Chris Dragan's Corner

We may be in for a ride, bigger and sooner than we thought.

2012 was not the year the world ended as predicted by those who did not know how to interpret the Mayan calendar, but there were a couple of disturbing climate changes. The most recent data suggests that there is a lot of carbon locked in the permafrost – more than scientists estimated so far. Let’s add to this that this year more ice melted in the far north and in the Arctic ocean than ever before (well, at least in the last few hundred years).

Maybe next year, maybe in a few years during summer on the northern hemisphere more ice will melt and the carbon will be released in the form of carbon dioxide and further accelerate global warming.

The recent climate hiccups are the result of the climate being knocked out off an equilibrium. Even before, the climate was getting a little bit warmer year to year, but it was slow and gradual. Many people remember snow on Christmas in the 1980s. Then came the 1990s and there was barely a few days of snow in the winter. In the recent years winters are either mild or strong. Summers are either very hot or mild or rainy. Similar thing is happening to El Nino – it’s accelerating and gaining on strength. This is because the global warming is accelerating and the global climate is unable to keep up resulting in hiccups.

Given what happened this year and what we’ve learned, the global warming is probably going to kick up a notch, more than we anticipated. In the next 10-20 years we will see the global temperature increase a few degrees centigrade and the sea level rise.

Rising sea level is of course bad for many people, because a large amount of world’s population is living close to the sea shore. My advice is, if you are planning to buy a house by the sea, don’t. If you live by the sea, sell the house and move inland, otherwise you will lose it. The rising sea level will cause massive losses and will impact global economy. It may result in a global crisis worse than the one which started in 2008.

It’s difficult to tell when it’s a good time to start preparing, but weather and climate are ones of those things which are super difficult to predict.