Weird Weather Forecast For The Long Term

[cdnvic]

Weird weather forecast for the long term

Published on December 25, 2005

Whether it is severe, long-term flooding in the South, a cold snap in the North that follows worse than usual seasonal flooding, or the persistent drought in the East, the weather has been weird this year. Many people might see it as karma – people getting the weather they deserve – but scientists have a different hypothesis. Dr Anond Snidvongs, director of Southeast Asia START Regional Office, agrees that the weather has been unusual. “No one knows exactly why it happened, but one thing I can confirm is it is the result of rising global temperatures,” the climate expert told The Nation.

Small islands and coastal cities face rising sea levels, but the main menace Thailand faces will be severe fluctuations in weather, Anond said.

“Natural disasters – like flooding, drought and extra cold winter – will happen more frequently and with a wider magnitude,” he forecast.

“This is the real meaning of a 1 degree Celsius rise in global temperature to Thailand,” he said. “The question for Thais is whether they can bear it?”

Normally, seasonal changes in Thailand are determined, for the most part, by shifts in the global climate belt – the so-called Intertropical Convergence Zone – from north to south. The 100-kilometre to 200km belt forms the barrier between hot and cold weather.

Heavy rains and storms move with it as it shifts each year between southern China (30 degrees north latitude) and Indonesia (30 degrees south latitude).

This yearly pattern has been slightly altered by global warming and as a result there have been changes to the timing of the rainy season and the amount of rain that falls, as well as changes to other seasons, Anond explained.

“All the scientific indicators we have now support this view. If we are right, the climate pattern will be unpredictable [like this year], but it might not [be unpredictable] every year,” he added.

Amidst all the unpredictability, there may be one safe bet. Anond said the phenomena known as La Nina – unusually cold temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific – is likely to have an impact from the end of next year until midway through the rainy season of 2008.

He said he has seen initial signs of La Nina – for the first time in three years – over the last two weeks. Another two months of monitoring would be needed before he could confirm that the phenomena – the opposite of El Nino – was occurring, he said.

If La Nina is happening, it will start having an impact by the end of next year and the effects will last for about two years, he said. The upshot would be a lot more rain.

Anond said there would be more landslides, and the average year-round temperature will be cooler. As a result farmers will see higher yields, but the risk from diseases that thrive in higher humidity would also rise.

However, Anond was quick to point out there was room for hope among all the gloom. The impact of climate change is preventable, he said.

“Technologically, we can prepare for and minimise the impact, but an efficient management system is needed.”

But it would be difficult to establish such a system in Thailand because it would require technologically advanced equipment and – most importantly – qualified personnel, Anond said. Thailand would not be able to properly train personnel to manage the system within a year, he added.

To be able to cope with climate change, Thailand needs better monitoring at the provincial level and more frequent forecasting. The country’s weather-monitoring system is centralised in Bangkok with about one sub-station per province. More sub-stations are needed as well as monitoring at 15-minute intervals under a system overseen by the national weather office, Anond said.

To set up the climate monitoring system, many legal and regulatory hurdles would have to be overcome first, he said.

Kamol Sukin

The Nation

[khall64au]

Predictably, life is unpredictable. I hear of a predicted new Ice Age starting in the next 50 years that confuses the predictions of global warming prophesies!

[mogoso]

Predictably, life is unpredictable. I hear of a predicted new Ice Age starting in the next 50 years that confuses the predictions of global warming prophesies! 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thirty years ago some of the same scientists hollering about the earths global warming were hollering about the next ice age that was coming.

The suns a bit hotter now and the climates warming up I wonder if they could be related cause and effect?

I've a book "Times of Feast, Times of Famine" A history of climate change since the year !000 by french scientist/author Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Utilizing many resources Ladurie takes the reader through climates changes up and down through the centuries.

I know my home state has all but disappeared and reappeared over the epochs due to rising and falling sea levels with no help from the burning of fossil fuels as man really wasn't then and really isn't now a factor.

Really need some hot headed protesters orbiting the sun within the orbit of mercury telling the sun to "be cool"

[buadhai]

Have a look at Michael Crichton's novel, "State of Fear"; especially the non-fiction appendix. No matter how you feel about "global warming" this work is both a good read and an eye-opener.

[bdenner]

Is it time for the auto manufacturers to consider installing heaters in their cars?

You guys in the North West highlands around Chiang Mai must be feeling it as it's bloody cold here around Udon and Nong Khai.

[chownah]

So....he's predicting that the weather will be unpredictable?....does this mean that the weather used to be predictable?

