Quizzes & Puzzles6 mins ago
How Are These Idiots Proposing That We "stop Climate Change" ?
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The climate is controlled by nature, how do they propose we override that?
The climate is controlled by nature, how do they propose we override that?
Answers
All their own hot air won't have helped . Only God can turn the tide, King Canute cannot!
04:51 Mon 30th Nov 2015
Sorry, jim, I'd lost track of this question until Ed's recent intervention. I had not seen my contribution referred to as "utter crap".
I don’t think my first answer was all that crappy. I merely pointed out that of all the disasters that had been forecast by the “scientists” and the “experts” that I have encountered over the years, none thusfar has materialised as far as I can see. Of course it may be that because of the experts’ doom mongering steps were taken to prevent an unwelcome outcome. But I doubt it.
The disasters that I mentioned which can be expected from Climate Change are not my pronouncements. They are simply a few among many that I have read about, usually predicted by the same experts.
My second answer moved on to the absolute futility of the Paris conference. Whenever I mention that my using unsuitable lightbulbs (or indeed anything the UK as a whole does) will make absolutely no difference to the problem, whether real or imagined, I am told “ah yes, your action may not save the world, but if everybody did the same…”. Yet here we see 40,000 people converging on a single city to draw up measures to prevent excessive emissions harming the planet. You could not make it up. I am told I should think carefully before flying to Benidorm for a week in the sun. Yet upwards of two million Muslim converge on Mecca every year for no rational reason yet I hear nothing about the harm that does to the planet.
And so we come to the “triumph” that was the Paris conference. A wishy washy collection of statements and aims, with no enforcement or sanctions for non-compliance and which will probably be ignored by just about everybody bar the UK and possibly a few of the Euromaniac nations. Sorry if all this appears to be crap. I’ve given up debating the science because, as I am constantly told, “the science is done”. In fact nothing is further from the truth but I can’t be bothered to argue the point. It’s rather like arguing about religion. I’m more interested in 3Ts question: just how is it considered that 40,000 people converging on Paris for a three week jolly will save the world? The answer now is patently obvious – it won’t (assuming it needed saving in the first place, that is).
I don’t think my first answer was all that crappy. I merely pointed out that of all the disasters that had been forecast by the “scientists” and the “experts” that I have encountered over the years, none thusfar has materialised as far as I can see. Of course it may be that because of the experts’ doom mongering steps were taken to prevent an unwelcome outcome. But I doubt it.
The disasters that I mentioned which can be expected from Climate Change are not my pronouncements. They are simply a few among many that I have read about, usually predicted by the same experts.
My second answer moved on to the absolute futility of the Paris conference. Whenever I mention that my using unsuitable lightbulbs (or indeed anything the UK as a whole does) will make absolutely no difference to the problem, whether real or imagined, I am told “ah yes, your action may not save the world, but if everybody did the same…”. Yet here we see 40,000 people converging on a single city to draw up measures to prevent excessive emissions harming the planet. You could not make it up. I am told I should think carefully before flying to Benidorm for a week in the sun. Yet upwards of two million Muslim converge on Mecca every year for no rational reason yet I hear nothing about the harm that does to the planet.
And so we come to the “triumph” that was the Paris conference. A wishy washy collection of statements and aims, with no enforcement or sanctions for non-compliance and which will probably be ignored by just about everybody bar the UK and possibly a few of the Euromaniac nations. Sorry if all this appears to be crap. I’ve given up debating the science because, as I am constantly told, “the science is done”. In fact nothing is further from the truth but I can’t be bothered to argue the point. It’s rather like arguing about religion. I’m more interested in 3Ts question: just how is it considered that 40,000 people converging on Paris for a three week jolly will save the world? The answer now is patently obvious – it won’t (assuming it needed saving in the first place, that is).
I don't know the ins and outs of global warming or climate change. However, I did listen to a lady from the Marshall Islands on the Jeremy Vine show who said that two of the islands had disappeared under the sea in the past 10 years. These were island which were inhabited and were relatively self sufficient. So, just what is causing this?
Whatever it is it's not Climate Change (or whatever it's called today). All sorts of things cause small islands to change in shape, size or even disappear and reappear.
