Superstorms

To the victims of Superstorm Sandy - Our thoughts and our prayers are with you.  May God bring comfort to the bereaved and relief to the injured and homeless.

The freshness of the images in our newspapers and on our televisions and computer screens does not change the fact however that this has been the worse decade of hurricanes, typhoons and superstorms in history.  Not a year has gone by without at least one storm killing and leaving a trail of destruction across whole countries.  Have people forgotten 2005 and the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina?  When are people going to admit that human industry is mucking up our weather patterns?

I will accept that the earths climate has changed in the past.  I'm a natural history freak and I know that in 1066 the world climate was so warm that they could grow grapes in England all the way up to Yorkshire, whereas by the 1800s the world climate was so cold that the London Christmas fair was held on the ice of the Thames river.  The world climate has cycled between hot and cold since it began.  The Chinses round 1066 sent a fleet that circum-navigated the world by sailing above Russia and what is now Canada.  That is how much the climate has changed.

But

Think about how long the climate took to cool down.  From 1066 to the 1800s is nearly eight hundred years.  Now consider that from the 1800s to 2012 is only just over two hundred years.  That and consider the historical Revolutions that happened in the 1800s.  The Industrial Revolution takes place and in less than two hundred years not only is the Thames no longer freezing, its rare if snow falls in Norfolk.  The run of snowy winters in England for the last part of the first decade of the twenty first century was a buck in the trend.

Yes the climate natural cycles between hot and cold.  What humans have done with our industry and pollution is speed up the yo-yo by about four times.  The world climate is bouncing and bouncing hard.  And we wonder why species the world over are crashing and crashing hard.  I'm not just talking the big iconic species like elephants and pandas, I'm talking the small, extremely necessary species like the honey bee, without whom most of our crops won't be pollinated. Let's think about the implications of that the next time we choose cheapness over envirmentally friendliness.

On a final note, I know of a gentleman who is now in the later years of his career.  Apparently his grandfather said one day "If we keep spraying stuff on the land and smoking stuff into the sky, we're going to muck up the weather".  At the time his family thought that he was just being cranky.  I ask you - how cranky is he now?