Climate Change Is Tangible

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/23/climatechange.australia

“By the banks of the Tamar river in Tasmania, winegrower Peter Whish-Wilson has built up the Three Wishes vineyard and is also in no doubt that the climate is changing in politics as well as the skies. "We have had storms come through that we have never seen before," he says. "In the last five years we have broken every single temperature record - highest temperature, lowest, highest rain. Climate change is tangible; we can see it in the country. Farmers are coping with the worst droughts on record.”

This is part of the political commentary leading up to the November 2007 federal election in Australia, land of droughts, floods and bushfires.

Don’t be surprised about the droughts, floods and bushfires; it’s three million square miles; you’re bound to have a droughts, floods or bushfires going on somewhere in all that area.

Peter Whish-Wilson may or may not be a good winegrower (Actually, I thought that there were grape growers and wine makers, but let it pass, to coin a phrase).

• “We have had storms come through that we have never seen before”

Of course he has; no two storms are alike. If he means “whose magnitude we have never seen before”, he is also right.

In every year there has to be a worst storm for that year.

In every five years there has to be a worst storm for those five years.

In every ten years there has to be a worst storm for those ten years.

In every fifty years there has to be a worst storm for those fifty years.

In every hundred years there has to be a worst storm for those hundred years.

It stands to reason that if you happen to be living in the year which demonstrates the worst storm in fifty years, it will be a storm whose magnitude you have never seen before.

This is not climate change; it’s a fact that some years will be hotter, wetter etc. than others. Just because you happen to be living in those years doesn’t mean that you are doomed. Next year will be cooler.

• “In the last five years we have broken every single temperature record - highest temperature, lowest, highest rain”

My comments above still apply.

• “Climate change is tangible”

Climate is a long-term trend in weather. Weather is what happens this year; climate is what happens over a longer period, to my mind at least a hundred years, but I’d be more comfortable with a thousand.

We mere humans think only in terms of three score years and ten. It’s how our brains developed over thousands of years.

We think that because things are worse now than when we were children, that we are seeing the Big Picture.

We aren’t. We are seeing only sixty years of it.

Scientists see the big picture, because they study fossil records, tree rings and the like; records which spane hundreds and thousands of years.

Scientistst tell us that eleven thousand years ago, an ice-sheet two miles thick covered Ontario. It seems clear to me that things have been warming up a lot since then, and that the warming has been taking place since long before the appearance of the horseless carriage.

• “the worst droughts on record”

My comments above still apply.

The worst drought on record can mean only the last one hundred and fifty years. And “worst” today might be a calamity for the mega-farmer in debt up to his neck. “Worst” a hundred and fifty years ago meant that the farmer went and worked on the railway, or on the roads, or in the city for six months.

Today’s “worst” drought is held in a different environment from yesterday’s worst drought.

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