In 2008 strong waves and high tides caused widespread flooding on a few of the islands, parts of some of them being only 3 feet above sea level. (With tides having nothing to do with the climate, changing or otherwise, the high tides certainly were not a product of climate change). In 2013 some of the islands suffered a severe drought.
Following the 2013 emergencies, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Tony de Brum was encouraged by the Obama administration in the United States to turn the crises into an opportunity to promote action against climate change. De Brum demanded new commitment and international leadership to stave off further climate disasters from battering his country and other similarly vulnerable countries.
Read into that what you will but between the lines I read "Our problems have sod all to do with Climate Change but we can jump on the bandwagon here and fool the gullible public into believing that they were". A high tide on an area only three feet above sea level is liable to cause floods in that area. It would happen in the UK, it would happen anywhere where steps had not been taken to prevent it.
In 2008 strong waves and high tides caused widespread flooding on a few of the islands, parts of some of them being only 3 feet above sea level. (With tides having nothing to do with the climate, changing or otherwise, the high tides certainly were not a product of climate change). In 2013 some of the islands suffered a severe drought.
Following the 2013 emergencies, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Tony de Brum was encouraged by the Obama administration in the United States to turn the crises into an opportunity to promote action against climate change. De Brum demanded new commitment and international leadership to stave off further climate disasters from battering his country and other similarly vulnerable countries.
Read into that what you will but between the lines I read "Our problems have sod all to do with Climate Change but we can jump on the bandwagon here and fool the gullible public into believing that they were". A high tide on an area only three feet above sea level is liable to cause floods in that area. It would happen in the UK, it would happen anywhere where steps had not been taken to prevent it.
-- answer removed --
//I’ve given up debating the science because, as I am constantly told, “the science is done”. In fact nothing is further from the truth but I can’t be bothered to argue the point.//
Just a brief comment on that one. To some extent I agree with you, and both sides of the debate have to be careful here that they don't over- or underplay the "done-ness" of the current state of Climate Science -- although it applies to every field, really.
No Science in any field is "done". There are always improvements to be made, gaps in the models to be filled, new theoretical breakthroughs to be discovered and more data to gather and analyse, squeezing the uncertainty in predictions and measurements. So it's never done. On the other hand, saying that can sometimes imply that there is a greater uncertainty about the current state of affairs than is actually the case. Taking my field as an example, the science is "done" in the sense that an stupidly huge volume of data can be very well-described using a single model that has been largely unchanged for the last fifty-odd years, with most of the progress since then being in learning how to use that model to spit out predictive numbers. There's plenty of such work still to be done, but the important message is that the model itself is, as far as it goes, undeniably a good description of nature.
On the other hand, it's not a complete model so there is also work to be done to find how to improve it (see pretty much every particle physics talk in the last ten years for a full description of the outstanding problems and potential solutions, eg http://
In essence this is true in Climate Science as well. By about now, a number of things have been established beyond doubt, such as the links between global climate and various contributing factors including CO2 levels (as well as longer-term cycles based on, say, solar activity or the irregularity of the Earth's orbit); and, further, there's a clearly established link between human activity and increasing levels of greenhouse gases -- and not only CO2, but also such gases as methane, ozone and CFCs (the last in particular being undeniably down to human activity as CFCs do not exist in nature at all). Mainly CO2, though.
The Science in that respect is, indeed, essentially done. The conceptual aspect that human activity can and does have an impact, is done. That, anyway, there is a finite supply of the problem sources of energy that is expected to run out, or become no longer economically viable to exploit, is also done -- so that even if the planet didn't give two hoots about fossil fuels being used up we'd have to think of ways to stop replying on them anyway. Plenty is not done: the scale of the impact, the nature of it, a complete understanding of the interplay between various components of the world's climate, improved measuring techniques, etc etc.
In some sense, the only way to really understand how the climate is impacted by human activity is to not bother doing anything, carry on as we are now, and see what happens. Such an experiment is, to say the least, highly inadvisable. Still, at least it would be "done" then, to everybody's satisfaction. For myself, I'd prefer to understand the impact of working to reduce the human contribution. At the very least, it stands a better chance of being rather less messy.
Just a brief comment on that one. To some extent I agree with you, and both sides of the debate have to be careful here that they don't over- or underplay the "done-ness" of the current state of Climate Science -- although it applies to every field, really.
