Climate science Professor Ed Hawkins is on a mission to communicate the effect climate change is already having on our lives in the clearest possible way. He’s come up with a series of graphs which show in an easy-to-understand way that global warming is well and truly upon the UK and the world as a whole. He’s taken the five parts of Britain which have the most comprehensive and longest-running data on temperature and rainfall and turned them into these graphics for i going back to 1883. Luckily, the five areas in question pretty much cover the length and breadth of the country – from Armagh in Northern Ireland, to Stornaway in Scotland and down through Durham and Sheffield to Oxford in the south of England. Given the remarkable similarity of the temperature patterns it’s a fair assumption that any graph for Wales would be pretty much the same. “The world has warmed by about 1C since industrial revolution and in the UK we’ve probably had slightly more warming because the land areas tend to warm faster than the ocean areas,” Professor Hawkins, of Reading University, said. He created his first temperature graphic in May, which looked at changes on a global scale. That proved popular in the US where a weatherman from Florida printed them on ties, cuff links and necklaces which were worn by 100 fellow presenters in the US and overseas. Now he’s turned his attention to the UK. He hopes his designs can be used to communicate the reality of climate change here – although he is still working out how best to deploy his new graphs. The rainfall graphs he has produced are less clear cut than the temperature ones since precipitation is much more volatile and localised than heat. That notwithstanding, rainfall is on the increase and poses perhaps the biggest climate change threat to the UK, said Prof Hawkins, whose stripey global temperature graph helped him win the Royal Society’s Kavli Medal for excellence in science and engineering in July. Every time you warm the atmosphere by 1C – as has happened in the UK so far – it holds 7 per cent more water. This isn’t leading to more storms but it means that rainfall and storms can be more intense when they happen.
inews 20th Sept 2018 read more »
Building walls on the seafloor could be the next move in tackling the impacts of climate change, scientists say. Researchers believe that through erecting barriers of rock and sand, they could halt the slide of undersea glaciers as they begin to break apart. It would be a huge task but could delay the repercussions of climate change according to a new paper published on Thursday in the Cryosphere journal, from the European Geosciences Union. The structure is supposedly not too difficult to construct.
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