The
presidential tweet scorning climate change, namely "We could do with
some of that climate change here," after severe blizzards hit the U.S.
east coast, could not have been more inopportune!
Figures published last Thursday (January 16) by the world's three main organizations monitoring global temperatures (NASA, NOAA and the UK Met Office) show 2017 to be the warmest on record for a year in which temperatures were not boosted by El Ni à � o, it was still one of the top three hottest years recorded.
Looking at the graph of global temperatures
from pre-industrial times on, an inexorable upward trend accelerating
from 1975 is obvious, even to any naive observer. Why is it not obvious
to Mr. Trump? The answer to that question might
lie in electioneering, politics, constituencies, supporters -- both
voters and financial contributors -- and a host or reasons that have
nothing to do with science.
While
a warming globe does not actually cause weather events, it does
certainly amplify them. Parched forests and record-breaking wild fires in Australia
and California. Last year hurricanes of surprising intensity
devastating Houston or Puerto Rico -- how much has Trump done for the
latter? This week a battered Netherlands with hurricane force storms
toppling shipping containers, ripping off roofs, blowing pedestrians
across roads, dislodged flying roof tiles closing airport terminals,
sweeping a bus off the road into a canal, stopping train services -- the
latter also in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany.
The closest epoch when average concentrations of CO2 ranged from 380 to 450 ppm -- we are now above 407 ppm -- was the middle Pliocene around 3.6 million years ago. The area around the North Pole was much warmer, as much as 19 degrees Celsius higher than the present. The surrounding land area was forested and ungulates roamed free. It is not going to happen tomorrow but over hundreds and thousands of years that is the future. What happens to the ice melt? That is the problem for coastlines and low-lying islands.
If 2017 was a non-El Ni à � o year and still a record-breaker, the onus is on manmade causes. What will future generations think of us if we do nothing and their habitats are washed away into the oceans?
Environmental records and disasters might have been swirling around the news circuit, Mr. Trump's mind was elsewhere, focused on his corpus -- now a disputed enormity. After his physical, he was reported to be an inch taller than his self-claimed height or that on his driver's license -- a miracle or an 'incredible' coiffure?-- a crucial issue for the Donald because the extra inch reduces his BMI (body mass index) classifying him 'overweight' instead of 'obese' -- 'vanity of vanity; all is vanity,' said the preacher (Ecclesiastes 1:2) . It's just an arbitrary classification by doctors, yet of such critical importance in the highest office in the land.
Meanwhile, ahead of Davos, now in progress , a survey of 1000 experts from government, business and academia has reported the risk of war in 2018 has risen sharply.
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