No Science in any field is "done". There are always improvements to be made, gaps in the models to be filled, new theoretical breakthroughs to be discovered and more data to gather and analyse, squeezing the uncertainty in predictions and measurements. So it's never done. On the other hand, saying that can sometimes imply that there is a greater uncertainty about the current state of affairs than is actually the case. Taking my field as an example, the science is "done" in the sense that an stupidly huge volume of data can be very well-described using a single model that has been largely unchanged for the last fifty-odd years, with most of the progress since then being in learning how to use that model to spit out predictive numbers. There's plenty of such work still to be done, but the important message is that the model itself is, as far as it goes, undeniably a good description of nature.
On the other hand, it's not a complete model so there is also work to be done to find how to improve it (see pretty much every particle physics talk in the last ten years for a full description of the outstanding problems and potential solutions, eg http://
In essence this is true in Climate Science as well. By about now, a number of things have been established beyond doubt, such as the links between global climate and various contributing factors including CO2 levels (as well as longer-term cycles based on, say, solar activity or the irregularity of the Earth's orbit); and, further, there's a clearly established link between human activity and increasing levels of greenhouse gases -- and not only CO2, but also such gases as methane, ozone and CFCs (the last in particular being undeniably down to human activity as CFCs do not exist in nature at all). Mainly CO2, though.
The Science in that respect is, indeed, essentially done. The conceptual aspect that human activity can and does have an impact, is done. That, anyway, there is a finite supply of the problem sources of energy that is expected to run out, or become no longer economically viable to exploit, is also done -- so that even if the planet didn't give two hoots about fossil fuels being used up we'd have to think of ways to stop replying on them anyway. Plenty is not done: the scale of the impact, the nature of it, a complete understanding of the interplay between various components of the world's climate, improved measuring techniques, etc etc.
In some sense, the only way to really understand how the climate is impacted by human activity is to not bother doing anything, carry on as we are now, and see what happens. Such an experiment is, to say the least, highly inadvisable. Still, at least it would be "done" then, to everybody's satisfaction. For myself, I'd prefer to understand the impact of working to reduce the human contribution. At the very least, it stands a better chance of being rather less messy.
In some sense, the only way to really understand how the climate is impacted by human activity is to take $trillions off poor people in rich countries and redistribute it to rich people in poor countries as we are now, and see what happens. Such an experiment is, to say the least, highly inadvisable. Still, at least it would be "done" then, to your satisfaction. For myself, I'd prefer to understand the impact of working to reduce the human population. At the very least, it stands a better chance of being rather less costly.
The problem with that rather poor attempt at satire is that "human activity" does include the effects of overpopulation. I'm not really sure how you go about reducing that. Curbing the increase, maybe.
You can't win, it seems. One of the chief (and, to an extent, justified) criticisms of the climate lobby is that they overstate the certainty and scale of the threat of continuing on the current path. So I've tried to provide a more balanced case for action. Apparently people don't take that seriously either.
You can't win, it seems. One of the chief (and, to an extent, justified) criticisms of the climate lobby is that they overstate the certainty and scale of the threat of continuing on the current path. So I've tried to provide a more balanced case for action. Apparently people don't take that seriously either.
Anyone who can, is trying to make a buck out of it. Climate changes full stop.
I the UK a few decades back we had severe droughts and the government and water companies were lambasted for not building enough reservoirs, now it's too much rain and the same is happening over insufficient flood defences.
I the UK a few decades back we had severe droughts and the government and water companies were lambasted for not building enough reservoirs, now it's too much rain and the same is happening over insufficient flood defences.
This thread only got started again because I added a satirical article link to a story entitled "Climate Change sceptic is fine with all other science" -- ie, that this is probably the only field of science that people are suddenly unhappy about (Khandro excepted, who at least is pretty consistent in lumping most scientists in as money-grabbing opportunists).
The world is far more likely to be a cleaner and -- well, better -- place if we work to avoid the potential dangers of climate change than if we ignore the risks. It may well be that nothing we do can stop anything from happening. Better by far, though, to clean up our own act regardless.
The world is far more likely to be a cleaner and -- well, better -- place if we work to avoid the potential dangers of climate change than if we ignore the risks. It may well be that nothing we do can stop anything from happening. Better by far, though, to clean up our own act regardless.
