I don’t know what things are like in the rest of the world or the rest of the United States for that matter. But in the Northeast part of the United States, at least in Connecticut, climate change seems to be producing more wind. I don’t mean there are higher speeds or higher velocities to the wind. It just seems like there’s more of it.
I happened to notice this phenomenon while I was staring out the window above our kitchen sink the other afternoon waiting for some coffee to brew. There are lots of trees in our yard. Our gardens are full of hydrangeas, dwarf Japanese maples, ornamental grasses, hostas, and other plants that seem to be moving a lot more due to more wind.
The Settled Science
As a result of doing my obligatory homework, I’ve discovered what’s going on.
Before climate change, Earth’s atmosphere was essentially a closed system. Its fixed mass was about 5.15 × 10¹⁸ kilograms, give or take. And it primarily comprised nitrogen (78 percent), oxygen (21 percent), and trace gases. Air molecules in the atmosphere were conserved; that is, storms, fronts, high- and low-pressure systems, and temperature changes moved, compressed, expanded, or mixed with existing air, but they didn’t generate new molecules. With climate change, that’s no longer true.
Now, as a result of climate change, fossil fuels, cow farts, internal combustion engines, gas stoves, wood-burning stoves, and forest fires caused by climate change, gases like water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride actually add to the atmosphere’s air mass, creating more wind. (Biological processes like plant respiration add oxygen incrementally, but those don’t count because they don’t fit the climate-change narrative.)
The same is true for water. Before climate change, the volume of water on Earth remained essentially constant due to the water cycle (roughly 1.386 billion cubic kilometers), which included evaporation and precipitation as key processes. Water evaporated from oceans, lakes, rivers, and the land into the atmosphere as vapor, then condensed and returned to Earth’s surface through precipitation like rain or snow. This cycle redistributed water among reservoirs, oceans, mud puddles, ice, groundwater, and the atmosphere without significant net loss or gain on a planetary scale.
Now, as a result of climate change and warming temperatures, more water is evaporating than can be condensed and returned to Earth as precipitation. Consequently, the water vapor remains in the atmosphere, adding to the air mass, and creating more wind.
The bad news is, due to the increasing atmospheric weight, we’ll all be crushed to death. The good news is we’ll be dead by the time all the glaciers melt, so we don’t have to worry about drowning.
Everything, after all, is relative.
Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/
