Written by NIGEL CALDER
Introduced by Magnus Magnusson Narration by Eric Porter
The world's weather is linked loosely in every scale of time and space, from the local impact of a thunderstorm or tornado to the advance and retreat of the ice-caps themselves. Our climate is never constant in the short term we may have hot summers, but the long-term trend is downward, against mankind.
Part 11 The Weather War
A hurricane unleashes the energy of an H-bomb every minute; the depressions that track into Europe release that much energy over our heads every ten seconds. We see how the world's weathermen labour to record and predict its action and are now uniting in a series of vast experiments in a global plan to understand better the workings of the weather machine. at 10.0
Interval: Over the Greenland ice and at 10.5
Part 2 : The Machine Changes Gear Recent discoveries on land, in the deep ocean beds, and within the polar ice-caps have rewritten the Last'two million years of the earth's history. For much of that time our northern Lands have been covered in ice, and each of the warmer intervals has lasted only some 10,000 years. By this new reckoning the next ice age is overdue. The immediate danger is that much smaller Changes are so shifting the world's weather patterns that crops in many parts of the world may fail.
MUSIC by JAMES KENELM CLARKE Studio director JOHN GORMAN
Producer ALEC nisbett
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