Who created the concept of climate change - answer (in part), it was crystallised as a concept in this country by Maggie T's think tank, led by the indefatigable Patten, as a means to countering Scargill and his mob re coal.
Some of the science is dodgy and a lot of the modelling is that, modelling, and needs testing and developing. The ice packs at both poles have been increasing quite dramatically these last 3 years and mentioning time, well that brings along so much confusion as we can all manipulate time-lines as to interpreting statistics. I remain as a healthy critic.
However, we are increasing CO2 - that I am not so concerned about as there are natural sinks out there and there are potential reforestation programmes that should come into play, esp in the Africas, Indonesia and Brazil...I suspect a lot can be done in the short term, inc Europe by encouraging reforestation and biodiversity in the environment.
I am not condoning to keep belching CO2 in the atmosphere and that comes to the core of my argument for climate change and resource management generally and that is for smarter usage, manufacture and reduction of consumption of resources, coupled with recycling (esp for metals).
My concern specifically on climate change is the continuation of NOx, particulates and then fluoro-chlorines etc as these can be really damaging and lead to ozone build and just as dangerous to the climate. The push for the H2 economy is perhaps the crux to this and when the storage issue is finally broken through, then we may see global advance. To then, we will see a wide variety of solutions by different geographies and local resources...
To me, solar and tide offer a huge potential but please not covering the Sahara in panels - as economically one needs local markets and the project(s) would be killed by the cost of moving the tricity over such long distances and while I am on about electricity - abandon the concept of electric cars as they stand at the moment - the electricity has to be manufactured and distributed in the first place and it ain't the most efficient process - period.
Some of the science is dodgy and a lot of the modelling is that, modelling, and needs testing and developing. The ice packs at both poles have been increasing quite dramatically these last 3 years and mentioning time, well that brings along so much confusion as we can all manipulate time-lines as to interpreting statistics. I remain as a healthy critic.
However, we are increasing CO2 - that I am not so concerned about as there are natural sinks out there and there are potential reforestation programmes that should come into play, esp in the Africas, Indonesia and Brazil...I suspect a lot can be done in the short term, inc Europe by encouraging reforestation and biodiversity in the environment.
I am not condoning to keep belching CO2 in the atmosphere and that comes to the core of my argument for climate change and resource management generally and that is for smarter usage, manufacture and reduction of consumption of resources, coupled with recycling (esp for metals).
My concern specifically on climate change is the continuation of NOx, particulates and then fluoro-chlorines etc as these can be really damaging and lead to ozone build and just as dangerous to the climate. The push for the H2 economy is perhaps the crux to this and when the storage issue is finally broken through, then we may see global advance. To then, we will see a wide variety of solutions by different geographies and local resources...
To me, solar and tide offer a huge potential but please not covering the Sahara in panels - as economically one needs local markets and the project(s) would be killed by the cost of moving the tricity over such long distances and while I am on about electricity - abandon the concept of electric cars as they stand at the moment - the electricity has to be manufactured and distributed in the first place and it ain't the most efficient process - period.
I can also recall about seven or eight years ago (following a couple of mild winters) the "experts" pronouncing that "children in the UK will grow up not knowing what snow is."
Two or three years ago, one of the worst (and earliest) winters for some time occurred. "Ah but we must exxpect extremes of weather to occur now that the climate is changing" Yes we do. It's called weather and the UK is famous for it.
Anyway, as I said, I'm past arguing the point. I'm more concerned by the extremes in "meaasures" being taken to combat the alleged problem.
But far more important than all of that - glad to see, jim, that you've regained your composure and are again posting in your usual, erudite and measured manner. :-)
Two or three years ago, one of the worst (and earliest) winters for some time occurred. "Ah but we must exxpect extremes of weather to occur now that the climate is changing" Yes we do. It's called weather and the UK is famous for it.
Anyway, as I said, I'm past arguing the point. I'm more concerned by the extremes in "meaasures" being taken to combat the alleged problem.
But far more important than all of that - glad to see, jim, that you've regained your composure and are again posting in your usual, erudite and measured manner. :-)
Not through 'The Paris Climate Accord' - the only mention of 'coal' is in coalitions, no mention of oil or gas, and certainly no mention 'carbon tax' or 'binding emissions cuts'. The charade was about 'ambition' and (unspecified)'budgets' and 'finance' and 'no criticism' before the next election chaps.
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