It’s already meaning something: take the floods in Cumbria last year. Temperature records are being broken, both minimum and maximum, and it’ll increase in both directions. Maximum temperatures are caused by more energy being released into the atmosphere, which will deliver potentially greater storms, and carry greater amounts of rainfall, so expect more floods and greater wind damage.
The extra degrees of temperature ignite greater energy – if you warm something up, the molecules move faster and more unpredictably than if they are cold and slowed down. The different is manifest, look at boiling water against cold water. It means there is far more activity in the atmosphere, and more unpredictability in the weather, and weather forecasting, as these systems will do their own thing, given they have all this extra energy. Like anything with more energy, it fizzes, and will go off in all directions that you might not expect.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/aLTyLmfFF-o?wmode=opaque
"Temperature records are being broken, both minimum and maximum, and it’ll increase in both directions"
A rise in temperature doesn’t mean you won’t see snow, because when it comes, it will be potentially deeper because there is more energy in the atmosphere. So, we’re talking extremes of all sorts, like more tornados here.
Of course, climate change has happened before. It’s a long, ongoing exercise, but we’re talking here about man-made changes, and we have the pot boiling faster than it would ordinarily on its own. It’s already having a massive effect in terms of economic, and then political ramifications, because it will affect people more and more. You talk of migrants; if you’re in the wrong part of the world where the weather changes such that you’re suddenly a desert because you no longer have water – or there’s too much because you’re an island in a flood zone – those people will need re-establishing somewhere else, as climate migrants. That will happen in the future, for sure, and then the walls will go up, and all the rest of it, because some people don’t give a damn.
"You talk of migrants; if you’re in the wrong part of the world where the weather changes such that you’re suddenly a desert because you no longer have water – or there’s too much because you’re an island in a flood zone – those people will need re-establishing somewhere else, as climate migrants"
The wrong person has arrived in American politics regarding climate change, if he carries out his threats to tear up the Paris agreement, to explode America’s coal fields and start up the furnaces again and re-establish them for the blue-collar workers. It may all be electioneering rubbish, but at the end of the day, if he does, he’s rowing backwards 30 years just at the time that the rest of the world is steering forwards, like China and India are running with climate change. If Trump had been around 300 years ago, he’d have believed the earth was flat.