Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Climate change in our lifetime

My first blog. (I've been writing webpages for ages, but I thought a blog might be useful for my soon to be finished book.)

1998 was a record hot year (the hottest in the last few decades). Today I heard in a talk by Vicky Pope that the climate models of the Hadley Centre predict that from 2010 onwards, every year has a 50% chance of being hotter than 1998.

Vicky Pope also showed a graph by Eleanor Burke showing predicted droughts. The graph showed the percentage of the world predicted to have "severe drought". In the past this percentage has bobbled around 2 or 3%. By 2060 it was projected that the percentage would be up to 20%.

I hadn't seen climate change expressed by climate scientists in such strikingly 'soon' terms.

1 comment:

rks said...

I'm confused about the association of global warming with drought. We know it is cold and dry during glacials and warm and wet in interglacials. Warmer bigger oceans with less ice cover put more water in the atmosphere. And indeed more floods are also predicted and we've seen that everywhere in the last 12 months. When the models first tried coupling climate to the environment the Amazon basin turned to desert. Now they've fixed that, and they don't get silly effects on past data. However I have big doubts about future predictions. Do they allow for the fact that plants can grow in drier places if there is more CO2 because the plants don't have to open their pores as much to get CO2 in, so they lose less H2O?