These are the dark days before Christmas, and my viewers, listeners and readers are in a collective winter depression. It is difficult to escape the triple grip of the Dutch winter: short days, lots of clouds and climate change.
First those short days. Here at more than fifty degrees north latitude we suffer quite a bit from the crooked earth’s axis. The winter days here are a lot shorter than in Southern Europe. When the sun is shining, it is low above the horizon. Permanent twilight. More than 16 hours of darkness per day. Interesting fact: in Maastricht it is currently half an hour longer per day than on Schiermonnikoog.
As a weatherman I like to look for a positive spin on the weather forecast. For the short days I have a trick that always works. I fall back on the sine and the cosine, those mathematical functions with their infinitely repeating wave pattern. The daylight period in the Netherlands follows exactly such a sine wave: in December the days are short and we are in the trough of the wave. In June we are at the peak of the wave with the longest days. The mathematical derivative of the sine is the cosine. This describes the speed at which the day length increases changes. And that cosine is now approaching the neutral zero point: the day length hardly changes anymore. So it won’t be long before the days get longer again. Hurrah!
This trick restores the courage of many people. If I’m really desperate for a bright spot, I can still flee to the derivative of the derivative. The derivative of the cosine, and therefore the second derivative of the sine, is again the sine (but with a minus sign in front of it). That is the rate of change in day length. Okay, I’ve lost most of my readers now, but you can use this to cheer yourself up from the end of September. From that moment on, the speed at which the days become shorter decreases.
Then those clouds. There’s nothing I can do about that. In winter we suffer from the iron laws of evaporation and condensation. Cold air can contain less water vapor – you hear your geography teacher say it – and so the lukewarm, moist Atlantic Ocean air above our country in winter condenses into a massive layer of gray clouds at the slightest hint of winter. It is cloudy about 80 percent of the time in the Dutch winter. The best you can wish for is wind that does not come from the sea, between southeast and northeast.
The last hold of winter is global warming. All other seasons are expanding (sunnier springs, warmer summers, wetter autumns), but the real Dutch winter withers away and is stretched into a three-month tunnel of saltless lukewarm gray. This week it was 14 degrees in December, a total of a century ago unthinkable. Even 13 degrees in December is rare, we only had that seven times between 1900 and 1950. We’ve had it almost 70 times since 1950, including this week. The endless stream of Christmas commercials on TV now suggest otherwise, but snow in December is a romantic idea that we have stoked together with fossil fuels. Ironically, thanks to the overconsumption glorified by those same commercials.
I also look for bright spots in communication in the field of climate change. And often there are. They are almost always about successful adaptation or technological progress. But it is also time that we can say something positive about the core of current climate change, fossil fuels. The basic goal of global climate policy is and remains to halt global warming. And since most, if not all, of the warming comes from the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere, there shouldn’t be more CO2 recover to halt the temperature increase.
The trick of communicating positively by talking about the mathematical derivative does not work here at all. The derivative here is the speed at which the CO2concentration increases. That derivative is positive, on balance there is still CO released every year2 bee in the atmosphere. In fact, even the derivative of the derivative is still positive: also the amount of CO2 which is added annually continues to increase every year. The CO2concentration is currently increasing about twice as fast as fifty years ago. Not only do we drive towards a wall at high speed, we also accelerate.
The first climate success would be if the increase in CO2concentration is slowed down. This can be done by reducing emissions and the absorption of CO2 through vital forests and oceans and stimulate. The next step is to also remove the CO2increase to actually decrease. A little less every year, until we end up in a world in which CO2concentration does not increase further. Who knows, maybe there will even be a phase in which the CO2concentration will decrease because, thanks to negative emission techniques and rapidly expanding nature, CO is produced every year2 is extracted from the atmosphere. But that’s for later. It is now high time for the first ray of hope for the climate.
NEW: Give this item as a gift
As an NRC subscriber you can subscribe every month 10 articles give as a gift to someone without an NRC subscription. The recipient can read the article directly, without a paywall.
The journalistic principles of NRC