What’s the Pacific Ocean got to do with a country which doesn’t even care about Europe – a continent just 24 miles away? Well, like it or not the UK is still on the same planet as the Pacific, and atmospheric and ocean water mixing will ensure that events down there l have an effect on us up here.
By 1900 the estimated global temperature was 13.7C. By 1960 it had reached 13.9C, by 1980 14.0C and by last year, 2015, it was 14.7C.
Of course many people refuse to believe this. Some have claimed that the Mediaeval Warm Period was warmer than today and have argued that this somehow shows that recent rapid warming is nothing to worry about. However work in the US has shown that that this historic warming had already been exceeded in the late 20 century.
Other sceptics have pointed to a recent slowdown in the warming. However this has come about by the working of a regular pattern of warming of sea water in the Pacific Ocean. Because the oceans and the atmosphere are global, it means that quite apart from any longterm gradual changes, if there’s a sudden warming in one particular place, then the heat energy there is unavailable elsewhere leading to a relative cooling. In this case there has been an unusually long Pacific warming and this has had the effect of slowing down the global temperature increases as the heat energy gets buried deep in the ocean.
But in January this process in the Pacific came to an end as it usually does – and this heat energy produced weather disturbances and enabled global warming to pick up again.
That meant that the global temperature for January 2016 was a January record high. February 2016 was a February record high. And so it has gone on month after month including July. It is now almost certain that 2016 will show the highest global temperature.
So why did the Tories move fast to cut back on the green policies brought in by the Liberal Democrats in Coalition? Don’t they care about their (and our) grandchildren’s futures?
The Tories may well go the way of the dinosaurs – but the danger is that they’ll take us and mankind with them!