The future of our climate
The last summer of drought is still too fresh in memory, and despite a few heavy rains here in the country, the groundwater hasn't been replenished. Farmers in particular are trembling about the summer, even if nobody knows if there will be weeks of sweltering heat again. In fact, extreme weather conditions have become more frequent in recent years, especially in the summer months - in Germany, in Europe and beyond. In 2018, for example, massive rainfall flooded the north-east of the USA at the same time as the local drought.
From p. 54, Michael Mann, Professor of Atmospheric Research at Pennsylvania State University, describes a current hypothesis for this development: The jet stream, a powerful current in the earth's atmosphere, which is high up on the boundary with the stratosphere from west to East is moving, weakening in summer and thus increasingly waving south and north. If these wave crests and troughs then get stuck in the same place for a long time, this is exactly where such extreme weather events occur. According to new studies, resonance mechanisms known from quantum physics amplify the amplitudes of the jet stream even further.
Researchers see the cause of the phenomenon in the fact that the Arctic is warming up faster than our temperate latitudes. And that, in turn, can be attributed to man-made climate change, according to model calculations. For Michael Mann, this is another argument in favor of significantly reducing emissions of climate-changing gases such as carbon dioxide as quickly as possible so as not to aggravate the development. Otherwise we would have to expect another dramatic increase in extreme summer weather in Germany by 2050 at the latest.
Richard Conniff interjects at this point in his contribution from page 62 onwards. For the science writer, the train has already left when it comes to reducing CO2: It alone won't be enough. In addition, we must remove and neutralize the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as efficiently as possible, he demands. Conniff provides a comprehensive overview of the technologies being considered and some of which are already in use. For this he refers above all to a thorough study by the German climate researcher Sabine Fuss from the Berlin Mercator Institute. His conclusion: If several approaches could be optimally combined, the necessary, enormous amount of CO2 could be removed at a reasonable cost and global warming could be limited in this way. Then the jet stream should also be slowed down less - and hopefully extreme summer weather will not become the new normal.
Best regards, Hartwig Hanser
