Has it really changed

[eastrock]

Has the natural world changed in your lifetime? Are we really to blame for the change in the climate or would it of happened if we were here or not?

[Jersey Forum Admin]

The natural world certainly has changed. I can actually pinpoint the year I first noticed, 1995. That was the first summer I spent on the beach where it rained for a couple of weeks on and off. Something I'd never experienced before.

Since that year the weather has gradually become more and more unpredictable.....or should I say, predictably unpredictable? I'm typing this now, it's July- almost the height of the season - and it was raining 20 mintes ago. it's been like October for the best part of the day. And that's no longer unusual for summers, it's expected.

There's always been that joke, with a basis in fact, about rainy days during English summers, but in Jersey that was never really the case until recent years.

[eastrock]

The northerly winds that we experience each year seem to last for a longer period as well. And they can vary as to when they start and end in the year. But is it all down to mankind? Are we as "powerful" as we like to think we are?

[crappogre]

The lousy summers we've had recently are usually because the jetstream ( www.southshields.metsite.com/jetstream.html ) doesn't quite reach where it needs to reach to give us long periods of sustained good weather. That's all due to complicated oceanography matters - but suffice to say it could well be because of global warming.

[crappogre]

I was once so bored I sat down and worked out how much of the planet's surface each one of us 6.6 billion Earthlings has to ourself, if it was divided equally.

The surface area of the planet is about 500,000,000 square km. There are about 6,600,000,000 of us alive right now. That means we get 7.5% of a square km each, 13 of us share each square km.

Now consider how much air is above us, in each of our equal plots. Google also found me this :
"The stratosphere starts just above the troposphere and extends to 50 kilometers (31 miles) high. Ninety-nine percent of "air" is located in the troposphere and stratosphere."

So each person on the Earth can claim that their share of all the available air is a box of the following proportions : an area of land 274m square and everything above it for 30 miles!

Even considering the 100s of thousands of miles I've driven, and all the products I've bought and consumed, I just still can't imagine making a massive dent in a volume of air that big.

Are all your efforts in your lifetime seriously going to make much impact upon all that?

[al]

I'm not sure whether this is an argument against any kind of Green, eco-aware conscience, that, whatever we do it is unlikely to make any impact on the Earth's sustainability...but...leave that aside... If the 'surface area of the planet is about 500,000,000 square km' and, as can be seen from a quick look at any atlas, roughly 2/3 of it is covered by water (might be more - can't be bothered to Google it) then it seems a bit unfair on the majority of people for whom their 274 square metres is on the ocean floor!