01-02 The Water Cycle

It was Ballycastle in 1967 and I am taking my family on a holiday. We had an unusual eight days without rain and my young son asked during lunch at a hotel, “Daddy, does it ever rain in Ireland?” The room burst into laughter.
One of the reasons it is so hard to convince people that our climate is changing is that we all remember experiences of extreme weather. Like a storm at your summer cottage. And taking a canoe the next day to find what happened to your dock.
Understanding the water cycle is getting down to basics. Water and snow in lakes, oceans and land evaporating and becoming water vapour. This rises in the air and becomes clouds. And these clouds become full of water vapor which condenses to form water and then rain or snow.
It is not brain surgery to appreciates that as the climates warm more water and snow evaporates from land and water.
In places like Greenland and Iceland, the water along with a three week longer growing season means local vegetables and strawberries showing up in the restaurants.
For a nation like Morocco, on the other hand, it means that the moisture is falling somewhere else and their crops are dying from drought.
Another weather memory. In Ireland, we could sit down for picnic without a cloud in the sky and then 15 minutes later clouds would fly across the sky and send us running for shelter from a quick shower.
The water cycle is not a complex concept but if it is disturbed by rising temperatures complex things happen to our weather. Places like New Orleans that is used to heavy rainfall and flooding is experiencing more rainfall and more flooding. The photo is a flood scene from neighboring Arkansas.
And something that does not get a proper play in the media. If climate change and the water cycle affects everyone in some way, we must have winners and losers.
Even the major geographies like China and the USA are going to experience floods and drought and areas where harvests and people flourish.