Curious Cook: Earlier than spring
This winter here in France is proving tiresome. Some days, the temperature falls to -8°C (and -18°C including the wind chill) with snow storms, and practically the next day, it is +18°C and sunny.

Today feels like spring already and this is particularly worrying if plants already start blossoming or birds begin their breeding season because everything would be killed by a sudden severe frost. From experience, this winter is far from over and the region has had extremely cold spells with up to a metre of snow as late as April.

Making bread

To make matters worse, a few exuberant Tai Chi exercises caused an injury to my left knee before Christmas, making it too painful for the walk to the local bakery. But this provided an excuse to finally use an electric bread maker, an unused birthday present.

The device is simple to operate and now we can get fresh warm brioches, French (mini) baguettes, and small bread loaves every morning, all made with organic ingredients placed into the machine the night before and automatically mixed, kneaded, and baked at dawn.

It is proving so useful that I am now thinking of buying one for the house in the UK so that we can avoid eating bread laced with additives there. And I estimate it would pay for itself within three months of making homemade baked goods. It is also creative fun to tune the standard recipes, so we get fluffier baked goods that include healthier wholewheat flour.

To avoid eating bread with additives, the columnist has been making his own bread, like this brioche pictured here. — CHRIS CHAN

It is just a suggestion, but it may not be the worst idea to consider auto-baking breads and cakes at home, especially if you want to avoid industrial additives. The lovely smells from the kitchen in the mornings alone are also probably worth it.

Another oddity

Apart from the volatile winter/spring, there has been some odd news about a significant jump in the number of cancers in people under the age of 50 around the world. Between the years 1990 and 2019, the number of under-50s globally diagnosed with cancers has risen by almost 80%. The causes are linked primarily to poor diets, obesity, and the consumption of alcohol.

In the UK, death rates from bowel cancers for the under-50s are estimated to increase by 39% for women and 26% for men this year compared with the average between 2015 to 2019. The UK numbers are a shock, as other selected countries in Europe show much smaller increases; the next highest is Germany with a 7.2% increase for women, while France shows no increase at all.

The high amount of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in UK diets is very likely a factor in the UK statistics, as UPFs make up a far larger proportion of daily calories compared to other countries. Amongst UK adults, 57% of calories come from UPFs while UK adolescents derive on average 66% of their calories from UPFs. This contrasts with the EU where the average is 27.3% of daily calories from UPFs, less than half the levels of the UK.

This is merely more confirmation of the insidious effects of modern foods, especially UPFs, on human health. If anyone has any concerns about UPFs, there are several online articles from this column.

Climate sensitivity

Further about the current weather here, it is readily apparent it has been affected by global warming. The effect is sobering, especially as countries like Spain are experiencing mid-winter temperatures of 30.7°C (which is hotter than Kuala Lumpur), plus parts of the country are already in drought.

But if you are still not worried about global warming, perhaps you should be, once you understand the significance of a little-known measure called “climate sensitivity”, which can be decomposed into two numbers: (a) Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) which measures the long-term effects and, (b) Transient Climate Response (TCR) which measures the immediate or short-term effects of CO2 levels. Mostly, climate sensitivity refers to the ECS measure.

Across the world, cancer rates for those under the age of 50 have shot up, probably linked to poor dietary choices associated with overconsumption of ultra-processed foods like sausages. — JONATHAN TAYLOR/Unsplash

Both the ECS and TCR measure the degree of global surface warming that will occur in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 relative to pre-industrial levels. Basically, they are the expected global warming outcomes if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reaches 560 parts per million (ppm). Currently, it is around 423 ppm, up from 280 ppm in pre-industrial times.

A detective story

This is now a statistical detective story. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) monitors dozens of sophisticated climate models via the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and publishes its recommendations for planetary action on climate change based on CMIP.

