It's all over but for the sweating?

[NeilBlanchard]

We need to take climate change head on - it is real and it is being largely caused by we humans burning fossil fuels. We need to take responsibility for our collective actions, because we cannot avoid the fact that we are interdependent with all the rest of life and totally dependent on the planet. We are morally obligated not only to our children to not ruin the planet, but also to all other life, as well.

Video: Ending the Silence on Climate Change | Watch Moyers & Company Online | PBS Video

[NeilBlanchard]

As Scientists Predicted, Global Warming Continues | ThinkProgress

[Arragonis]

I won't be commenting just posting, I'm doing a "suspect" style appearance as this thread unfortunately decided to thrive (like Polar Bears) and has descended into predictions of the jaws of doom via postings from people who drive cars, have kids, and PCs etc. - all of which the last time I checked made loads of CO2. But hey - they are evangelists and so therefore "allowed".

Just like Mr Gore is, apparently.

Anyway the other side of the world from me (Australia, via the Australian newspaper - cunning name, no ?) has woken up to no warming for a decade thing, finally. In fact they say 2 decades.

Which could be interesting as Oz has a carbon tax and the government that introduced it is looking like losing the next election. It is also an additional comment on the world noting the "pause", you know - the one Skeptical Science says is not happening...

Mind you they (Skeptical Science) might be a bit busy explaining the daft "moon landing conspiracy theory" pish in the wind paper they just published (after 8 months in "typesetting" - have they not tried computers ?) which even has the UK met office calling them deluded.

But at least someone has noted what the real priority should be, at least here in the UK.

The reaction to the 2003 heatwave was extraordinary. It was blamed for 2,000 deaths, and taken as a warning that Britain was horribly unprepared for the coming era of snowless winters and barbecue summers. The government’s chief scientific officer, Sir David King, later declared that climate change was “more serious even than the threat of terrorism” in terms of the number of lives that could be lost. Such language is never used about the cold, which kills at least 10 times as many people every winter. Before long, every political party had signed up to the green agenda.

Since Sir David’s exhortations, some 250,000 Brits have died from the cold, and 10,000 from the heat. It is horribly clear that we have been focusing on the wrong enemy. Instead of making sure energy was affordable, ministers have been trying to make it more expensive, with carbon price floors and emissions trading schemes. Fuel prices have doubled over seven years, forcing millions to choose between heat and food – and government has found itself a major part of the problem.

Delve deep enough into the Government’s forecasts, and they speculate that global warming will lead to 6,000 fewer deaths a year, on average, by the end of the decade. This is the supposed threat facing us: children would be less likely to have snow to play in at Christmas, but more likely to have grandparents to visit over Easter. Not a bad trade-off. The greatest uncertainty is whether global warming, which has stalled since 1998, will arrive quickly enough to make a difference.

At least someone has written a decent appeal for sense, we shall see otherwise as the posting suggests we will elect a set of politicians who have no idea how to run things, because those who do forgot how to listen.

...If the British establishment doesn’t heed the warning, it will be brought down by cold, angry people voting for a populist party with no administrative experience. While it would be fun, it’s unlikely to solve the energy crisis which is upon us...

Stop dicking around, the eyes of the people are upon you. If you don’t move fast to fix the mess you’ve created, their collective boot will be up your collective arse, and since the Labour and Conservative parties are the two cheeks of the same arse, pointing the finger at each other in parliament won’t appease the taxpayer. You are our paid servants, not our masters, so shape up, or ship out.

[freebeard]

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...oq=record+cold

No kidding. Add energy to a system and it increases the chaos. Who knew?

It's sad, though, if you look to corporations or government to solve the problems they are creating. Have we talked about social anarchism? It only takes one individual like Buckminster Fuller or Steve Jobs to change society's trajectory. And Bitcoin and Creative Commons licensing creates at least a little insulation against predatory capitalism.

IMHO a reasonable design brief for a modern residence would be a design envelope of -40 to 140°F (-40 to 60°C) and wind speeds of 160-240mph (257-386km/hr). It kind of implies aerospace construction techniques.

Edit: Couldn't find this earlier:

How not to prove you’re not wearing a tin foil hat.

It starts with an xkcd cartoon, so you know it's credible.

[Arragonis]

The science is weak. The idea is strong.

But you argued, global warming policies are a matter for economists and, pre-eminently, for democratically elected politicians.

Second, using the IPCC’s own numbers, the case for drastic action rested on people in the developing world being 9.5 times better off than they are today rather than 8.5 times better off if climate change was left to its natural course – a patently absurd proposition to impoverish the present for the benefit of the future.

And third, the superiority of adaptation over trying to cut emissions, because with adaptation you can pocket the benefits of warmer temperatures while reducing the costs of coping with them.

The science is inherently weak because it is not capable of being falsified in the here and now. It is weak because it doesn’t appear to preclude several years of standstill in average global temperature, or even, for all I know, declines in average global temperature. Neither does it preclude it snowing in March – contrary to one of the most famous prophecies made by any climate scientist.

‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’ predicted David Viner of the University of East Anglia in March 2000.

...Come rain or shine, drought or storm, global warming came to acquire the characteristics of phlogiston in the 18th century theory of combustion.

‘Chemists have made phlogiston a vague principle, which is not strictly defined and which consequently fits all the explanations demanded of it,’

The great French scientist Lavoisier wrote ‘Sometimes it has weight, sometimes it has not … Sometimes it passes through the pores of vessels, sometimes they are impenetrable to it … It explains at once causticity and non-causticity, transparency and opacity, colour and the absence of colours.’

It must be conceded that proponents of phlogiston explained their ideas with rather greater elegance than 21st century believers in global weirding. So the science is inherently weak.

Alarm about population growth was popularised by Thomas Malthus at the beginning of the 19th century – a century in which Britain’s population nearly quadrupled; cash wages for factory workers rose 50%; the purchasing power of money doubled; and life expectancy began its long-term increase.

Despite the failure of Malthus’s prediction that population growth would be repeatedly checked by famine, disease and war, for true believers, the idea that there are or will be too many humans is an article of faith.

In 1865, the brilliant economist William Stanley Jevons modified the Malthusian construct. Resource depletion in the form of exhaustion of cheap coal meant the prosperity of Victorian Britain could not last.

Jevons made the mistake that every one of his depletionist successors makes. He had not factored in the impact of new technologies and new discoveries. Jevons convinced himself that the steam engine was the farthest mankind could progress. Electrical power was a delusion and petroleum was merely the liquid essence of coal – and an expensive one at that.

The sudden emergence of environmentalism as a political movement in the post-war world can be dated with precision – to 1962 and publication of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’. In reality, ‘Silent Spring’ is a work of fiction – and all the more powerful for that. The political impact of environmentalism following ‘Silent Spring’ was immense. I would go so far as to say that ‘Silent Spring’ is the most consequential book of the post-war era. Just ten years separate ‘Silent Spring’ from the first major UN conference on the environment at Stockholm in 1972.

[NeilBlanchard]

What does Brian Cox say about anthropogenic climate change?

What does David Attenborough say about anthropogenic climate change?

What does Neil DeGrasse Tyson say about anthropogenic climate change?

What does Bill Nye say about anthropogenic climate change?

What does Jane Goodall say about anthropogenic climate change?

What does Michio Kaku say about anthropogenic climate change?

What did Carl Sagan say about anthropogenic climate change?

What does Richard Dawkins say about anthropogenic climate change?

What does Vandana Shiva say about anthropogenic climate change?

What Steven Hawking say about anthropogenic climate change?

What does Craig Venter say about anthropogenic climate change?

***********

Climate change is the equivalent of a meteor the size of Mount Everest hurtling at 40,000 MPH about to hit the earth. You know - like the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.

We know that we humans are largely causing it - why would we choose to ignore it? We need to choose to do as much as we can to get it to be a glancing blow. We need to be responsible stewards of the only planet we share with all other known life.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

But at least someone has noted what the real priority should be, at least here in the UK.

You know, I would really, really like to see some proof of that statement. I frankly do not believe that it is possible to die of cold in the British climate, other than in special circumstances like becoming lost, unprepared, on a Scottish mountainside. (In which case the death is arguably from stupidity, not cold.)

I would suspect that, if these deaths even happened, they were in fact caused by excessive alcohol and/or drug use, not cold. As a parallel, people who die from anorexia may technically have starved, but it's not because food was not readily available to them.

As to the rest, it's nothing more than obvious wishful thinking; ongoing attempts to prove that the world really is flat, and that perpetual motion machine is for sure going to work this time...

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

You know, I would really, really like to see some proof of that statement. I frankly do not believe that it is possible to die of cold in the British climate

Franky you are wrong. It is very possible to die of hypothermia in the UK whether outside on an adventure or inside when heat is not avalable or it is too expensive.

Hypothermia deaths double over five years - Telegraph

UK NHS stats only include patients who have presented to a hospital with this condition, those who die at home are not counted.

The UK climate varies, it is the end of March now but there is snow outside my house.

[Arragonis]

Snowdon is the highest mountain in Wales, here is what the news said in 2004:

The data collected by experts from the university [of Bangor] suggests that a white Christmas on Snowdon - the tallest mountain in England and Wales - may one day become no more than a memory.

The figures indicated that this winter Snowdon is on track to have less snow than any of the last 10

The results appear to back the growing body of evidence to support climate change.

And this year ?

Snowdon Mountain Railway will be shut over the Easter weekend after it was hit by 30ft (9.1m) snow drifts.

Workers using two excavators tried but failed to clear the 4.7 mile (7.5km) track.

The railway resumed operations from Llanberis last week after the winter break but they were suspended within days after heavy snow on the mountain.

[NeilBlanchard]

Right, more snow and rain is part of the climate change models. As are much different jet stream patterns, due to the melting Arctic ice.