This last Sunday, a string of deadly tornadoes wreaked havoc in the USA. 29 deaths have been accounted for, numerous towns have been destroyed, and people are still making sense of what happened. Meanwhile, the news channels are showing the same wreckage again and again.
But if we seperate the risk from the phenomenon, tornadoes take on a whole different allure. When you watch tornado videos on Youtube, you can't help but feel oddly fascinated by them. I mean, it's like God extended a finger down from heaven and swirled it around, like one would swirl a tequila.
South Dakota tornado, by Carsten Peter for National Geographic.
Most everyone falls into two categories: either you're morbidly fascinated by tornadoes, or you're panicked by them. You can't really ignore it. Such extreme power demands attention.
Here's what happens: Springtime in the USA means that cold air from Canada meets warmer air coming in from Mexico. Since the two masses of air come from different directions and at different speeds, this creates a vortex between the lower layer of air and the higher air. The vortex is horizontal; however, it can be tilted upwards until it forms a funnel cloud, which you probably recognize as the tail of a tornado. To understand more, watch the video below by Science America.
But why do the US have so many tornadoes? They have over 1000 tornadoes per year, making them the planet's favorite tornado place, being that the second is Canada (more than 100 tornadoes per year). Well, it's because of the convergence of air from the Gulf of Mexico and Canada and the enormous difference of temperature between them. The temperature shock creates greater winds, which in turn create thunderstorm supercells, nearly essential for tornadoes. Furthermore, the two American mountain ranges (the Appalachians and the Rockies) channel the convergence of the two air masses over the giant plains that stretch across the Midwest. This combination is so dangerous that part of this area is called the Tornado Alley.
Tornado alley by NOAA.
But tornadoes can be seen in nearly all parts of the world, such as demonstrated by the video below of a waterspout in Florianopolis, Brazil, in 2008.
Sometimes I wonder if the reason that we're truly fascinated by tornadoes isn't because they're great and powerful- it's because they have the power to kill us, and because we're naturally fascinated with everything that can kill us. Just like Formula One- nobody really watches it for the race itself. You watch it because people race each other in combustible machines that reach 270 km/h. It's the brush with death that captivates us.
Global
anomalies galore! So you’ve seen the biggest typhoon ever wreak havoc in the Philippines.
You’ve seen snow fall where it rarely, if ever, falls (Palhoça, Brazil).
You’ve seen deadly forest fires that killed 19 firefighters in Arizona and others that devastated part of the Yosemite natural park, killing thousand-year-old
sequoias, due to intense heat waves.
You’re scratching your head trying to imagine when and where the next
catastrophe will hit.
Destruction in Tacloban, Philippines from the typhoon Haiyan. Photo taken by French journal La Libération.
All of the
events mentioned above happened in 2013, folks.
But how on
Earth can scientists still claim that this is perfectly normal and we’re not
experiencing any major global changes caused by human activity?
Here’s my
guide on how to become a climate skeptic in three easy steps. First, inform
yourself on all the major changes the Earth goes through that can cause climate
change. Second, learn how to deny and contradict arguments employed by
scientists on the opposite team, basing your facts scientifically. Thirdly,
ally yourself with important politics that will approve your claims and have economic
interests in proving/disproving climate change.
So! Buckle
up, this is a long one.
#1. Inform yourself about all the other processes
that can affect the climate
Ice ages
First
of all, the Earth didn’t always have this warm, sunny climate that we’re used
to today. You’ve all heard of ice ages that periodically cover part of the
Northern hemisphere in ice and the wooly mammoths that come with. Ice ages are
just one of the Earth’ many cycles. They are part of Earth’s past and will
happen in the future.
In fact,
the period between ice ages is so short, it’s called interglacial period. It’s
much shorter than the ice ages. While each ice age lasts about 100 to 150
thousand years, the interglacial periods last only 20 thousand years.
So what we’re
living in today is nothing more than a brief interruption of the last ice age,
known as Würm here in Europe or the Wisconsin glaciation across the Atlantic
Ocean. Rises and drops of temperature
are normal during this period. In fact, a rise in temperature may mean that the
Earth is bracing itself for another ice age, not that we’re releasing enormous
amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Influences
from outer space
The sun
When we
hear about the Earth warming up, we tend to look up- with good reason. The sun
is Earth’s heat source and the greenhouse effect is what traps part of this
heat and keeps the Earth toasty. Any
changes in the sun itself would impact Earth’s temperature directly. As it is,
the sun does has its own cycles, one of which lasts around 11 years and is responsible
for boosting the solar “constant”, or the radiation factor that makes the sun
transmit more or less heat to Earth. Another longer cycle lasts from 80-200
years and gradually increases the constant maximum before bringing it back to
normal.
This isn’t
a great argument to use in climate-skeptology, because the period involved in climate change is too short to be taken into account. Unless you're ingenious and you want to show that
global warming nowadays is a result of the end of this sun cycle. Or maybe you’re
part of the group that denies climate change completely and you want to use
this argument to show that according to the number of sun spots recorded over
the last decade, the solar radiation is actually going down, not up. The great
thing about science is that you can pick your data according to your beliefs
and back it up with your own arguments, right?
