The April Travel Book
Is the planet really warming up?
In a word, yes. Independent teams of scientists have laboriously combed through more than a century's worth of temperature records (in the case of England, closer to 300 years' worth). These analyses all point to a rise of more than 0.7°C (1.3°F) in the average surface air temperature of Earth over the last century. In recent years global temperatures have spiked dramatically, reaching a new high in 1998. An intense El Niño early that year clearly played a role in the astounding warmth, but things haven't exactly chilled down since then. The first six years of the twenty-first century, along with 1998, were the hottest on record – and quite possibly warmer than any others in the past millennium. Apart from what temperatures tell us, there's also a wealth of circumstantial evidence to bolster the case that Earth as a whole is warming up.
Ice on land and at sea is melting dramatically in many areas outside of interior Antarctica and Greenland. Montana's Glacier National Park is expected to lose its glaciers by 2030. Arctic sea ice has lost nearly half its average summer thickness since 1950, and by mid-century the ice may disappear completely each summer, perhaps for the first time in more than a million years. The warmth is already heating up international face-offs over shipping, fishing and oil-drilling rights in parts of the Arctic once written off as inaccessible.
The growing season has lengthened across much of the Northern Hemisphere. The most common species of Japan's famed sakura (cherry blossoms) now blooms five days earlier on average in Tokyo than it did fifty years ago. At some higher latitudes, the growing season is now more than two weeks longer than it was in the 1950s – hardly a crisis in itself, but a sign that temperatures are on the increase.
Mosquitoes, birds and other creatures are being pushed into new territories, driven to higher altitudes and latitudes by increasing warmth. The range of twelve bird species in Britain shifted north in the 1980s and 1990s by an average of 19km (12 miles). And Inuits in the Canadian Arctic report the arrival over the last few years of barn swallows, robins, black flies and other previously unseen species. (As we'll see later, however, not all fauna will migrate so successfully.)
But don't many experts claim that the science is uncertain?
There is plenty of uncertainty about details in the global-warming picture: exactly how much it will warm, the locations where rainfall will increase or decrease, and so forth. Some of this uncertainty is due to the complexity of the processes involved, and some of it is simply because we don't know how individuals, corporations and governments will change their greenhouse emissions over time. But there's near-unanimous agreement
There is plenty of uncertainty about details in the global-warming picture: exactly how much it will warm, the locations where rainfall will increase or decrease, and so forth. Some of this uncertainty is due to the complexity of the processes involved, and some of it is simply because we don't know how individuals, corporations and governments will change their greenhouse emissions over time. But there's near-unanimous agreement that the global climate is already changing and that fossil fuels are at least partly to blame. The uncertainty that does exist has been played both ways in the political realm. Sceptics use it to argue for postponing action, while others point out that many facets of life require acting in the face of uncertainty (buying insurance against health or fire risks, for example).
Rough Guides – Climate Change is published by Rough Guides (paperback; £10.99). It is also available through www.roughguides.com and all good booksellers.
