Some Climate Science basics everybody needs to know

rom now on, it is not just Odette but any typhoon that skims over the Pacific Ocean before hitting our shores will be packing winds always in excess of 100kph.

The era of sub-100kph typhoons is over. It’s been over for a long. time now. The seawater temperature is higher on average by about 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels globally. The warmer the seas, the more severe typhoons become.

I know some people who not only reject but are outright hostile towards climate science. When I tell them supertyphoons are caused by global warming, they demand an explanation, they want an illustration of the causal relationship.

I tell them to go to hell. They say to me, “you’re a hypocrite. You want me to believe that global warming is the cause of severe weather but you’re not willing to show me proof.”

I answer, “I’m the hypocrite? You don’t even believe in climate science, and you’re asking me for a scientific explanation of what you don’t believe.”

So the explanation I’m giving here is not for the benefit of people who don’t want to believe the reality of climate change. Even the truth will not set these people free from their elective ignorance.

This is for the benefit of those who FEEL the effects of climate change, who are not in denial of their experience but don’t understand why it’s happening.

As a child you must have played with pinwheels—those little paper fans that you stick on the rubber eraser end of a pencil with thumbtacks. To make the fan spin you can blow on it or make it face even the slightest air current.

But there’s a third way. Heat some water in a kettle that has a long spout, hold the pinwheel near the mouth of the spout and wait.

As the water heats up, the air in the kettle expands and rushes out of the spout, spinning your pinwheel. Slowly at first, then faster and faster as the water gets hotter and hotter. Finally, at some point, it is no longer just air that escapes from the kettle but air and superheated water—steam. If you do it long enough, all the water in the kettle will be gone—the inside of the kettle will undergo drought or la niña, sound familiar? But the outside of the kettle experiences a localized warming Sounds familiar also?

Now think of the water in the kettle as the sea, the pinwheel as the eye of a storm. The warmer the sea, the faster the storm spins around the eye because warm air is rising fast through the eye, sucking cold air all around the storm’s outer skirt, causing it to spin the whole typhoon faster and faster. The warmer it is at the core (the kettle spout) the faster the storm spins and therefore the higher the windspeeds will be near the center.

The math is fairly basic. Your pinwheel, of course, is only 10 centimeters across, but even with a radius of just 5 centimeters, the edge of your pinwheel covers a circumference of 31 centimeters (the formula is twice the radius times “pi” or 3.1416, in case you forgot). The edge of the pinwheel covers this distance in one-fourth second if your fan is spinning at a fairly low rate of 4 revolutions per second (or 240 revolutions per minute). This means in one hour (14,400 revs x 31 cm = 446,400 cms or 4.4 kms) the edge of your pinwheel is travelling at 4.46kph. Slow, huh?

But imagine if your “pinwheel” was 400 kms wide (Odette’s diameter), with a radius of 200 kms. The outer circle of your “pinwheel” would now be 1,256 kms which distance must be covered by the edgepoint at, let’s just say, one revolution per day. If you do the same math, that edgepoint should even be travelling at a higher speed than Odette’s topwinds—about 400kph!

Fortunately, no storm spins as fast as a pinwheel (240rpm) because if one did (meaning , the edge of the storm would be travelling at more than 18 million kilometers per hour) that would be Martian-storm grade and even the Himalayas would probably be levelled.

So just imagine what happens if you raise the seawater temperature JUST ONE DEGREE CELSIUS HIGHER?

Even though you will not feel that one degree celsius temperature rise, you will DEFINITELY feel the jump from 400 kph to 800 kph in the center winds of your once-benign “tropical depression” to your now-killer supertyphoon.

Scientists have been shouting themselves hoarse saying all these things for years. All it has gotten them is get labeled as techno-paranoids and alarmists.

The scientific community, it seems to me at least, has dropped it evangelistic mission. Scientist are no longer wasting time CONVINCING people about climate change and global warming. They’re now just keeping busy DOCUMENTING severe weather events, measuring their growing intensity, and presenting the data to the whole world. Now the whole world is asking—in fact, demanding—to know why this is all happening. So scientists are saying, “we told you this would happen, you wouldn’t believe us, remember?”

There’s a growing number of people, even in less-industrialized countries like the Philippines, who don’t need convincing. They just need informing. Tell anybody in central visayas today whose house was made of concrete, steel and other “permanent materials” that was blown off into smirhereens by typhoon Odette anyway, “you know global warming is the reason you don’t have a house now.” He’ll believe you this time.

The task now is to translate the newfound conviction into meaningful agenda and action. The only way to abate global warming (rolling it back is a pipe dream) is to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emission levels by realistic targets. That target is just ONE DEGREE CELSIUS by the end of this decade (2030). No one country can do it That’s why 200 countries agreed to do it together in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.

We signed that agreement.

We are NOT doing anything to fulfill our commitment under that agreement, not as a country, not as a city. We have not set our net-zero emission level target (almost 150 cities all over the world have, setting 2050 as their target year for achieving net-zero emission levels).

Here in Baguio, we have not even determined what our current emission level is, so how can we set a target emission level moving forward?

It will take political will. If we determined our current level and said we want to reduce it by half, say, by 2030 or 2035, then it means we shall have to limit the number of fossil fuel-burning cars running on our streets, or entering the city—definitely cutting into our tourism revenues. Electric cars—of which there is ZERO right now—would be unrestrictedly welcome, of course.

Now it also becomes clear why too many people just prefer to bury their head in the sand. Many still subscribe to that most idiotic and dangerous line of reasoning that what you don’t know (or care to learn about) is not going to hurt you.

No? When Earth storms start packing winds of 1,000kph+ and even steel condominium towers topple down like toothpicks, it will be too late to change your opinion.