Monday, April 07, 2008
Climate Change and the Canaries
Safety in the desert: Captured on Gran Canaria, Playa de Ingles, Maspalomas. Photo: sundstrom.
43% of the archipelago's surface suffers an intense process of erosion from the rain and wind and has a high risk of desertification. Though, as the photo shows, curious things like finding a lifebuoy in the middle of sand dunes are already the norm.With the forecast for a more tropical-style summer in the UK this year (don't guffaw, because though that translates to warmer - always uncomfortable in British humidity - it also means wetter than usual and even more unsettled).
Everyone, I think, gets confused between the terms climate change and global warming and it certainly seems more like "global freezing" when the UK has April Snow and Britain is colder than Alaska.
Whilst I can't even pretend to understand, what I know is that the weather is "messed up" (for want of a polite term) here also. So what can you expect if you decide to escape to Tenerife instead?
We mentioned before that the *winter* rain arrived just as we changed the clocks to *summer* and, that it had seemed quite chilly - for Tenerife. Since then, we had a day or so that were hot for the time of year, with calima.
Then on Sunday, the weather did another 180 turn and the islands were put on alert for high winds and rain again. (The alert, it seems, has been prolonged and is now expected to end on Wednesday, April 9th. Some flights between islands have been cancelled because of the winds, gusting up to 120 kmph.)
The weather in Tenerife, in recent years, I've noticed, is becoming almost like the Climate of the United Kingdom, about which Wikipedia states the obvious:
"The weather can be notoriously changeable from one day to the next."
Wikipedia also tells us that "The boundary of convergence between the warm tropical air and the cold polar air lies over the United Kingdom." In other words, when the hot air and cold air collides over Britain, it causes "weather" (of one sort or another, depending on which one is prevailing at the time.)
The forecast for the British summer of 2008, according to the Met Office, "We think it's likely to be a case of a few fine days and then there's a band of rain, perhaps some thunderstorms and then it warms up again."
And that is what has been happening here in the Canary Islands too, because we seem to be stuck in a "rinse cycle" of hot air causing more calimas that bump into cooler air that causes more storms that causes more calimas ...
... resulting in more swift changes from one extreme to the other.
What goes up, must come down
Laughable, if you know British weather, you might think to read that the Gulf Stream is the reason why the British Isles are much warmer than they would be at that latitude, without it. The Gulf Stream (on the downstroke, along with the Trade Winds), is the reason the Canary Islands have been much cooler, milder and devoid of extreme weather, than they would be at this latitude too.
Any failure or weakening of the Gulf Stream would affect us at both ends. Britain would get colder [1], while we get hotter and more unpredictable weather.
Is what we are seeing now part of that pattern, I wonder?
My non-scientific definition of climate change, therefore, is "climate changeable"; more abrupt changes and more extremes. (In fact, this article on the effects of global warming appears to bear out what I'm noticing; i.e. more extreme weather and the destabilization of local climates.)
And certainly, if this pattern persists, then I think the unsettled, rotating forecast of "three fine days and a thunder storm" will apply equally.
Down here, we should simply learn not to be surprised: it won't change any habits, because it's always too windy to carry an umbrella. And all it will mean to visitors is that nobody will be able to tell you what clothing to pack! :)
[1] Shutdown of thermohaline circulation would trigger localized cooling or without the Gulf Stream, the UK would be as cold as Canada in winter. That article also advises that, "An armada of robot submarines and marine sensors are to be deployed across the Atlantic, from Florida to the Canary Islands, to provide early warning that the Gulf Stream might be failing, an event that would trigger cataclysmic freezing in Britain for decades." This article, "... warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020."
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2 Comments:
Pamela Heywood wrote (on
April 08, 2008)
I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice. It's bad enough having the wrong weather in the wrong seasons, which plays havoc with the agriculture, but it also used to be that you would wake up in the morning and, if you saw sun, sun was what you were going to get all day and you could dress comfortably, accordingly. Now it can change hourly, like it does in Britain.
But the winters are milder. When I first came to La Palma to work at the observatory, we had at least a few days of snow every winter. Typically, a storm would blow up out of nowhere, and dump about a foot of snow, which would hang around for a few days before it melted. This would happen perhaps three times a year. In 1994 we had an ice-storm severe enough to wreck the big crane being used to build the Italian Galileo telescope. The next winter, we didn't have any snow at all. Then we had more and more winters without snow. These days it's rather unusual to get snow.
And of course in 2005 we had our first ever tropical storm.
Yup, the climate's a whole lot less predictable than twenty years ago.