I wrote the bulk of this blog on 23 Feb when I first watched the Met Office 10 day forecast. Since then all of us in the UK have been experiencing weather. And at last I have been noticing articles in main stream newspapers about the causes of the weather and longer term concerns. Climate scientists are usually very careful to talk in terms of probabilities and a range of outcomes but if, like me, you aren’t interested in walking into the future with your eyes shut AND you want all the encouragement possible to keep doing more, have a look here http://arctic-news.blogspot.cohttp://arctic-news.blogspot.co.uk/.uk/ and read about what might happen, no holds barred.
Today I watched a Met Office 10 day weather forecast predicting the cold weather due next week. I felt sad, scared, amazed and grateful all at once. My sadness comes from imagining those who will suffer in the cold next week and maybe die on our streets.
Scared because it tells me how fast climate change is coming. The slowing Jet Stream has formed an amazing double back in the North Atlantic which means a high pressure system will pull our weather from Siberia. It also means the warmer Gulf Stream is aimed for the Arctic! Temperatures above freezing were measured at the North Pole at the beginning of February (by NASA satellites). Remember it is dark 24 hours a day at this time of year… The lowest sea ice levels ever recorded are this winter- in the Arctic and the Antarctic. Warms seas are melting sea ice in the Bering Straight. This is not in 20 years time, this is in February 2018.
Amazed because the Met Office scientists can show me what is happening and NASA satellites record wind speeds and temperatures in the Artic (until Trump shuts off the funding…) and make the data available to others to interpret. See Arctic News for analysis.
Why isn’t this front page news? Aren’t Brexit and Boris’s most recent gaff such brilliant distractions? To me it feels like Nero fiddling while Rome burns, or more likely Madrid and Kuwait next summer, and Sydney this year.
My cat’s woke me up at 3pm on Wed 28th Feb because it was as light as day and they thought it was time for food! The sky was full of snow clouds and snow falling and everything was bright and orange with reflected sodium street light. How wonderful, weird and weighted…. A fox was wandering up near the house and set off my neighbour’s outside light. The snow reflected the light into my bedroom, hard and white and it exaggerated the density of snow flakes I could see. We woke up to about 12 cm in the garden.
skylarkflying 