Pri­or Be­har­ry

?Pro­fes­sor John Agard will tell you that cli­mate change is nat­ur­al and nor­mal. "Cli­mate is not sta­t­ic," he says, in his of­fice at the St Au­gus­tine cam­pus of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies a few weeks ago.

The world goes through cy­cles–freez­ing glacial pe­ri­ods and then warm­ing pe­ri­ods. About 12,000 years ago, the world en­tered a warm­ing pe­ri­od, of course, af­ter a long glacial one. And for the next 30,000 years or so, the earth should be go­ing through a fair­ly sta­ble pe­ri­od of warmth. The prob­lem is that in­stead of it stay­ing sta­ble it start­ed to shoot high up be­cause some­thing has been added to the nat­ur­al cy­cle, what is re­ferred to as glob­al warm­ing which is the hu­man in­duced part," Agard said. He said it start­ed with the In­dus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion in the 19th cen­tu­ry with the ad­vent ma­chines and the burn­ing of fos­sil fu­els and com­bus­tion, etc. "We start­ed to put a lot of green­house gas­es in the at­mos­phere and this ac­cel­er­at­ed the warm­ing pe­ri­od," he said.

"It should have lev­elled off, but it did not stop. But the amaz­ing thing is that when you look at the graph, the kind of warm­ing that would take place over 12,000 years has been hap­pen­ing in 100. So you would see on the news, nine of the last 12 years or so have been the warmest ever." Green­house gas­es are what seem to be in­creas­ing the tem­per­a­ture. The green­house gas­es are car­bon diox­ide, ni­trous ox­ide, methane. Peo­ple main­ly know about car­bon diox­ide–car, oil and gas burn­ing and it caus­es an en­hanced green­house ef­fect where as it ac­cu­mu­lates in the at­mos­phere it re­duces the amount of heat that goes back in­to space. It acts like the roof of a green­house and re­tains the heat, Agard ex­plained. Ris­ing tem­per­a­tures have been record­ed by me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal ser­vices through­out the world. Agard said there are now heat waves in Eu­rope where thou­sands of peo­ple die.

Sea Lev­el rise

The ice caps and the poles are melt­ing faster than nor­mal. That has been ob­served by satel­lites. More wa­ter was now go­ing in­to the oceans and al­so the in­creas­ing tem­per­a­tures caus­ing the wa­ter to ex­pand. Agard said in Trinidad there were two sea-lev­el mon­i­tors, one in the Port-of-Spain har­bour and the oth­er in Pointe-a-Pierre. He said, "Sea lev­el is ris­ing be­tween 1.4 and four mil­lime­tres per an­num. This seems small, but this has been hap­pen­ing for prob­a­bly the last hun­dred years with­out any­one re­al­ly notic­ing." Agard said seal-lev­el mon­i­tors in all the Caribbean is­lands were show­ing about the same rate of rise. "If this was hap­pen­ing very slow­ly be­tween 10,000 to 12,000 years, then there is time to adapt. But, if it is hap­pen­ing dur­ing one per­son's life­time, you are see­ing things that should not be hap­pen­ing," he said. It's now snow­ing in the desert in Bagh­dad. Col­orado and oth­er places with ski re­sorts, are in trou­ble with their busi­ness, be­cause the ski re­sorts have no snow. Agard said, "It seems as though hu­man ac­tiv­i­ty has desta­bilised the cli­mate mech­a­nism and is do­ing strange things."

Rain­fall

Some places were pro­ject­ed to get more rain that oth­er places.

"In the Caribbean we are not too sure. In the Greater An­tilles–Cu­ba, Puer­to Ri­co, Do­mini­ca Re­pub­lic–the mea­sure­ments are say­ing that it is al­ready dri­er in the wet sea­son," Agard said. "In the Less­er An­tilles we are not too sure. The Prime Min­is­ter (Patrick Man­ning) says we are go­ing to build more de­sali­na­tion plants, and I am say­ing on what ba­sis this is go­ing to be de­cid­ed. Some­times we have a wet dry sea­son and dry rainy sea­son, but it's un­pre­dictable. It's odd."

Storms

Last year, Haiti got three or four Cat­e­go­ry Five hur­ri­canes in a row.

"Un­prece­dent­ed, this has nev­er hap­pened on the plan­et be­fore in record­ed his­to­ry. Cat­e­go­ry Five Hur­ri­canes are very rare, they are mon­ster hur­ri­canes," Agard said. Since hur­ri­canes feed off heat, then in­creas­ing tem­per­a­tures are go­ing to make them big­ger and last longer.

To­mor­row–The im­pact on the Caribbean