36,000 Feet
Have you ever been on a long haul flight, when the sheer boredom of it all was broken by the crackling of the Intercom and the Captains’ voice comes over to tell you, ‘We are cruising at 36,000 feet. We shall shortly begin our descent and should arrive in LA in 90 minutes times. The weather there is fine with a temperature of 90°Fahrenheit.’
Have you ever wondered to yourself why he says 36,000 feet? Be honest with me – can you think that way? Why does he not say 12,000 yards? After all a football pitch is about 100 yards and it would be sort of easier to imagine 1,200 football pitches. Or would it? Just try it for a moment.
On the other hand why doesn’t he say miles? Most of us can imagine a mile. We have our own special personal means of measuring a mile. It is just about a mile for me to the nearest Motorway junction. I can imagine a mile. But hold on – 36,000 feet that is just about seven miles! Seven miles high! I guess I can take a stab at that too since 7 miles is just about the distance from Farnborough, where I live (the home of the Air Show you may have heard of), and Farnham, that cute little Surrey town, which is an ever so much better address. No one ever admits to living in Aldershot if they can possibly claim to live in Farnham!
But I digress. 7 miles high? Is that in some way significant? You bet it is. The average height of the Troposphere is 7 miles, the lowest level of the atmosphere. It is pretty rarefied up there; it is amazing that we can breathe. And pretty cold, I guess, if you could just put your hand outside the window. But, of course, you can’t, not even to wave Goodbye. They are really strict about such things.
And you notice something. Up there the clouds are below you, great seas of clouds, and above you is the clear blue sky. Of course, once you have flown once or twice you get blasé, you don’t even think about it, but stroll about the Flight Deck to chat up the most available Air Hostess. At that height the plane is so stable, that there is a really corny joke about the ‘mile high club’, and if you don’t know what that is, don’t bother to ask me!
Have you ever thought about this temperature business? If the Doc wants to take your temperature he sticks a thermometer under your tongue, just to stop you yakking on for 10 minutes. Of course if the nurse does it, she sticks the thermometer under your armpit, or even somewhere else a lot more personal – nurses are like that aren’t they? They’re ok, though, nurses – personally I like them a lot. They always seem to think I am afraid to give my blood – why I have given gallons and not fainted once!
Now what about the Globe? You have thought about the Globe haven’t you? Hell, man, you do care for the environment, don’t you? Of course, you do. But have you thought this – ‘Where the heck do they stick the thermometer?’ You could not stick it through the North Pole now could you? I mean it would be miles too cold up there. Besides which, who is going to check it every day? You’d get frostbite just shaking the thing!
Well the Equator then, somewhere like Accra the capital of Ghana. No…Clearly that would not do. The Equator is going to be much too hot. It’s got to be somewhere mid-way, like in the middle of the Atlantic or the middle of the Pacific. Can you imagine an enormous thermometer stuck in the middle of the ocean, so that our great scientists can take an average temperature reading every day. That’s the sort of thing they do, isn’t it?
Silly boy! Don’t you know anything? It is nothing like that. If they stuck a bloody great thermometer in the middle of the ocean some Japanese whaler would be sure to harpoon it. No! it is all done by some scientist flying balloons every day and using satellites.
Oh, is that where they do it? Up in the sky, above the clouds?
Of course, I am kidding you along. Actually there are a whole lot of weather stations, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. (Pictures of North American Weather Stations taken from the Web, not shown here on this first occasion.)
Have you ever been on a long haul flight, when the sheer boredom of it all was broken by the crackling of the Intercom and the Captains’ voice comes over to tell you, ‘We are cruising at 36,000 feet. We shall shortly begin our descent and should arrive in LA in 90 minutes times. The weather there is fine with a temperature of 90°Fahrenheit.’
Have you ever wondered to yourself why he says 36,000 feet? Be honest with me – can you think that way? Why does he not say 12,000 yards? After all a football pitch is about 100 yards and it would be sort of easier to imagine 1,200 football pitches. Or would it? Just try it for a moment.
On the other hand why doesn’t he say miles? Most of us can imagine a mile. We have our own special personal means of measuring a mile. It is just about a mile for me to the nearest Motorway junction. I can imagine a mile. But hold on – 36,000 feet that is just about seven miles! Seven miles high! I guess I can take a stab at that too since 7 miles is just about the distance from Farnborough, where I live (the home of the Air Show you may have heard of), and Farnham, that cute little Surrey town, which is an ever so much better address. No one ever admits to living in Aldershot if they can possibly claim to live in Farnham!
