ChatterBank1 min ago
Is It Really All Doom And Gloom?
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No best answer has yet been selected by Khandro. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.I don't really want to think about it too much because if it's bad news there's little we can do about it anyway. I do my recycling, pick up and dispose of rubbish wherever I can, including from beaches, but unless we abandon all semblance of modern living - which we won't - we're stuck with whatever the future may bring.
Remember Mark Horton, the Bristol Prof on 'Coast' - to us he was known as 'The Digger'....one Jan night, wet and very windy, my mate and I went to meet him to go to a local hostelry near Henley. He took us via a local village and we 'slid' across the village green to pull up just short of the church wall - lights on, so that he could go and inspect an old oak that had just come down.
"It's amazing what the tree-rings can tell us" - his inspection of the tree to see whether it was worth carting off to Cambridge where he was studying for his first degree.... The pint afterwards was tasty...... Fond reminiscing too - but then peat bogs in Scotland hold just as many secrets to past climatic changes and variations - such as the 'mini-Ice Age' of the Tudor period....
Despite it still being winter, much of Australia has been experiencing temperatures up to 17 C (30 F) above average for a week.
The snow fields melted in winds described as"like coming from a hair dryer".
Japan is having record stoms.
These are the effects of climate change and they are only going to accelerate.
No more than 50 years ago, I you had wanted to record the storm in Japan to be seen by a British audience in the cinema or TV, It would have to be filmed with a 36mm movie camera, the film would have to be either developed there, or sent in the can by plane to London to be processed and edited there, a drawn out process which would take several days - more than a week certainly.
Today thanks to video and satellite we can see everything that is happening, as it happens.
Therefore we nightly watch on TV, forest fires, earthquakes, landslides, etc. etc. from every part of the planet. These things would never have been brought to our attention, but we now combine them all as one homogenous disaster taking place and panic, but they have always been happening.