[...]... homeless in Bangladesh and the Indian state of Bihar At the same time central China also 7 ARCHITECTURE IN A CLIMATE OF CHANGE ● ● ● ● ● ● 8 suffered devastating floods whilst Delhi experienced a major draught The people of Ethiopia are facing starvation in their millions because of the year-by-year failure of the rains Insurance companies are good barometers of change One of the largest, Munich Re, states... seasonal malaria in Britain by 2020 15 ARCHITECTURE IN A CLIMATE OF CHANGE ● ● ● ● 16 effect will be to increase global warming Water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas Historically relatively abrupt changes in climate have been triggered by vegetation For example, average temperature rose by 5ЊC in 10 years 14 000 years ago Earlier it was said that the paleoclimate record shows that in the past the explosive... fields are increasing as temperatures rise To repeat, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and levels are rising rapidly The year 2000 saw an unprecedented catalogue of warnings The warming that is eroding Europe’s largest glacier in Iceland also created clear water across the North West Passage at the top of Canada making navigation possible This has not happened since prehistoric interglacial... that half the planet would have permanent summer and the other endless winter It has been calculated that the current orbital configuration is similar to that of the warm interglacial period 400 000 years ago We may indeed be in the early stages of an interglacial episode and the accompanying natural warming which is being augmented by human induced warming (For more information on climate fluctuations... metres a day This is another indication of the instability of the West Antarctic ice sheet At the same time there has been massive melting of glacier ice on mountains The Alps have lost 50 per cent of their ice in the past century The International Commission on Snow and Ice has reported that glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than anywhere else on Earth In Alaska there is general thinning and... more abundant in warm years Finally, the air trapped in the snow layers gives a measurement of the CO2 in the atmosphere in a 3 ARCHITECTURE IN A CLIMATE OF CHANGE Figure 1.2 Correspondence between historic temperature and carbon dioxide given year Other data from ice cores show that, at the peak of the last ice age 20 000 years ago, sea level was about 150 m lower than today Another source of what is... seasonal malaria will have a firm foothold in southern Britain, including the deadly plasmodium falciparum strain which kills around one million children a year in Africa (Figure 2.3) The incidence of the fatal disease West Nile fever has increased in warm temperate zones New York had an outbreak in 1999 The Department also estimated that there will be around 3000 deaths a year from heatstroke – a prediction... Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew involving 5000 species indicates that spring is arriving ‘several weeks earlier’ A study of European gardens found that the growing season has expanded by at least ten days since 1960 Munich scientists studied 70 botanical gardens from Finland to the Balkans (616 spring records and 178 autumn) The conclusion was that spring arrived on average six days earlier and autumn... Scientific American it was reported that, following the collapse of the Larson ice shelf ‘inland [land based] glaciers have surged dramatically towards the coast in recent years’ Satellite measurements have shown that the two main glaciers have advanced 1.25 and 1.65 km CLIMATE CHANGE – NATURE OR HUMAN NATURE? ● ● ● ● respectively That represents a rate of 1.8 and 2.4 metres per day When the West Antarctic... excesses of climate change At the same time it is important to appreciate that there are absolute limits to the availability of fossil fuels, a problem that will gather momentum as developing countries like China and India maintain their dramatic rates of economic growth China may well serve to give a foretaste of the future By 2005 it had reached 1.3 billion population; at this rate by 2030 it will reach .