[Tufty]

We are all seeing rather less of the Sun. Scientists looking at five decades of sunlight measurements have reached the disturbing conclusion that the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface has been gradually falling. Paradoxically, the decline in sunlight may mean that global warming is a far greater threat to society than previously thought.

The effect was first spotted by Gerry Stanhill, an English scientist working in Israel. Comparing Israeli sunlight records from the 1950s with current ones, Stanhill was astonished to find a large fall in solar radiation. "There was a staggering 22% drop in the sunlight, and that really amazed me," he says.

Intrigued, he searched out records from all around the world, and found the same story almost everywhere he looked, with sunlight falling by 10% over the USA, nearly 30% in parts of the former Soviet Union, and even by 16% in parts of the British Isles. Although the effect varied greatly from place to place, overall the decline amounted to 1-2% globally per decade between the 1950s and the 1990s.

Gerry called the phenomenon global dimming, but his research, published in 2001, met with a sceptical response from other scientists. It was only recently, when his conclusions were confirmed by Australian scientists using a completely different method to estimate solar radiation, that climate scientists at last woke up to the reality of global dimming.

Dimming appears to be caused by air pollution. Burning coal, oil and wood, whether in cars, power stations or cooking fires, produces not only invisible carbon dioxide (the principal greenhouse gas responsible for global warming) but also tiny airborne particles of soot, ash, sulphur compounds and other pollutants.

This visible air pollution reflects sunlight back into space, preventing it reaching the surface. But the pollution also changes the optical properties of clouds. Because the particles seed the formation of water droplets, polluted clouds contain a larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds. Recent research shows that this makes them more reflective than they would otherwise be, again reflecting the Sun's rays back into space.

Scientists are now worried that dimming, by shielding the oceans from the full power of the Sun, may be disrupting the pattern of the world's rainfall. There are suggestions that dimming was behind the droughts in sub-Saharan Africa which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1970s and 1980s. There are disturbing hints the same thing may be happening today in Asia, home to half the world's population. "My main concern is global dimming is also having a detrimental impact on the Asian monsoon," says Prof Veerhabhadran Ramanathan, one of the world's leading climate scientists. "We are talking about billions of people."

But perhaps the most alarming aspect of global dimming is that it may have led scientists to underestimate the true power of the greenhouse effect. They know how much extra energy is being trapped in the Earth's atmosphere by the extra carbon dioxide (CO2) we have placed there. What has been surprising is that this extra energy has so far resulted in a temperature rise of just 0.6°C.

This has led many scientists to conclude that the present-day climate is less sensitive to the effects of carbon dioxide than it was, say, during the ice age, when a similar rise in CO2 led to a temperature rise of 6°C. But it now appears the warming from greenhouse gases has been offset by a strong cooling effect from dimming - in effect two of our pollutants have been cancelling each other out. This means that the climate may in fact be more sensitive to the greenhouse effect than thought.

If so, then this is bad news, according to Dr Peter Cox, one of the world's leading climate modellers. As things stand, CO2 levels are projected to rise strongly over coming decades, whereas there are encouraging signs that particle pollution is at last being brought under control. "We're going to be in a situation, unless we act, where the cooling pollutant is dropping off while the warming pollutant is going up. That means we'll get reduced cooling and increased heating at the same time and that's a problem for us," says Cox.

Even the most pessimistic forecasts of global warming may now have to be drastically revised upwards. That means a temperature rise of 10°C by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable. That is unless we act urgently to curb our emissions of greenhouse gases.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes...g_summary.shtml

[mogoso]

We are all seeing rather less of the Sun. Scientists looking at fivave to be drastically revised upwards. That means a temperature rise of 10°C by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable. That is unless we act urgently to curb our emissions of greenhouse gases.

Particulate matter throughout geologic history has always gone up and down I guess Krakatoa 100+ years past is a fine example. The following year was known as the year without no summer due to the particulate matter in the air. Crops were terrible because of the volcano. The sunsets though were supposed to be really good for a couple of years also.

In recent times Greenland was green with vegetation, thats how it got its name. Bit chilly there now. Climates always been changing.

For some reason we're ready to blame so many of lifes problems on industrial and fossil fuel usage, with no thought to what man is doing elsewhere. Care to guess how much pollution is done by the burning of fields to clear them. Think of the air pollution that occurs in southeast asia when Indonesia burns their fields.

Back to the suns dimming, I can't see how one could say the suns output is the culprit when the particulate matter in the earths athmoshrere is the supposed cause of the dimming. You could say the earth is dimming due to particulate matter, but the in suns output dimming isn't happening. What we do here isn't going to affect the suns output, and to state so is preposturous, misleading at best.

[gharknes]

mother nature will protect the planet, it will destroy any destructive element including man