Global climate change: how we inadvertently change our environment every day.

My latest novel, White Thaw: The Helheim Conspiracy, once again tackles a meteorological subject, this time global climate change. I say “once again” because my first thriller, Category 5, had a meteorological premise involving hurricanes, but for my second, Prophecy, I strayed into the biological realm. Because my pre-writing career involved meteorology, I felt guilty and wanted to redeem myself.

In White Thaw, there is no subtlety concerning global climate change: for purposes of writing an interesting story, evil people are doing bad things to the environment for their own maniacal purposes. Such fiction is far different from the realities we hear on the news every day, where considerable bandwidth is devoted to discussions between those who believe that carbon emissions do or do not have anything to do with the warming of our planet. I’ve touched on this subject in another blog. My purpose here is to discuss the more obvious, smaller ways in which we affect our environment every day.

As mentioned above, my career before I retired to write fiction revolved around meteorology. I was a researcher and for about a decade in my early career, I focused on planned weather modification. Specifically, I studied different techniques for clearing fogs from airport runways (for landing planes under low visibility conditions).

But before I did that work as part of my professional career, for my Master’s thesis at Penn State I studied what’s called inadvertent weather modification; back then we applied this term mainly to ways humans affect weather and climate on a local scale. Specifically, while spending a summer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (Boulder, Colorado), I designed an experiment to assess the effect cities have on surface temperatures (and thus air temperature). We outfitted one of the laboratory’s Beechcraft Queen Air aircraft with a downward-looking infrared radiometer. Then I designed an experiment to fly a grid defined by the streets of Denver, Colorado (which were conveniently straight and parallel), flying from city center out to the countryside.  We flew at sunrise, sunset, and during the day. (Literally two days after I completed those airplane flights, I came down with a burst appendix, ending up in the hospital for a scary fifteen days, and almost dying—but that’s another story.)

My goal was to document and numerically model the urban “heat island,” global warming on a miniature scale. Scientists had known for some time that cities were warmer than surrounding countryside. Why?  The proliferation of asphalt and concrete surfaces not only absorb and store heat but also replace moist soil and vegetation that allow for evaporative cooling. To complement my aircraft observations, I demonstrated these effects using a computer model simulating both the atmosphere and the surface beneath it. Looking back all these years, this was a pretty neat study. To complement the observations from Denver, when I returned to Penn State that fall I did the same thing over Buffalo, New York, using a Penn State research aircraft. From the data from those two cities, my observations demonstrated how much warmer the insides of cities were compared to the surrounding countryside, and I explained why.

I’ve elaborated on this research because it shows, in an obvious way, how humankind impacts our planet on relatively small scales. Besides the current larger concern over carbon emissions, there are many examples of our impact on the environment. Deforestation, as is going on in South America, is another huge concern. Akin to the way our cities have transformed the underlying surface, the removal of vegetation from millions of acres of tropical rain forest has a similar effect, but on a grand scale. Here in California, we worry about forest fires, many of which are human-caused. As I write this blog, terrible forest fires are raging in Colorado. And, of course, we all remember how chlorofluorocarbons were phased out, beginning in the early 1990s, because of their detrimental effect on the ozone layer.

The point of this blog is to remind ourselves that none of us can claim innocence when it comes to altering the face of our small planet. Being aware of, and understanding, how each of us—individually or as part of our larger society—impacts our tiny planet will go a long way in developing personal and collective goals to minimize detrimental, long-term damage to the environment. For the foreseeable future, Planet Earth is our home, and we need to take care of it.

Categorised in: White Thaw

This post was written by paulmarktag01