Naturally, not every model outputs the same results so the IPCC has to handle outliers or estimates that it deems to exceed expected bounds for climate change. These bounds are established using Paleoclimate data derived from rocks, ice cores, fossils, and other artifacts from millions of years ago when CO2 levels were roughly similar to present-day levels.

In 2020, a massive study, ‘An Assessment of Earth’s Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence’ estimated that the paleoclimate data fits with a baseline climate sensitivity in the range between 2.6°C and 3.9°C. So far, so good.

However, 10 out of the 55 CMIP models estimated an ECS of more than 5°C. As these 10 models do not fit with the paleoclimate data, they have been assigned a lower weighting by the IPCC, which means these ‘hot models’ matter less in calculating the official climate sensitivity figures.

Supercooled water

The problem is that only these 10 models include a factor absent in the other models, and that is the behaviour of clouds. In particular, these hot models tend to include other factors such as the processes which affect clouds as the earth warms up. And one interesting factor is the impact of supercooled water in the cloud layers.

Supercooled water describes the unusual phase where the temperature of water is at or below 0°C but still remains a liquid. Whether water droplets are liquid or not affects the reflectivity of clouds, and this change in cloud reflectivity influences the impact of the sun on global warming.

There is no information about cloud reflectivity in the paleoclimate data, nor does the paleoclimate data contain clues about the impact of other man-made greenhouse gases such as methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, etc. Nor does it have any understanding about human activities such as deforestation, large-scale agriculture, and atmospheric pollution (e.g., fine air particulates from cars and factories).

There are a lot of factors today that cannot be found in the paleoclimate datasets. From a modelling perspective, it is not wholly reasonable to assume cloud behaviour today is the same as cloud behaviour in paleoclimate times, millions of years ago.

So a good statistical detective would want to validate these hot models, and this may be done by using the hot models to estimate short-term climate patterns and heat changes over briefer periods of time, and compare the results with the normal models. And short-term climate patterns and heat changes are known as weather.

The problem is that climate models are usually unsuitable as weather models because they operate on two entirely different timescales. But there is at least one climate hot model, from the UK Met Office, that can be adapted to run as a weather model and this hot model was tested against real weather data. This is where it gets interesting and very worrying.

The outcome of this hot model test was published in a paper called ‘Use of Short-Range Forecasts to Evaluate Fast Physics Processes Relevant for Climate Sensitivity’. The tests were run for three months with four forecasts per day for two to five days ahead, and compared the hot model against normal weather models which did not include cloud behaviour.

The hot model test did not include cloud behaviour. — PIXABAY/Pexels

The results showed that the hot model provided significantly better forecasts, in that the hot model forecasts matched better with what happened in real life when compared to normal models. This shows that cloud behaviour is very probably a factor that needs to be included in global warming models. It would therefore be prudent to include clouds as a factor until there is evidence that allows us to ignore cloud behaviour.

The very worrying issue is that all the 10 models which include cloud behaviour indicated a climate sensitivity of more than 5°C. This matters a lot because the ECS is used to plan for when parts of the Earth become uninhabitable and/or unviable for critical activities such as food production.

The IPCC’s official ECS in 2021 is between 2.5°C-4.0°C, averaging at 3.25°C. If the true ECS is above 5°C, that would mean that all the current plans for managing and mitigating global climate change would be completely inadequate.

Even with an ECS of 4°C, the impact on our planet is classified at the topmost level of “very high”. Anything above an ECS of 4°C would be beyond the scale currently used by the IPCC. Serious effects such as “adaptation of socio-economic pathways” are not even modelled above 4°C, probably because the impacts of unprecedented mass human migrations and resulting societal collapses, epidemics/pandemics, famines, and potential wars just cannot be estimated.

Basically, if you have not been doing anything about climate change, then it is probably a good time to start now. And even if you have been doing something, then please consider doing more.

The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
Curious Cook,Chris Chan,ultra processed foods,climate change,supercooled water,cancer,cancer rates
The columnist looks at temperature changes, climate patterns and the effects of ultra-processed food.