But I digress. 7 miles high? Is that in some way significant? You bet it is. The average height of the Troposphere is 7 miles, the lowest level of the atmosphere. It is pretty rarefied up there; it is amazing that we can breathe. And pretty cold, I guess, if you could just put your hand outside the window. But, of course, you can’t, not even to wave Goodbye. They are really strict about such things.
And you notice something. Up there the clouds are below you, great seas of clouds, and above you is the clear blue sky. Of course, once you have flown once or twice you get blasé, you don’t even think about it, but stroll about the Flight Deck to chat up the most available Air Hostess. At that height the plane is so stable, that there is a really corny joke about the ‘mile high club’, and if you don’t know what that is, don’t bother to ask me!
Have you ever thought about this temperature business? If the Doc wants to take your temperature he sticks a thermometer under your tongue, just to stop you yakking on for 10 minutes. Of course if the nurse does it, she sticks the thermometer under your armpit, or even somewhere else a lot more personal – nurses are like that aren’t they? They’re ok, though, nurses – personally I like them a lot. They always seem to think I am afraid to give my blood – why I have given gallons and not fainted once!
Now what about the Globe? You have thought about the Globe haven’t you? Hell, man, you do care for the environment, don’t you? Of course, you do. But have you thought this – ‘Where the heck do they stick the thermometer?’ You could not stick it through the North Pole now could you? I mean it would be miles too cold up there. Besides which, who is going to check it every day? You’d get frostbite just shaking the thing!
Well the Equator then, somewhere like Accra the capital of Ghana. No…Clearly that would not do. The Equator is going to be much too hot. It’s got to be somewhere mid-way, like in the middle of the Atlantic or the middle of the Pacific. Can you imagine an enormous thermometer stuck in the middle of the ocean, so that our great scientists can take an average temperature reading every day. That’s the sort of thing they do, isn’t it?
Silly boy! Don’t you know anything? It is nothing like that. If they stuck a bloody great thermometer in the middle of the ocean some Japanese whaler would be sure to harpoon it. No! it is all done by some scientist flying balloons every day and using satellites.
Oh, is that where they do it? Up in the sky, above the clouds?
Of course, I am kidding you along. Actually there are a whole lot of weather stations, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. (Pictures of North American Weather Stations taken from the Web, not shown here on this first occasion.)
There you are, there are a few weather stations, a lot of them dotted across the USA. Do you know something? These Weather stations give wildly differing results. But from these Weather Stations an average is taken. And that average shows that in the last 150 years, since about 1850, we have warmed on average 0.5° Celsius. Some people would say 0.7°, and I would allow that if they wanted to seriously argue the toss. However since 1998, the Globe, by these same average calculations, has been cooling! What has gone wrong? Or perhaps I should say, what has gone right? Perhaps Vice President Al Gore has reduced his Carbon Footprint, contrary to all those foul rumours, and that alone has caused the Globe to cool.
Of course the Greenpeace apparatchiks don’t care for this Global Cooling, not one whit. It upsets them so much that they even had this bulletin erased from the Sci-Tech section of the BBC text.
Of course the Greenpeace apparatchiks don’t care for this Global Cooling, not one whit. It upsets them so much that they even had this bulletin erased from the Sci-Tech section of the BBC text.
Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said. The World Meteorological Organization’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.
This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.
You know what? I am getting a bit weary of all this nonsense. I think of T.S.Eliot’s immortal verses:
I grow old, I grow old,
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled
I shall wear white flannel trousers
And will walk upon the beach
I have heard the mermaids singing each to each…
I do not think that they will sing to me…
Finalised on the morning April 15th. My lawns are white with frost, the magnolia blossom has turned all brown, the car is ice bound. A friend from near Paris has sent me a picture of his garden covered in snow.
Anthony Bright-Paul
April 15th 2008
You know what? I am getting a bit weary of all this nonsense. I think of T.S.Eliot’s immortal verses:
I grow old, I grow old,
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled
I shall wear white flannel trousers
And will walk upon the beach
I have heard the mermaids singing each to each…
I do not think that they will sing to me…
Finalised on the morning April 15th. My lawns are white with frost, the magnolia blossom has turned all brown, the car is ice bound. A friend from near Paris has sent me a picture of his garden covered in snow.
Anthony Bright-Paul
April 15th 2008
