This is not to say we needn’t bother doing anything — far from it. By “thinking globally and acting locally”, as the saying goes, we may be able to delay the catastrophe, which will be a good thing — for people of my generation at least, if not for the next — but as I gather and analyse the information that’s out there, I’m becoming persuaded that despite our best individual efforts, it will ultimately overtake us.

See what you think: here’s a rundown of my Climate Change category posts, in chronological order, so you can more easily follow developments from the start. New posts will be added at the bottom when they’re written.

June 4th 2007: Defeat Global Warming? Just Think About It — I discuss the results of a US university’s Intention Experiment, which demonstrated how group thoughts can act over distance, and how their next ambitious experiment will be to try to lower the temperature of the earth just by having groups of people think about it. I mention the inclement UK weather in May, and how the weakening Gulf Stream may have had something to do with it.
 
 
June 26th 2007: The UK Floods — the summer floods hit Leeds, Sheffield, Hull and the Midlands in the UK. The Environment Agency, responsible for much of Britain’s flood defences, has been advised by climate change experts that this is the sort of thing we need to expect for the future. There’s more on the Gulf Stream, and a report on sunspot activity research that indicates we might be heading for a period of global cooling rather than global warming.
 
 
July 11th 2007: Climate Change: Sunspots? Or Us? — a BBC News item refutes the “sunspots will cause global cooling” theory, and places global warming back on the agenda, as well as reiterating that human activity is responsible for the current temperature rise. The research concludes that changes in the Sun’s output cannot be causing modern-day climate change. My question: will we ultimately experience global warming, or global cooling? Personally, I think the jury’s still out. I’m worried because our politicians need to know which one to prepare for, and soon — because spending whatever funds they allocate for our protection on the wrong outcome will surely be as utterly catastrophic as the event itself.
 
 
July 23rd 2007: UK Floods: The Crisis Deepens — the floods invade the southern counties of Britain as the politicians begin a damage limitation exercise. I highlight what Prime Minister Gordon Brown says about flood defence spending, contrasting his statement with an opposing view from the magazine Private Eye. I wonder how we will cope if the winter proves to be as wet as the summer. Supposing it happens again next summer? And the following winter?
 
 
July 25th 2007: Climate Change: Competing Theories — I discuss how the oceanic Gulf Stream and the atmospheric Jet Stream may be linked; I find a couple of items carrying research claiming that Gulf Stream cessation will not lead to a cooling of the northern hemisphere, any cooling effect being more than offset by the rapid increase in global temperatures. I discuss Whitley Strieber and Art Bell’s The Coming Global Superstorm, a book which bolsters my concern about a sudden, catastrophic climatic upheaval. Their Superstorm theory has been dismissed by many as untenable. I’m not so sure.
 
 
 
October 11th 2007: Gore Gored By British Judge — in haste, I quote verbatim from BBC News about A High Court judge who rules on whether climate change film, An Inconvenient Truth, could be shown in schools. He said it contains “nine scientific errors”. I disagree with something he says in his ruling, namely: that Mr Gore’s assertion that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of ice in either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”. The judge said this was “distinctly alarmist” and it was common ground that if Greenland’s ice melted it would release this amount of water — “but only after, and over, millennia”. I rebut this with another verbatim quote from a source I didn’t take the time to check, which states — inaccurately, as it turned out — that Greenland’s entire ice cap could disappear within five years. (The north polar sea however, is likely to be ice-free during each summer season within five to six years — see below, December 28th 2007 — The Maya And The Arctic Meltdown.)
 
 
October 12th 2007: North Polar Meltdown — I congratulate Al Gore and the IPCC for being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I acknowledge the erroneous statement about the Greenland ice melt I quoted in the previous post and go into some detail about a journalist’s visit with a group of scientsts to Greenland, where he observed first-hand the speed of the Arctic meltdown. I explain the latest thinking behind what’s causing the glaciers to melt so quickly — the NOAA reports that the Arctic ice cap is melting faster than scientists had expected and will shrink 40 percent by 2050 in most regions. I express my frustration with politicians who are still waiting for what they consider to be “definitive proof” that something’s wrong before beginning to prepare for the outcome.
 
 
October 18th 2007: Cornwall: Part 1 — the first day of our brief holiday in Cornwall, including a trip to Land’s End, where I ponder the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean and the extraordinary power of the Gulf Stream and its effect on our weather. We also visit the Minack Theatre, perched on the Cornish cliffs, and the tiny hamlet of Mousehole, scene of the UK’s worst lifeboat disaster.
 
 
October 24th 2007: More Climate Change Indicators — three more items from BBC News carry worrying news: Scientists have discovered there’s a new wind circulation pattern that’s blowing more warm air towards the North Pole than in the 20th Century; the second reports that the amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world’s oceans has reduced, and the third states that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have risen 35% faster than expected since 2000.
 
 
October 30th 2007: Cornwall: Part 2 — taking in a visit to the Eden Project, a vast conservation/ecological site. The huge biomes contain an astonishing diversity of trees, shrubs, plants and flowers from around the globe. I reflect on the consequences of burning the world’s tropical rainforests, and follow up with something positive: a brief look at Eden’s latest construction project, The Edge.
 
 
November 9th 2007: Somerset Flood Defences Put On Hold — I take the government to task for promising one thing (see the post above — UK Floods: The Crisis Deepens) but then doing another: despite the reassurances given during the summer floods about flood defence spending not being curtailed, our local flood defence upgrade has just been put on indefinite hold.
 
