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Winds have flattened hundreds of thousands of acres of forests. France was
hit with unparalleled winds the winter of '99, '2000. There have been reports of winds that have blown railroad trains from the tracks. The weather seems to be getting erratic in ways that it does seem could have been predicted. The latest research has shown that as the lower atmosphere warms, the upper
atmosphere is getting colder. The atmospheric pollution as a blanket, not only traps sunlight below it, but isolates the upper atmosphere from the warmer temperatures below thus causing the upper to get colder. The interaction
of these two extremes where they intermix, is said to explain much of the
extreme weather that is being seen today. And all this is not to be confused
with the Ozone problem as an atmospheric layer which protects the earth
from dangerous and destructive x rays from the sun by screening them out.
But it does represent another problem in that it may cause a die off of the ocean's Plankton which will lessen the absorption of carbon from the atmosphere and increase the rate of planetary warming.
However there are other complications as well. Burke demonstrates that a huge warm water current which encircles the oceanic globe consisting in perhaps seventeen separately named currents, commonly known as the Gulf Stream, carries warm water and air to the northern climbs such as Northern Europe. Temperatures in Norway are as much as forty degrees warmer in the dead of winter from what they should be for that latitude. This current is said to be twenty time bigger than all the rivers in the world and move something like
five billion gallons of water a second. This stream running close to the surface carries warm water from the south of Africa, across the Atlantic to the north of South America. It then crosses the Atlantic again to the north African coast and
proceeds up the European coast to Greenland where it is called the North Atlantic Drift. This warm water current helps to keep northern Europe warmer than it otherwise might get in winter. By the time the stream gets to Greenland, its salt content has changed, perhaps from evaporation it becomes saltier and heavier and then it sinks to much deeper levels. It then proceeds south down the middle of the Atlantic to the Anartic. It turns east, south of Australia where
it goes north up the middle of the Pacific to the Bering Sea, where it again rises to the surface, turns around and proceeds again southward on the surface down the middle of the Pacific, turns west and runs just north of Australia into the Indian Ocean and continues west to southern Africa where it began.
PLANETARY WARMING (3 of 4)
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