Aug 07

World’s Temperature Getting Warmer. 8 Apr 1954. The earth’s temperature has gone up and down many times in its life time. For 99 per cent of its time the globe has been much warmer than it is now. At the moment we are ‘warming up’ after the last ice age.

World’s Temperature Getting Warmer (1954, April 8). The Newcastle Sun (NSW : 1918 – 1954), p. 14. Retrieved August 7, 2021, from https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/161614751?searchTerm=worlds%20temperature%20getting%20warmer&searchLimits=#

(BY A CORRESPONDENT IN LONDON)
The world’s temperature has gone up two degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years, most of the rise developing since 1890.
A new survey of world warmth has been made by United Nations scientists working for UNESCO and their conclusions are that not only is the world getting warmer, but the rise in temperature is probably caused by industrial man.
Although two degrees Fahrenheit may not seem much of a change in 100 years, we are only four degrees away from a glacial age in which the ice cap of the world would develop into an ice shawl, and glaciers would creep south to cover large areas of Canada, northern Europe and Asia.
Up And Down
It is only 10,000 to 20,000 years ago that most of Canada was ice-bound, a mere tick of the clock away in time compared to the age of the earth, now believed to have been born 3000-million years ago.
The earth’s temperature has gone up and down many times in its life time. For 99 per cent of its time the globe has been much warmer than it is now. At the moment we are ‘warming up’ after the last ice age.
In a few hundred years from now, if present tendencies continue, people in Britain will be growing grapes and wheat fields will flourish again in Greenland and Iceland.
A more immediate example of what happens when the earth warms up a Fahrenheit degree or two is the case of the Canadian town of Aklavik, centre of a 50.000 square mile arctic circle region. The ground at Aklavik, when it was settled, was made up largely of ice particles. Now they are melting and the buildings of this cold outpost are beginning to slide into the Mackenzie River.
The situation has be come so acute the Canadian Government has approved a scheme to move Aklavik before the big thaw moves it nature’s way.
Unexplained Facts
By the end of this century the warming world will steadily melt the present polar ice caps and the tide will come in higher all over the globe. The winter snowfalls in the Arctic regions no longer make up for all the ice that melts in the summers and trickles into the oceans.
In Spitzbergen, one of the places where accurate records have been kept, the local temperature average has risen 18 degrees Fahrenheit since 1910 and the port is now open 200 days a year — nearly 50 days longer than it was back in the early 1900’s.
What interests scientists is that no one can predict how much warmer the world will get in its present trend, nor how long it will be before it grows a little cooler again. One of the unexplained facts of global life is what makes its temperature convenient for human life.
Some physicists say the earth’s warmth comes from radiation from its inner structure, others have theories about the heat radiated from the sun and the way the earth’s envelope of atmosphere keeps the sun’s heat from escaping into space.
The recent U.N.E.S.C.O. survey on world temperature develops the ‘idea that atmospheric conditions play a major part in maintaining the warmth of the earth. There are two main causes for the atmosphere changing its properties of heat conservation on the surface of the globe.
One is the amount of volcanic ash in the air surrounding the globe, the other the amount of carbon dioxide (the stuff we breathe out) in the air.
For the past 70 years the earth’s volcanoes have been relatively quiet. The last really big eruption was when the Pacific isle of Krakatoa blew its top and changed itself from a peak sticking several hundred feet out of the ocean into a submarine mountain with its top a thousand or so feet below the waves.
The ash from this explosion floated around the world to dim the sunlight in countries as far away as France, where scientists recorded a 10 p.c. drop in sunshine for nearly three years.
But Krakatoa was the last of the great eruptions and the air is thought to be clearer now — and the sunshine hotter.
The other main factor in changing the earth’s wrapping of warmth is the amount of carbon dioxide floating in the atmosphere envelope.
Normally air contains .03 p.c. of this gas, an amount kept amazingly stable by natural processes of growth and decay among the plant and animal  kingdoms.
Plants’ Role
Green plants absorb about a million million tons of CO2 from the air each year — and replace nearly all of it when they decay. The rocks of the world use up another 100 million tons of CO2 as the stone weathers into soil with the washing of rain, dew and frost that contain some of the air’s CO2.
But thermal springs and volcanoes pour about 100-million tons of CO2 into the air each year, and the geological exchange is equal.
This perpetual swap ping of CO2 between the plants and rocks of the world and the air about them maintains a skin of CO2 that lets, the sun’s rays through to warm the globe, but does not let the heat escape. The film or screen of CO2 acts rather like a glasshouse roof, letting the heat in and keeping it from escaping.
In the past 50 years the air’s CO2 has gone up about 10 per cent. — just enough to account for our rise in temperature of two degrees Fahrenheit.
Burning Of Coal
The more CO2 in our air the warmer the world gets; the less there is the cooler it grows. The amount of CO2 in the air also affects world rainfall — the less CO2 the more rain.
There is another factor pushing our temperatures up. It is man’s recent habit of burning vast quantities of coal and oil to make life more comfortable for more and more people each year.
Burning a ton of coal produces 21 tons of CO2. Each year, it, is estimated, man burns enough fuel to add 1000 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.
This is enough, by itself, to have raised our world warmth two degrees in the past century.
With man helping the earth’s own gradual tendency to get warmer, it may be that, in the course of the next few hundred years, vast new areas of the globe will become food-growing regions.
In Finland and Scandinavia farmers are already ploughing land that has been ice-bound for centuries. In Canada and Siberia the ice frontier is retreating northward from a few hundred yards to several miles a year.
Who knows — perhaps Heard Island will become a holiday resort one day. There are other factors at work on world warmth, of course. The old ladies who are so often quoted as worrying about what atom bomb explosions are doing to our climate may be right. After all, Krakatoa’s explosion robbed the French of 10 per cent, of their sunshine for three years back in 1883-86