 
November 16th 2007: Spend Flood Defence Cash Quicker — in a follow-up to the previous post, the Local Government Association (LGA) warns central government that the additional money allocated for improving Britain’s flood defences must be spent sooner rather than later, or it will cost the nation much more in the long term. I discuss Risk Management and how it applies to the government’s approach to climate change.
 
 
December 21st 2007: Superstorm Authors Vindicated — following newly-published research indicating that a past weakening of the Gulf Stream, caused by a sudden massive flow of fresh water into the north Atlantic from the American continent, brought about a rapid, catastrophic century-long cooling of the northern hemisphere about 8,000 years ago, Whitley Strieber and Art Bell’s Superstorm theory is reappraised in the scientific journal New Scientist: the film The Day After Tomorrow [based on their book The Coming Global Superstorm], which portrays such a scenario, may have exaggerated — but not by much.
 
 
December 28th 2007: The Maya And The Arctic Meltdown — noting that the famous Mayan long-count calendar ends on December 21st 2012, I pull three different strands together: 2007 is the year the Northwest Passage became navigable for the first time since records began; the year scientists predicted that Arctic waters could be ice-free in summer within five or six years; the year the political temperature began rising over Arctic resources ownership and ask the question: What do the next five years hold for us?
 
 
January 14th 2008: Antarctic Ice Loss Confirmed — less than a decade ago, scientists were saying the Antarctic ice sheet was growing in size. Now that outlook has been revised. Latest research shows that while East Antarctica is currently neither growing nor shrinking (though that may change in the next few years), West Antarctica is losing ice at an ever-increasing speed, much like in the Arctic.
 
 
February 6th 2008: Sudden Climate Shifts Predicted — could the Earth undergo sudden, rather than gradual, climate change? A recent report in a prestigious science journal assesses the likelihood and concludes: yes, it could. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal suggests that many of Earth’s climate systems will undergo a series of sudden shifts this century as a result of human-induced climate change.
 
 
February 11th 2008: Polar Meltdowns: More Evidence Emerges — when the Antarctic’s Larsen B ice shelf broke apart in 2002, human-induced climate change was blamed. Now two scientists claim there was rather more to it. Meanwhile, up north, a huge fracture in the Beaufort Sea ice pack has researchers worried about its implications for the future.
 
 
February 21st 2008: Being Economical With The Truth — is there no such thing as human-induced climate change? Is it all just a natural blip? The Telegraph’s Christopher Booker seems to think so. Meanwhile, the Unknown Country web site has put solar radiation back in the frame as a candidate for climate disruption — but have they each arrived at these differing positions by cherry-picking the available information to suit their own agendas?
 
 
February 25th 2008: Antarctic’s PIG Threatening Sea Levels — it was recently suggested that the amount of Antarctic ice has been growing in volume. Now comes news of glacial shrinkage that has the British Antarctic Survey worried: they say it could lead to a significant rise in global sea levels.
 
 
March 7th 2008: There Goes The Sun — China’s coldest winter in 100 years, Baghdad’s first snow in recorded history, North America has the most snow cover in 50 years. Record cold in Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile … in the past 12 months, global temperatures have dropped so dramatically that a century of warming has been reversed. Why? And where do we go from here?
 
 
March 19th 2008: When More Means Less — Recent news that Arctic winter sea ice bounced back to previous levels after an unprecedented summer melt prompted speculation that the global warming scenario had been exaggerated. Indeed, it’s been a surprisingly cold winter across much of the northern hemisphere — so is there really anything to worry about? Yes, says a new report backed by NASA.
 
 
April 14th 2008: A Sunny Outlook? — Once again, the Sun’s influence on the current state of our climate has been called into question, with the link between incoming cosmic rays and global warming being refuted. Meanwhile, Solar Cycle 24 has got off to a grindingly slow start. Where have all the sunspots gone?
 
 
 
September 12th 2008: Still No Sunspots — The current Solar Cycle — an indicator of the sun’s magnetic activity, which in turn is believed to influence our planet’s climate — is confounding astronomers by resolutely refusing to conform to predictions. There should be increasing numbers of sunspots blemishing the sun’s surface by now, but there are none. What does this trend indicate for our future?
 
 
September 17th 2008: Arctic Ice Melt: 2008 Just Misses The Boat — Having recently passed the period of maximum retreat, the Arctic sea ice melt this year just missed beating last year’s record — but there’s little to celebrate. This summer’s ice cover was the second lowest since satellite records began 30 years ago, which the US National Snow and Ice Data Center says emphasises the “strong negative trend”.
 
 
September 24th 2008: Methane Gas: The Great Escape — It’s been talked about for years, and now it’s really happening — methane, a global warming gas far more deadly than carbon dioxide, is escaping from the Arctic seabed in vast quantities, adding to the atmospheric burden. What effect will it have on our planet’s climate?
 
 
September 26th 2008: Cold Comfort — What sort of consequences will we have to endure if, as I suspect, our weather starts to turn really cold in the near future? Hopefully, none of us will have to go through this Austrian resident’s unsettling experience …
 
 
 
October 3rd 2008: The Truth Behind ‘Cold Comfort’ — The story was so outrageous, many doubted it could be true — “Hailstones shooting out the toilet? Nahh. Gotta be a hoax.” When I published “Cold Comfort” a few days ago, it stirred up quite a controversy. So I dug a little deeper.
 
 
 
 
 
 
February 12th 2009: Rising Sea Levels — When the waters start to rise, how will coastlines around the globe be affected? A clever mash-up of Google Maps and NASA data gives a graphic illustration of what could happen if sea levels rise by up to 14 metres.
 
 
 
 
 
*****

Last updated: February 12th 2009.

Links to new climate change posts will be added here when they’re published.