GLOOM AND DOOM III

I HAVE JUST READ AN INTERESTING BOOK: written by one of those climatologist types, Wallace Broeker, 'Fixing Climate; what past climate changes reveal'.

It is really amazing what these scientific chaps can do with a mile of so of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, submerged tree stumps, and lakeside stratifications to gain knowledge about past climate, reaching back tens of thousands of years. I recommend this book for your 'must read' list.

One compelling piece of information: each day the earth's inhabitants emit 80 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. You will perhaps agree that this is a lot of CO2! A great deal of this is recycled via natural processes but much remains leading to an increase in the 'green house' gas content of the atmosphere. Broeker puts the case that it is urgently important to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, given that there is little we can do, in the short term, about slowing the emission rate. Despite this, he is overall pessimistic about the chances of humans doing anything constructive in the next thirty years. We will become accustomed to a hotter climate along with some nasty stormy weather where it will cost the insurance companies and the governments lots of money.

This will probably make life difficult for Californians who are now in their third year of drought. The real problem for Californians is that their state has come to being during a rare period of wet climate that has continued since the great gold rush, judged by recent studies of climate change over the last several thousand years in the region. I hope this is not true but if it is so, they may be about to slide into a period of extremely dry climate lasting a hundred years or so, typical of past periods of greatly pr0nlonged dry climate. It won't help the rest of us much since theirs is the eight largest economy in the world and a very large slice of the US economy; not to mention that they grow a lot of what the rest of us enjoy eating. Watch how climate develops there and if you notice continued drought and happen to live there, plan to move somewhere else where it rains more reliably, such as Oregon or Washington states. This will not help those of you who live in Australia which looks as it will have to endure prolonged droughts as climate shifts.

I confess to being surprised at how the current recession has developed. I thought it would arise as oil became scarce and more costly. Given that oil contributes to so much of what we use and even eat, it just seemed inevitable that, as supplies dried up, so the global economy would stall. Instead it has turned out that, due to the efforts of some clever financial wizards in manipulating and disguising debt, what has dried up is credit. As available money has suddenly diminished to just about naught, the global economies have stalled and toppled. Consequently, we are not using so much oil and the price is dropping. If it falls far enough we will probably recommence our profligate ways, get back into our SUVs, and resume our former fatal course to ruin. Hopefully, this recession will provide an opportunity to learn better ways. Darn...just when those oil rich nations were becoming embarrassed, due to the falling price of oil, and were in trouble with their attempts to strong arm us with oil-diplomacy.

The slowed global economy will not stop us burning lots of coal to keep our poorly designed and built homes (from the climate perspective) warm/cool, depending on the season, our TVs on standby, our computers humming, and the like. So the CO2 will just keep on piling up in the air above us.

So, if you hear of someway of getting CO2 out of the air at about 90 millions tons of it per day, please send the 2009 President or Prime Minister (depending on where you live) a note so that she or he too will have a clue about what to do. Well, send a note anyway...maybe, when enough or us do so, it will be a wake-up call loud enough, a tsunami like roar demanding urgent attention.