Global Warming and Storm Chasing

Global Warming is a reality, and whilst most of us are focusing on the ecological concerns. Some folk are taking the opportunity to study the effects first hand...Be afraid...the Storm Chasers are coming...

Over the past several decades there has been an active international debate over the cause of global warming. The question is whether the recently recorded increase in extreme and unpredictable weather worldwide is due to natural variations in weather cycles, or whether it results from global warming brought about by burning fossil fuels.

However over the past few years, the evidence increasingly points to the fact that these changes are occurring as a result of man's activities on the planet. According to Eco-Economy Update, the preliminary global temperature data for 2001 indicates that it was the second warmest year since record keeping began in 1867. Six of the 10 warmest years ever recorded were in the 1990s - the other four happened in the 1980s .

There is now a growing consensus amongst both scientists and politicians that global warming is a man-made effect - and that it will get worse before the world's climate stabilises. As far back as 1990, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) published its first assessment report and announced that the world's most senior meteorologists agreed that the earth's climate was warming - with potentially disastrous consequences .

'We can no longer say we are still unsure whether extreme weather events are caused by global warming or not,' says Dr Mike Hulme of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University . 'When we look at the Mozambique floods, at the storms that hit France, at the absence of winters in Britain over the past few years, at the avalanches in the Alps, we are witnessing events that are now clearly tainted by human actions.'

The consequences of global warming could become catastrophic and it is already becoming a serious global economic and human problem. The escalation in extreme weather conditions over the past two decades has led to an increase in the frequency and intensity of storm conditions . Even as 2002 dawned, high temperatures and strong winds were fuelling intense fires across south-eastern Australia. Flames as high as 20-metres (60-feet) raced through open bush within 16 kilometres (10 miles) of the centre of Sydney.

Temperatures in the region have soared to over 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) and up to 20,000 fire fighters - mostly volunteers - battled more than 100 blazes that overcame firebreaks and containment lines across New South Wales .

The cause of these fires was a summer drought in Australia - as in other parts of the world - emergency rescue crews, meteorologists, scientists and storm chasers followed quickly onto the scene.

An Introduction to Storm Chasing