h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I must say that's a fabulous BLOB as well, well done Mala!

GB

Thanks GB!

I loved the BLOB too.

Thanks, both of you!

It's the last one I'll do for a while (though there are two more finished ones in the queue). But the mental image just came to me while reading it...

As for global warming I think that the recent Met Office about-turn about the summer of 2009 in the UK should sound a note of warning. Apparently they feel much more confident about forecasting what will happen over the next fifty years - and ask us to trust their science on that when they cannot forecaste what will happen in the next couple of months.Old English wisdom says "Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves."

It is a couple of years now since I wrote to the Met Boys, and some others, pointing out that the argument about Global Warming leading to a drier Earth seemed to defy the basic laws of Physics. A larger surface area of water covering the globe with a warmer ambient temperature must inevitably produce more water evaporation. That water vapour must rise until it cools and must then fall to the ground in some form of precipitation. In other words global warming would produce a wetter Earth overall though the distribution patterns to which Humankind has adjusted may be altered and the greater activity of the water cycle would be likely to lead to more violent rainstorms- as was normal previously in the tropics.

No-one bothered to acknowledge my letters-- but I note that my version now seems to have become the authorised one.

Last year, I returned to thinking about this water-cycle model; and realised that, of course, it would involve an increase in energy transference.

Physics tells us that energy is never destroyed: so the energy that turns liquid water into water vapour- stays with the vapour as it rises. In other words global warming risks acting like the cooling system on a motor car in which the engine coolant takes the heat out of the engine and takes it to the radiator where the excess heat energy is released into the atmosphere.

In the case of the water cycle, the vapour will take the energy into the upper atmosphere where it may do one of three things (a) produce violent thunderstorms and hurricanes, (b) escape into space, and (c) add to the dynamism of the winds in the upper atmosphere.. Apparently our appalling July weather here in the UK was caused by an unexpectedly hyper-active Jet-stream, which would be exactly in keeping with my thesis about energy transference from sea-level to the upper atmosphere.

Again I have received no response.

Thanks for this Casseroleon.

It does seem from weather records so far that the initial effect of global warming has been to increase the number of extreme events.

I agree that there is no certainty about the course global warming is likely to take. I hope that the direst predictions are wrong. I still think that we ignore the evidence that the climate is warming at our peril.

minorvogonpoet

I just do not approve of being bullied into changes for negative reasons. That tends to backfire.

Now anyone who studied the economic and social history of the nineteenth century as I did almost fifty years ago should have understood that the economic model that we were using was incredibly destructive of the environment..though not that of the first phase of the economic take-off that was launched in England and used wind, water, and muscle power- though to be fair there was an increased use of coal in order to preserve the trees.

But Matthew Boulton told Boswell and Johnson that the firm of Boulton and Watt marketed "power" which was what everyone wanted; and this started a new addiction which has made it possible to vastly increase the scale of human operations.

We only got through things like cholera, typhus and typhoid - that were the consequence of that increased scale of oipeartions by investing in a domestic war that involved a huge investment in the aparatus of the State and by spreading the impact more thinly around the globe..

But, as I wrote to E.F. Schumacher after the publication of "Small is Beautiful", we will not be able to sell sustainability to the rest of the World unless we can show that its is truly a better way of life for everybody-- and not just a convenient way of leaving the rich part of Humankind with the largest increment of its wealth and power intact.