Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.
There’s nothing quite as nice as a really catchy title that perfectly sums up your story. If you want to leave it at that, then you’ve probably got the whole of the story. However if you want to know just a bit more about how climate change is affecting our planet’s poles, then keep reading.
Speaking in a telephone briefing last Friday, Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said that the Arctic and Antarctic are exhibiting opposite effects to the climate change affecting our planet.
By Pem Charnley •
April 3, 2008
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/IxHFidiSC9U" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent"/]
Remember CFCs? They had the power to flavour teenage armpits and work wonders on refrigeration.
There’s two things I remember from when I was growing up. Well, not two things literally. That would suggest a woebegone adolescence. No, two things of environmental importance.
At 15, Chernobyl. A complete nuclear meltdown causing Europeans to duck for cover to avoid the prevailing winds.
Yeah, so plants are safer now, aren’t they? Well, look, personally, when you play with atoms, I still think of Hiroshima and Chernobyl, once smiling communities now nothing but cancerous shells of their former selves. Higher safety standards lead to greater complacency. No-one reading this can guarantee that another nuclear disaster won’t happen, so please, let’s leave that one alone. I’ve heard it all before.
(I don’t like things that glow in the dark really. I have innate misgivings.)
And as well as Chernobyl, we had an enormous hole in the ozone layer recognised for the first time.
