@unhurt
This oddball used outdoor curling as an example of observable climate change a couple of years ago.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
Climate Crisis
(1297 posts)-
Posted 5 years ago #
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An alarmist extremist obviously.
I keep seeing the term "non linear state" and I know that might not be good...
Posted 5 years ago # -
Alas linear responses in physical systems are the exception rather than the rule. You'd think politicians elected under First Past The Post would understand that.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Why just French politicians?
(there is no 'post' in UK elections using plurality, it is a misnomer designed to give the elected candidate some form of gravitas)
Posted 5 years ago # -
"This new study demonstrates that the drop in CO₂ is itself partly due the settlement of the Americas and resulting collapse of the indigenous population, allowing regrowth of natural vegetation. It demonstrates that human activities affected the climate well before the industrial revolution began."
Interesting...
Posted 5 years ago # -
Interesting indeed.
Was there anything about the quoted expert that caught your eye?
Posted 5 years ago # -
Wow. I mean - I knew the effects of western settlement on the peoples of the Americas were grim, but this is a pretty extraordinary way of comprehending the scale of it.
"And what we see from this study is the scale of what's required, because the Great Dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few ppm. This is useful; it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate."
That's - not very encouraging.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Want a cheery Monday read? Well...
"Because the numbers are so small, we tend to trivialize the differences between one degree and two, two degrees and four. Human experience and memory offers no good analogy for how we should think about those thresholds, but with degrees of warming, as with world wars or recurrences of cancer, you don’t want to see even one.
At two degrees, the melting of ice sheets will pass a tipping point of collapse, flooding dozens of the world’s major cities this century. At that amount of warming, it is estimated, global GDP, per capita, will be cut by 13 percent. Four hundred million more people will suffer from water scarcity, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. It will be worse in the planet’s equatorial band. In India, where many cities now numbering in the many millions would become unliveably hot, there would be 32 times as many extreme heat waves, each lasting five times as long and exposing, in total, 93 times more people. This is two degrees — practically speaking, our absolute best-case climate scenario."
"To avoid warming of the kind the IPCC now calls catastrophic requires a complete rebuilding of the entire energy infrastructure of the world, a thorough reworking of agricultural practices and diet to entirely eliminate carbon emissions from farming, and a battery of cultural changes to the way those of us in the wealthy West, at least, conduct our lives. And we need to do all of that in two, or possibly three, decades."
Posted 5 years ago # -
For anyone that hasn't already done so, I suggest having a look at getting involved with Extinction Rebellion. There is an active group in Edinburgh. There are various events forthcoming, including a planned week of worldwide action in the run up to Easter, between 15th-19th April. Having said that, I just hope that we aren't already too late...
Posted 5 years ago # -
While western colonialist culture believes in “rights”, many indigenous cultures teach of “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself. When I orient myself around the question of what my obligations are, a deeper question immediately arises: from this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?
Posted 5 years ago # -
To answering the question: How and at what density can human beings live imaginative, reasonably comfortable, carbon-neutral lives at 56°N?
Posted 5 years ago # -
Imagination (in a good way) is probably key to a humane and hopeful answer to that.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Are things worse than we think? It's a simple enough calculation to work out the energy stored in the top 50m of the world's oceans by raising their temperature by 1K over the last 150 years which is what happened. Let's do it shall we?
Surface area of the ocean: 361.1 x 10^6 km^2
Mass of top 50m assuming a flat Earth: 1.8 x 10^21kg
Specific heat of water 4186 J/kg/KActually the number is so huge it's incomprehensible, even using the biggest hydrogen bomb ever as the unit of energy.
Posted 5 years ago # -
So your conclusion is?
Posted 5 years ago # -
That the number is incomprehensible and I hope the energy stays distributed in the sea and doesn't find a way to coalesce and come and get us.
Posted 5 years ago # -
@iwrats, having said that, a warming ocean is no bowl of cherries either.
Posted 5 years ago # -
@paulmilne
Warming and acidifying simultaneously. And concentration/pH curves are the very paradigm of non-linearity.
Posted 5 years ago # -
“
Demand reduction is a necessary part of meeting our climate change targets
“
http://www.demand.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/FutureTravel_report_final.pdf
Posted 5 years ago # -
“
Fire risk in parts of New Zealand could more than double with climate change
“
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12201958”
Posted 5 years ago # -
@chdot
Your link corrected.https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12201958
Very concerning. My niece and her family live in Nelson. They prepared to evacuate but didn't have to after all.
I don't remember the New Zealand of my youth being anything like this hot. Bush fires were an Australian phenomenon.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Climate Change
Or maybe not
Who knows?
Posted 5 years ago # -
Neonicotinoids?
Posted 5 years ago # -
Oddly motorcyclists have known about insect collapse for years. Visor-cleaning stops have been getting less frequent ever since I started riding. I noticed that after crossing the Alps into Italy you didn't need to bother. Lord knows what they were spraying.
Posted 5 years ago # -
About time too
Or
Too little too late
Unknown unknowns
Posted 5 years ago # -
I was at a meeting in Poland last year and was amazed by the large number of insects even in agricultural land.
Posted 5 years ago #
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