The Jet Stream and Us

I've just finished watching a brilliant (despite the doomsday score) BBC4 documentary called "Jet Stream and Us" (you can watch it here)

The best thing about this film is that it questioned the recent "certainties" about climate change and defended the idea of more research into the apparent fluctuations in the Jet Stream to make us understand better the changes in climate patterns before we invest more on fighting "global warming".

I've always been interested in the Jet Stream, and even though much of the physical subject matter covered in the programme felt already quite familiar, it was nonetheless broached in a fresh way.

We learnt that, despite the deeply ingrained myth of the low IQ and attention-threshold of US audiences, they are said to feel a great deal more comfortable than their British counterparts in accepting technical weather terms interspersed in their weather forecasts.

Perhaps that has something to do with a story told in the first part of the documentary.

To start with, the knowledge we today have of the Jet Stream is relatively new, dating back to World War II.

One of the first encounters with the Jet Stream phenomenon occurred during the high-altitude precision bombing over Tokyo by US planes.

Ignorant of the sheer force of such winds, pilots didn't understand why they kept overshooting targets; and the last thing US war planes wanted was to bomb the Imperial Palace or the sacred city of Kyoto (funny how the weather became to be associated with the weather...)

Flying against the Jet Stream on the other hand, and with rudimentary or no radio navigation systems in place, pilots would sometimes believe they were approaching their destination and in fact flying to their deaths and crashing against mountain tops.

The Japanese though, armed with more knowledge of these weather phenomena devised the balloon bomb attacks on US territory, since they didn't have sufficiently-advanced planes capable of reaching US mainland.

Of the approximately 9,000 bomb-carrying fire balloons released to America, only 1,000 actually reached the mainland (causing only six deaths, unluckily children, in Oregon) and instead of creating havoc, they were either captured or shot down.

This recurrent link between ingenious warfare and acquired scientific and technological knowledge has always fascinated me; thus, I guess, my obsession when young with films like War Games and a powerful machine that acquires human traits and spirals out of control (perhaps not as distant a reality as we thought since fantasy might become reality sooner than we thought, more precisely in 2029, but with a twist: machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence but rather by merging machines and humans, in other words by inserting tiny robots in people's brains to, we are told, "make people more intelligent" - alhtough isn't that a bit like competing in the Olympics with performance-enhancing drugs? I can a whole new social dimension at parties, trying to establish who's wearing a chip and who's not...)

News the US has shot down a "spy satellite" is making things even more interesting, although I suspect this was just a very good PR stunt. A few weeks ago we had this dying satellite ("the size of a small bus") going out of control - you wouldn't want that one on your soup bowl... - next we get space war theories.

Anyway, back to the weather and how phenomena like the Jet Stream could be causing changes in global weather patterns.

I mention this because a few hours earlier I'd watched another documentary on the BBC (as I've explained on a previous post, I recently and accidentally found out that unbeknownst to me I had access to all sorts of TV channels on my flashy, but until now, seldom used TV - so I'm making up for lost time...) about how the islands of Tuvalu may be about to become one of the first victims of global warming and rising sea levels.

The plea of its people was put against the backdrop of the "King Tide". We were shown pictures of a flooded island where salt water is slowly making life impossible in that small nation in the Pacific (asked if she was going to stay in the islands for the rest of her life, a young girl answered with an air of surprise that she obviously wasn't because the country had no future against the waves; asked the same question, a perspiring prime minister said he was going to fight that prediction and added he was pretty confident that the islands were not going to be submerged - how? once richer nations decided to save it - which looking at the fate of other similar remote islands which are or were once part of colonial empires, some not even threatened with rising sea levels, doesn't augur well for Tuvaluans...)

(on that, we were told how Taiwan funded the construction of the local parliament in its global attempt at turning public sympathies to its cause - a story repeated around the globa, in many small nations, mainly island states which can get them UN votes; a very much forgotten story these days, with China's ascendancy; which means the Taiwanese migh well be the ones financing the giant wall around Tuvalu...)

Nevertheless, before anyone decides to spend their money saving the flooding island, perhaps they would now like to look at the Jet Stream (there are two, one in the Northern hemisphere, one equatorial), since we now know that the Jet Stream fluctuates and it looks like it is adopting new patterns.

(Let's not forget the biggest blooper of all and the unfortunate face of public disaster when it comes to getting the facts wrong)

Yet, man-induced or not, the changes taking place in glaciars and the poles is not exactly encouraging.

Especially for Tuvalu (say the man living in London-on-Sea; at least it will make up for the exctinction of Lidos in this country...)