What goes around...

Used by ancient cultures for millenia to symbolise the sun, the ages of woman and the turning of the seasons, the spiral is the most meaningful symbol for surfers.

The spinning of a low pressure system that generates swell, the turbulent eddies that increase the size of the waves within the swell and the beautiful spirals of seashells on the seashore are the good spirals.

But what goes around comes around. Cheap oil has led to cheap plastic which ends up in the ocean and can survive for hundreds of years The spiralling currents concentrate it into certain areas. The most famous is the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch‘ covering thousands of square miles. These are the bad spirals that poison the ocean and eventually leave plastic litter on the beaches (33 years later in some cases).

What can we do? Take Surfrider Foundation‘s Pledge to rise above plastics, take part in SAS’s 2012 Barefoot Wine Beach Rescue Project and, next time the good spirals deliver you some surf, take some bad spiral plastic home for recycling.

It's true - the water was colder years ago

Us 'mature' surfers often grumble that we had it tougher in the old days - no instant online eyeball surfchecks, slow journeys to the surf and wetsuits like suits of armour. Even worse, the water was colder. Now there is evidence that all is true - even that last bit.

A pukka study shows that the oceans have been warming for over a century - before manmade climate change had time to kick in. The study was comparing new data ftom 'robot' buoys with that from the 1st serious scientific oceanographic journey by HMS Challenger in the 1870s.

Mind you, we are only talking about a rise of about 0.6° C, so it just goes to prove that our memories are playing tricks with us.

Most beautiful video on the internet?

No, not the latest Reef girls video, but this 3 minute mesmerizing animation of ocean currents, produced by NASA (which has a 20 minute version). It graphically shows how energy, heat, pollution and litter gets transported around the globe.

Global weirding - or just warming - and you

The other night, I watched the BBC's Global Weirding series. The term 'global weirding' looks like an attempt to sex-up 'global warming' and possibly make it less politically controversial. But it seems a pretty semantic difference, given that climate scientists have been saying for decades that the weather will get more extreme and less predictable, as well as warmer. My experience bears this out - while Spring is springing earlier every year and we're in an amazing record-breaking heat wave at the moment, we also had a very harsh winter in 2010/11.

The programme was more useful for nailing the myth that global warming is the sole result of solar flares and that us humans have had no impact.

What are the impacts of global weirding for us surfers? I've used the UK's latest projections to work out that by the end of this century, the sea level will probably have risen since 1990 by around 70cm - 88cm (depending on whether global carbon emissions stay on their current path or not). In 2030 this could be between 19cm and 24cm and it will mean that the best breaks around here will stop working or work for shorter periods of time.

The 'global weirding' effects of climate change also include higher waves and higher winds. More hurricanes may give us more long range swell. The Environment Agency's advice for flood risk agencies indicates that the annual maximum wave height change could be between -1.5m and +1m, in other words uncertain (although revised projections may become available).

So we may end up having to rely on the bigger, more extreme (or 'weird') swells to get any rideable waves.