Beyond greed

It still isn’t clear to me that global warming was a major player in the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. The incidence of the severe storms and hurricanes that can result when a low-pressure system comes in contact with a warmed ocean has been increasing dramatically in Florida and the Gulf of Mexico over the past decade or so.

The next few years will no doubt tell us whether this is part of a continuing trend or just a consequence of some sort of climate blip that happens from time to time. A factor in evaluating this will be the development of ever more sophisticated computer hardware and software for environmental monitoring and prediction. The better and more comprehensive the data sets, the faster we can crunch the numbers, the more sophisticated our understanding and our capacity to deal both practically and intellectually with these very complex issues will become.

My bet is that much of the pressure to enhance these types of analytical tools will come from the insurance companies that stand to lose so much in many global-warming scenarios. By steadily increasing premiums, the insurance industry may also prove to be well ahead of both the political and the scientific communities when it comes to changing public behaviour that impacts on, and reacts to, global warming. That may already be happening in Florida.

Science is all about measurement, and numbers matter a great deal. What numbers should we look for?

The fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been rising rapidly since we started burning large quantities of fossil fuels at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution seems incontrovertible. Much of the “back-information” has come from the measurement of gas levels in, for example, air bubbles trapped in ice formations. Everyone is aware of this, and we should expect to continue seeing such numbers published.

The evidence that mean global water and air temperatures are increasing also seems valid, but this can be a very confusing area, even for the experts. My naïve perception is that cloud effects can cause confounding, and unpredicted, consequences. As the warming of the deep ocean proceeds, the “tractor” of the Gulf Stream that makes life more temperate for much of Britain and north-western Europe may stop, leading to a transient “ice age” in those areas.

A key factor to monitor for the oceans is evidence of species loss, particularly corals that are likely to bleach and die if mean water temperatures rise more than two degrees. We can expect that Australia’s marine biologists will be watching this very closely.

The other parameter that affects the health of the oceans is acidity. Ocean acidity gives an objective measurement that is directly related to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and thus human activity, which is why people who argue that global warming is a scam never mention acidity. Atmospheric carbon dioxide combines with water to give carbonic acid, a “weak” acid that in turn initiates further acidification pathways. We are familiar with this from acid-rain scenarios.

The consequences can be disastrous for many ocean life forms, like corals, that need to make calcified shells. Again, Australia’s marine biologists and climate scientists, working from the tropics to the Antarctic, are incredibly important monitors of this situation.

The melting of glaciers, the northern and southern polar icecaps and the Greenland icesheet also provides a spectrum of parameters than can readily be measured by, for example, satellite mapping. Again, as a society, we must ensure that this information continues to be freely available and, as individuals, we need to keep these numbers in our consciousness.

If you are a young person reading this, I would like to persuade you that one of the best things you can do is to spend at least a little of your time learning biology and some of the chemistry and physics that affect the environment. It’s your future, and the future of the children who come after you, that we are talking about. Strength comes through knowledge and insight.

It’s great to have an emotional commitment to the environmental movement but it will mean a lot more to you and you will be much more effective if you can back up that commitment with at least some understanding of the underlying science.