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The hurricane season of 2017 saw several massive cyclones batter the USA and Caribbean in quick succession. First Harvey, then Irma, Jose and Maria all reached category 3 or higher. The intensity and frequency of these events resulted in huge media coverage and led many to speculate on the role of global warming in these storms. Continue reading “Global Storming – Tropical cyclones and climate change”

“Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day.”                                         Carl Sagan

One of the biggest cognitive barriers to understanding climate science, and indeed many other scientific fields, is the short nature of a human life. According to the World Health Organization, the average global life expectancy is 71.4 years. That’s just 857 months or a measly 26000 days! Given that our planet is 4.54 billion years old, our perception of time is extremely short-term – far too short to fully comprehend the universe we live in. Continue reading “Climate Change and the Paradox of Time”

Picture the scene: The air is cold, crisp and dry. You stand on an expanse of grassland extending as far as the eye can see with nothing but gently rolling hills to break the horizon. Tiny flowers sparsely cover the ground which crunches slightly under foot, a thin powdering of frost on the surface. This is the Late Pleistocene some 15000 years ago. The age of ice and mammoths, a time when multiple human species roam the earth. You are standing in what will become the North Sea, a land connecting what will become Britain to continental Europe, a land commonly dubbed ‘Doggerland’. Continue reading “The Ghost of Climates Past”

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably heard something about Carbon Dioxide (CO₂). In recent years it has increasingly become something of a bogeyman in the mainstream media, synonymous with pollution and negative human impacts on the planet. ‘Low carbon’ technologies on the other hand, are routinely hailed as a glittering path to a utopian future. In contrast, climate sceptics have repeatedly espoused CO₂ as everything from a benign and perfectly natural component of the atmosphere to a vital pillar of global agriculture and natural ecosystems which can only benefit society in the future. Continue reading “Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe?”