Climatic Extremes

By Jackson Dias

Not only do clouds play a role in the delicate temperature balance of the planet, they cause catastrophic weather phenomena. The more warmth that rises into the atmosphere in water vapour, the more powerful will be the climatic extremes.

Global warming may have its greatest impact in transforming the sun’s radiant energy into climatic violence: burning heat, roaring storms and pulverising hail, as well as more and more drought of greater severity.

As difficult as it is for meteorologists to predict the next day’s weather, it is far harder to make realistic long-term predictions, simulating the often contradictory forces of clouds with a computer is a tricky proposition. Even the inner workings of a single real cloud arc hard to reproduce in a laboratory. Helped by weather satellites, researchers now have hundreds of millions of bits of data at their fingertips each year. And yet that is only a tiny part of all of the measurements that could be made.

Will the deserts become green?

Furthermore, the water cycle is so complex that its reactions bear greater resemblance to a living creature than to a stable physical system. So long as the sun shines on the planet, the earth will have clouds, jet streams and ocean currents. But a rise of a few degrees in the planet’s temperature could change the direction from which they emanate. As a result, fertile lands could turn into deserts, and desert regions could again become green.

Some researchers believe they already see evidence of this happening. Over the warmest regions of the earth - the three global ‘heat centres’, Central Africa, the Amazon and the Western Pacific - a research group has found that the water content of the atmosphere has risen by 30 per cent over the past three decades. In some areas, this ‘warm pool’ has doubled - an enormous reservoir of atmospheric warmth, which has already led to some atmospheric extremes.

But no one can say with certainty whether the increasingly damp air will form more clouds which will stabilise the climate, or instead produce catastrophic changes. Will it become much warmer, just a little warmer, or perhaps colder. After all, no one can see through the clouds.