The Earth
Then there’s
the Earth’s position in outer space.
Everyone is familiar with the Earth’s two main rotations; one around
itself, creating day and night; and one around the sun that accounts for the
change in seasons. But there are three other processes that change which parts
of Earth are closer to the sun, commonly known as the Milankovitch cycles:
Precession,
or the rotation of Earth’s axes, as demonstrated by this video:
A complete rotation takes about 23 thousand years to be completed.
Axial tilt
or obliquity, which are responsible for the changes in seasons, but can also
vary over a long period (41 thousand years), as demonstrated by this video:
Eccentricity,
or the change in Earth’s eliptic orbit, as demonstrated by this video:
This takes
about 100 thousand years to be completed. All in all,
these many cycles have a major impact on Earth’s climate in the long term.
Volcanoes
Next on the
anti-climate change menu is volcanic activity. Yes, volcanos have a major
impact on the planet. When a strong eruption reaches 12 to 18 kilometers in
altitude, it releases sulfur in the stratosphere. This will cause a layer of
reflective material that make the sun rays bounce back from where it came from,
and keep the Earth from warming with the greenhouse effect. Volcanic eruptions
such as Krakatoa in 1883 create harsh winters.
In fact,
releasing sulfur in the stratosphere is such a powerful combatant against the
greenhouse effect that a couple scientists have considered launching missiles
in the stratosphere to imitate what volcanoes do naturally.
Ocean currents and wind
And last on
my non-exhaustive list of arguments are the changes in ocean currents, known as
El Niño and La Niña. El Niño is a transfer of heat from the Pacific Ocean towards South America, where there will be heavy rain fall. This will also cause droughts in Indonesia and
Australia. La Niña is the opposite, caused by strong winds that push this heat away from South America. The warm water is blocked near Indonesia and cold underlying water is forced to move
towards South America.
If you
compile all this data, you will have a great selection of what to choose to
prove those pesky scientists that it's ok to keep on polluting. Climate change is natural and not
caused by human activity at all.
And that,
my friend, is how you make a climate skeptic.
Keep tuned
for Part 2 on becoming a climate skeptic: how to deny global warming.
Here I was, studying Management of Natural Risks, when my family alerts me of a very real disaster going on not to far from where they live.
Blumenau on a sunny day, bordered by Rio Itajai. Photo from Wikicommons
My mother's family is from a cute little town called Blumenau, which means Field of Flowers in German, and is one of the German towns set up by pioneers in the late 19th century in Southern Brazil. You see, these German pioneers were practical. They knew that living near a water source would help them with their early development and getting started in a new country. So they picked a site next to a large river bend, built sturdy German houses, and named the town after flowers. It couldn't get much better than that.
But Brazilian climate tends to be a little more unpredictable. Southern Brazil is predominately Atlantic rainforest- or at least it is supposed to be. There is a large annual rainfall, electrical storms, and even some tornados off east. Once the riparian forest was gone, the river started swelling and causing enormous, catastrophic floods. The first recorded flood was September 23rd, 1880. The worst ones were in 1983 and 1984. My mom was a teen at that time. She remembers the streets becoming rivers and drinking water from the neighbor's swimming pool, because it was the only potable water left.
Unfortunately, it wasn't the last. The last one was in 2008. It killed over a hundred people and moved thousands out of their homes. Many still don't have where to live. I've seen stories on tv of people that have no idea what to do next. They shake their fists into the air, wondering why this happened to them.
While it might not be their fault that they lived in such a precarious position, it certainly isn't nature's fault. This is Brazil. This is a climate that is used to very rainy seasons that may pop up once a century or twenty times. It's unpredictable. You cannot, and must not, do anything to change that.
What you can do is to reduce its consequences. It's the first thing I learned on my very first day of class this year : Risks are there. You can't change them. Earthquakes will happen, volcanoes will spew lava, rain might fall for 40 days and cause a flood. Earth is like that. We have to learn to live with it instead of fighting it. Luckily, most of these events are predictable. The Japonese have learned to deal with earthquakes by building seismic-proof buildings. The Dutch have built dikes to keep their country from disappearing bit by bit.
Unfortunately for those who live in Blumenau, it's very hard to deal with this particular risk. Those who live on low lands often don't have the choice of moving elsewhere. The high lands are too far from the city and there's not enough money to move away. Sometimes the solution is asking for the government to step in and offer solutions : maybe subsidizing building companies to construct other buildings on the highlands, and connecting it with a good transport system so they won't be cut off from the city. Maybe it's making a system so that those who do construct on forbidden land are penalized. What I do know is that it's necessary to create a fool-proof risk system so that accidents like these don't happen again.
Because it will rain again. And again, and again. The trees love it, and so does the entire ecosystem. What can I say? It's a little piece of paradise down there. I just hope that people will protect it and not get mad at it.
These two guys were chilling out near São Martinho, Brazil. Lime green toucans are common in the Atlantic Rainforest.
