The first signs of global warming is increase in weather extremes - longer droughts, more heat waves, more severe storms, and much more intense dumps of rain and snow. Physics described by WMO, “As the atmosphere warms, it accelerates the evaporation of surface waters. It also warms the ocean waters, speeding up their evaporation rates. The heated air expands to hold more water. When the normal turbulence comes through the atmosphere, it results in much more intense downpours. The warming air also redistributes the moisture within the atmosphere-leading to more intense storms and rainfalls and more prolonged and protracted droughts.”
In 2001 Britain experienced the wettiest winter in 270 years; Northern China had twenty two successive blizzards which stranded more than 100,000 herders; Florida had the worst drought in 100 years decimating crops; 1.5 million farmers in Central America had no crop; and Iran experienced a devastating drought caused $2.5 billion in agricultural losses.
In 2002, more than 1,000 people died from a spring heat wave in India. 2002, wildfires consumed more than 5 million acres in the western United States; 235 million people went without electricity as the electric grid collapsed because its hydroelectric sources dried up; West Nile has spread to 42 states, affecting 230 species of mammals, insects, and birds; 12 million people in South Asia were displaced by severe flooding.
In 2003. 1,400 people died from a heat wave in India and Pakistan; the US experience a record 562 tornadoes in the month of May; heat wave in Britain set new temperature record triggering Portugals worst forest fires in fifty years and killed as many as 11,000 people in France in a four week period.
“Were the ocean circulation to slow, the result could be a rapid and catastrophic deep freeze in Northern Europe and northern North America - where the climate is tempered by the warmth conveyed by the ocean currents.” 11,000 years, a sudden warm up caused melting fresh water to cause the conveyor to stop changing the climate in Britain to the climate in Greenland. “According to scientist who have read the ice-core records from that period of time, the entire changes took place in about four years.” Current, “We can’t determine the precise source or sources of this additional fresh water. Global warming may be melting glaciers or Arctic sea ice. In recent decades, the volume of Artic Sea ice has decreased by 40 percent.” “In February 2002, at a worldwide meeting of oceangraphers, new data on North Atlantic are approaching a density very close to the critical point at which waters will stop sinking.” “In addition to the change in salinity, the increase in evaporation is putting more water vapor into the atmosphere, which, in turn, traps more warming.”
“The world’s largest insure-Munich Reinsurance- has said that within several decades, those losses will amount to $300 billion a year.” Britain insurer projected that a climate uncheck could bankrupt the global economy by 2065 from property damage due to sea level rise and increasingly severe storms and floods; destruction of energy; health, and communication infrastructure; crop failures; losses in travel and tourism industries; and public health costs.
In 2003, reports that the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf was rupturing, says Warwick, “large blocks of ice are moving out. It’s really a breakup. Ward Hunt Ice shelf lies along the north coast of Ellesmere Island in north Canada; the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf had dammed an epishelf lake, a body of freshwater that floats on denser ocean waters; when the WHIS fracture, the epishelf lake suddenly drained out of Disraeli Fiord, spilling more than 3 billion cubic meters of fresh water into the Artic Ocean. Jeffies noted “that the Artic ice has thinned dramatically in 20 years. In 1980, the same ice shelf was 150 feet thick. By 2003, it had thinned to less than half that depth.” “A major, and potentially very rapid, rise in sea levels could result from the collapse of huge land-based glaciers like the Greenland Ice Sheet.” The Greenland ice sheet covers 80 percent of Greenland. And is 2km to 3km thick or 2.85 million cubic km of ice. If all the ice were to melt sea levels would rise by 21 feet.
Today there is 379 parts CO2 per million.