If you've got a spare hour or so...

So during the research for my next post I found this video which I thought some could find quite interesting. It's basically an overview of the climatic extremes that Britain has experienced within the past decade or so, and in my opinion it justifies the concerns that weather patterns are becoming more unpredictable. So have a look if you have time and judge for yourself...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbTc6LZ9KZ4

A look into the future

I am well aware that over the course of these past few weeks I have been talking on the topic of anthropogenic climate change; and as yet, I still haven’t fully explained either what this is seen to be, or the future it could potentially lead to. To give a brief overview, here is a video looking at some effects of climate change, focussing on 3 of the IPCC SRES scenarios.

Please be aware that these scenarios were predicted 12 years ago and that a renewed report is to be released in the next 6 months or so.

There are high levels of uncertainty in future climate predictions, due to the complexity of the environment being hard to replicate in models and also a lack of knowledge in how the globe is going to respond to future changes. Therefore, climate change is still a contentious issue within the scientific community. There are some general trends that have been agreed upon, however, which include the fact that our globe is going to get warmer (1.4-5.8°C by the end of the 21^st century).

As can be presumed, an increase in temperature would see a similar increase in the frequency of heatwave events, such as that seen in Europe in 2003- this could be seen as a cool summer by 2100! A change in temperature could also lead to changes in the water content of the atmosphere, as saturation vapour pressure increases with heat. This could lead to more frequent, heavy precipitation events in some places which leave some regions vulnerable to flooding, especially coastal populations (e.g in Bangladesh).

The Thermohaline Circulation will almost certainly be affected in our future world, as increased precipitation events in some regions (e.g Europe) could lead to an increased uptake of freshwater within the circulation; decreasing the density of surface waters and therefore the likelihood that this water will sink, weakening the THC. This could also be exacerbated by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, where the large influx of freshwater would severely slow the circulation down or even halt it, leading to changes in heat transport around the globe.

All of these changes will impact different regions in different ways, but are likely to increase the likelihood of tropical storms, heatwaves, droughts and flooding depending on the country.

As I mentioned before, the future climate is still very unclear although scientists are always gaining further insight. The IPCC SRES scenarios are widely used as a basis for climate modelling and are perhaps the most reliable projections that we currently have, however, these have been updated recently and are to be released in a future report. As such, it is difficult to judge whether or not these documents can provide us with accurate facts about global climate in the future, but for the present, assumptions as to how global feedbacks will react to forcings is the best we can hope for. After examining these articles, however, I think it is safe to say that our globe will warm and that this will affect the frequency of extreme events. The extremities of the changes are yet to be seen...