Climate Change 2.0
If you weren’t paying attention this month, there was a catastrophic climate event. This was the third Polar Vortex in my lifetime of 73 years, and all three occurred in the last 10 years. The first time it happened, my mother was still alive. I drove to her house before the snow hit so that I could be there in an emergency. I didn’t try to figure out why it was happening, but with another in 2019 and 2020, it dawned on me that if we are experiencing polar weather, then it is not occurring where it is supposed to - at the pole. Sure enough, some scientists believe the air at the pole is displaced when the air at the pole is warm.
“This warming is believed to be weakening and fragmenting the polar vortex, and distorting the polar jet stream, the ring of westerly winds that typically keeps the ultra-cold air mass contained to the Arctic Circle.”(1)
With polar temperatures warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, I’m afraid I agree with Greta Thunberg, who says we have less than ten years to change the environmental history of the planet.
I talked about feedback loops last month, but I’d like to talk about the poles this month. Many years ago, I took a class online from a Canadian University. Sorry, I can’t remember which one, but it was a GREAT class. One thing I had never thought about was the salt content of the oceans. Salt drops to the floor of the ocean when the water freezes. Ocean currents pick it up and carry it all over the world. But what if less water freezes?
Salinity levels are important for two reasons. First, along with temperature, they directly affect seawater density (salty water is denser than freshwater) and therefore the circulation of ocean currents from the tropics to the poles. These currents control how heat is carried within the oceans and ultimately regulate the world’s climate. Second, sea surface salinity is intimately linked to Earth’s overall water cycle and to how much freshwater leaves and enters the oceans through evaporation and precipitation. Measuring salinity is one way to probe the water cycle in greater detail. (2) For a detailed explanation of oceanic warming, this web site has colorful graphics to show you: https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/ocean-warming#:~:text=Data%20from%20the%20US%20National,over%20the%20past%20100%20years. IUCN stands for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
In the last month, two events have surfaced in my life. First, the Chicago Gifted Community Center is hosting a Kids’ Climate Summit on April 13th. For more information, look here: https://www.chicagogiftedcommunity.org/KCS-2021, then I got Bill Gates’ new book in the mail, and watched his interview with Trevor Noah.
Today, after I wrote this, Science Friday interviewed a climate scientist who shot my theory down. Oh well.
I have been an environmentalist since the 1960s but I am still learning. Hope you are, too.
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