Climate Change

Granted, this is what climate does. Change. But is certainly doesn't change at the rate which we have pushed it to. In a myriad of ways, we accelerate the speed at which air moves. over-riding some and perturbing most of the natural flows and cycles that were formerly responsible for climate. Not weather, which we all recognize, but climate, long term trends that lead to ecological regions, ecology and individual niches. Most of our activities speed the air, creating impingement on natural flows and movements of air. Energy laden air tends to move upward, carrying particles with it into higher levels within the atmosphere.

When a house burns, air coming out has six times the volume than when it was at room temperature. Consequently, the weight of the air mass is considerably less, causing the bolus of air to rise, like an invisible balloon. Similarly, the air that flows through our internal combustion engines does the same, expanding greatly and carrying particles up and out in all directions. People may say, "My engine only displaces a small volume of air." which is true until you multiply it by a thousand or more revolutions per minute. I drive a small, efficient auto, getting 50MPG hwy. 45MPG city. I think it has a displacement of 1.2 liters per revolution of the engine. The engine inhales that much about fifteen hundred to twenty two hundred times per minute. That translates to emissions of at least 300 to 440 gallons of air every minute which "wants" to rise up, carrying dust, hazardous chemicals, carbon and debris with it.

Most people have heard of inversions, created when cold dense air lies atop a warmer level, preventing the dirty bolus of air from rising. In this case the energy embedded in the air changes from potential energy to kinetic energy as the upwelling spreads out and creates vortices along the horizontal boundary where the rising air meets much colder, dense air.

We have a winter weather pattern that persists over the Fox Valley in Northeast Wisconsin that is a giant oscillation. During the day, the Bay of Green Bay warms the air above it, and combining with the prevailing winds, slowly carry a contaminated bolus of air out over the Bay. At night, the winds reverse sucking the same air back over the city of Green Bay, the Fox Cities, Lake Winnebago, it's pool lakes and along the Niagra Escarpment beyond Fond du Lac. I have seen this daily cycle go on for over a week, creating a toxic soup of air that contains vast quantities of carbon, dust, debris and toxic compounds. The air is held down by extremely cold dense air. This single interaction between natural cycles and the human factor should prove that we are having a devastating effect on climate. This air, normally would have had a tiny fraction of the carbon added that it has today.Ignoring for a moment the toxic compounds, this thick air that we create actually captures more energy from the sun than it did just a few generations ago. Remember, as well, climate normally operates on a time scale of many many years, perhaps being stable for 1,000 years or more. Think of the 10,000 years that it took after the last glaciation to achieve climax forests that covered Wisconsin in trees. We pretty nearly eliminated forest cover in two generations and have expanded from under one million residents in the entire state, to over one million in just the Fox River Valley.

The combined impacts of our lifestyles have the ability to create catastrophic inversions as well as giant mushroom clouds of warm air from our communities. The destabilization of the atmosphere occurs any time that conditions are not right for inversions. As we burn fossil fuels that took millions of years to form, we release not only all of their stored energy, but hazardous chemicals as well. Because we will burn in hundreds of years, what it took thousands to lay down in the earth's crust, it has an effect equivalent to ten suns, just not all neatly spaced at regular intervals across the planet. Most are focused on cement kilns, cities, industry, mines, agri-business land and transportation corridors. These unevenly heated areas, especially like where I live in the Fox River Valley, give rise to rivers of rising air that act as giant walls of upwelling. If the source is small enough, it will take the form of a single mushroom cloud, but a million people strung out over 100 miles, blend into a giant high pressure ridge that can't help but influence climate in negative ways.

We are causing change. The change is several orders of magnitude greater than the Earth changes by itself. This effect can be documented worldwide, especially in developed and developing nations. It is happening now, so the time to curtail the bad habits we have learned in the last several generations must end. Multiply even a tiny number by a very large number and you will get an immense number. Our nation alone is 1/3 Billion people, using the majority of the Earth's resources. There is enough of everything to sustain us all but there are limits to what we can expect the planet to abide. The greed that it takes to justify the sense of entitlement that we have is the only thing that I can imagine motivating the naysayers. We cannot wait until every ignorant person becomes enlightened. We must act. We must require investment in proven technologies that decrease or carbon footprint. We must not be mislead by massive corporate interests who benefit most from our current trajectory. We must begin to look more critically at our way of life that taxes people around the globe for our opulence and comfort. We certainly can't allow developing nations to make all the same mistakes that we have. Many billions are looking to us for guidance in reaching their own better futures. If we want to remain an influential participant on the world stage, we need to be able to come to terms with the fact that what we tried worked for a while, but it has come back to bite us in the ass. We are dying off at higher rates from more diseases that stem from our affluent lifestyle than ever before. Change is afoot, let's not ignore it until it becomes too late!