Black & White Edition in
U.S.A
Arctic
Heats Up.
Spitsbergen 1919 to 1939
|
Colored Edition in Europe
How
Spitsbergen Heats the World
The Arctic Warming 1919-1939 |
ISBN: 978-1-4401-4087-7 |
ISBN 978-3-8370-9524-1 |
Ca.116 pages and 100
b/w figures. More details in right column. |
Ca. 116 pages and 100
color figures. Details see column. |
|
How Spitsbergen Heats the World
The Arctic Warming 1919-1939
Published 2009
"ABOUT US"
Reason, Scope & Content.
The background for all the material and reasoning provided by the following links is quickly explained: the sea,
the law, and the climate, and exactly in this order. This order is an immediate reflection of the site
organizer and authors professional career, as he started as a trained seaman and served as ship master before
becoming a jurist, lawyer and an international consultant in the 1980s.
The climatic issue became a matter for elaboration since the late 1980s, resulting in a number of papers and presentations
during the 1990s. The frist website went online in 2004 (www.seaclimate.com), and the corresponding book pubished in 2005.
The story why it came this way
will explain a lot of the rational behind all efforts. During the first assignment as consultant abroad in
the 1980s it was felt that the understanding of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982, proved to be a
considerable challenge for lay persons and professional alike. The idea to provide a Guide to the Convention
was borne and undertaken. The book (see: Books & Links) was published in the United Kingdom in 1988, at the
very time when the NASA expert James Hansen had been claiming at a USA Senate Hearing that global warming by
the emission of carbon dioxide is real. The debate on anthropogenic climate change was from now on lively and
increasingly a very political issue.
The commencing debate on global warming was difficult to accept for someone who grew up on an North Sea island
for some years, who had been sailing the seas for many years, and whose duty as ship mate had been to draw
hundreds of weather charts when crossing the North Atlantic or sailing elsewhere. Such experience led to the
conclusion that climate best be regarded as an appendixes of the ocean and seas. Several decades later this
understanding became suddenly seriously challenged by the way the climate change issue was debated.
Furthermore, due to the work with the Law of the Sea Convention, this legal instrument was regarded as the
perfect master plan for a better understanding of the mechanism and risks of climate change. But the world
did not discussed the climate issue in this way, which had been initially regarded as 'misunderstanding', but
while trying to find out why there was such a big gap in understanding what climate need for being protected
from men made forcing, the author's involvement was sealed.
From 1992 to 1997 a considerable number of climate related papers and articles were published and are accessible
-inter alias- at:
In English: http://www.oceanclimate.de/
In German & English: http://www.ozeanklima.de/
The presented material is based on the opinion that climate should be defined as the continuation of the oceans
by other means. The definition was first published in 1992, and shall indicate that the oceans are the
overriding force that makes the climate and runs the climate whether on a time span of seconds or thousands of
years due to the importance of water in two ways, namely:
- By far the most of atmospheric water vapour is supplied by the oceans and permanently, as it is completely
exchanged in less than two weeks, respectively 30 times during one year.
- The global air temperature is highly reliant on the input from the oceans, as they are an excellent storage of the heat received from the sun. However, only the most upper sea surface layer is warm, while the actual mean temperature of the oceans is about three degrees Celsius.
With such an understanding of Climate it was almost inevitable to get in high alert when reviewing climatic
changes during the last century. There were actually only two major shifts in a steadily global temperature rise
since the mid 1880s, namely a sharp rise of winter temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the First World War
for two decades, which abruptly ended with the start of the Second World War in autumn 1939, with three extreme
cold winters in Northern Europe. The subsequent cooling lasted for a period of three decades, before it resumed
a rising trend again since about the early 1970s. If it would be understood what made the world warming since
1919 and cooling since 1940, one would also know it had been caused by the seas and ocean, and that it is time
to organize the protection of the oceans by implementing committed the UN Convention on he Law of the Sea. For
further information please consult the explanation given with each link.
January 2009/Arnd Bernaerts