And yet another new joiner to an MTB forum to post only on the Climate Change thread...
It will make us less healthy, far less competitive as a nation, paying more in tax, much more beholden to the Chinese State (some of you would love this by the sounds of it)
And that's where I stopped reading.
And as for the forests, the SNP supported by the Scottish Greens has cut down millions of trees to make way for ‘green’ wind power. You can’t make this stuff up
Actually someone has as its utter nonsense. gross distortion of what is actually happening
I hope we are very careful working from home if you can does become a rule - mental health issues will go through the roof imo.
Mixed some days in some not is a good balance
A lot of folk moved further away from the office working from home now they have further to travel.
Plus it had a big effect on house prices in the out of city locations, which is not great.
Not sure on the answer but it is BALANCE in some form
Have you “done your own research”?
Even a simpleton could point out the utter BS of your cartoon's argument. Net Zero is not without huge cost and huge downsides. And we enter into this based on poorly understood climate science. About time you acknowledged this.
poorly understood climate science
Most of the general public do not understand climate science. This is just like COVID where clear scientific communication is required.
And we enter into this based on poorly understood climate science
I understand it - and the scientific consensus is clear. Yes its complex chaotic systems and thus you cannot predict micro events ( local weather) from globa ltrends ( climate change)
Net Zero is not without huge cost and huge downsides
compared to runaway climate change?
I do wonder what motivates these trolls ( or is it the same person?)
And yet another new joiner to an MTB forum to post only on the Climate Change thread…
Yet another * ing mug who can only see one side of the argument.
How would you know how many "* ing mugs" there are here? You only joined stw yesterday.
I do wonder what motivates these trolls ( or is it the same person?)
There don't write like they are the same person but who knows, they are pretty mixed up so expecting any consistency is a bit much I suppose.
There do seem very keen to tell us how we are all wrong but can't actually demonstrate why though.
The windmills that are decimating our wild bird populations.
This is total rubbish. There has been a lot of research and very few birds have been killed.
I do wonder what motivates these trolls
Really? It's attention seeking. You deal with them by not responding. Have a look at the last 3 pages or so of this thread. 🥴
As someone who works closely with nature and whose father, grand father and great grandfather all worked on the land, I'm inclined to err more on the side of skepticism about the impact. Each generation had tales of what would now be coined 'climate events' that were more extreme than anything I've seen that's for sure.
Most of what's going on in the world in terms of floods and fired is down to poor urban planning and bad habitat management practices.
Also, if the 'record temperatures' are in fact that- then almost every native species should go extinct right? It is evolutionarily inefficient to be able to cope with extreme temperature variation and yet everything is coping just fine- almost like they've seen it all before. (Anecdotally, nature feels in rude health around the farm here. Especially the insect life which is currently booming).
I also think that the huge advantages of global greening for sustaining an ever greater population are being played down. The predicted food shortages of 20-30 years ago (by the bed wetting armageddon mongers of yesteryear) just haven't materialised largely because plants need co2 and yields have thus gone through the roof.
But the most striking thing reading this thread is how tone deaf the smug liberal elite are. And I guess it brings to mind that line from the Imitation Game where Keira Knightley's Joan says "If you really want to solve your puzzle, then you're going to need all the help you can get. And they are not going to help you if they do not like you!"
And quite frankly I'd rather me, my son and his future family all burned to death in an inferno (or froze to death in an igloo depending on which side of the Gulf Stream argument is being trotted out today) than do anything most of you suggest.
Climate Action seems to me to be the icing on the cake. But in order to make the base for that cake, we need to sort out the easy wins first like stopping pollution, cleaning up litter, ending the recycling charade (all that effort for 9%!! I'd rather be honest and throw it straight in the bin!), stopping the construction of ludicrous wind turbines and solar farms that are desecrating our countryside and building enough state owned nuclear plants that electricity is basically free to use.
Then I want the 'green' tech revolution to be BETTER, CHEAPER and more EGALITARIAN. People will switch automatically if the future is BETTER.
But at the moment it just feels like a lot of very well off people with apparently serious mental health problems going through some kind of guilty midlife crisis.
Imagine if the energy that's gone into this thread was spent writing an inspiring blog about how fantastic your lives are now you have done X,Y and Z to clean up your own personal act and reduce your footprint? Unless.......
But the most striking thing reading this thread is how tone deaf the smug liberal elite are.
Imagine if the energy that’s gone into this thread was spent writing an inspiring blog about how fantastic your lives are now you have done X,Y and Z to clean up your own personal act and reduce your footprint?
I get the feeling nothing will please you....
It should be possible to be inspiring without being smug....
Our new friend(s) seem to have every single type of discourse/delay tactic covered:
https://www.leolinne.com/?portfolio=discourses-of-climate-delay
I see you. I know what you are.
Whilst you may find others here who are willing, I won't be engaging further, since the ability to reason, which the content of your posts indicates you do not possess, is required in order for me to reason with you.
For anyone who would like to read them, the headline points of the latest scientific position are available here:.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/resources/spm-headline-statements
Of particular note are the confidence levels assigned to particular statements, rather than the statements themselves (all of which are pretty well known). The detail underpinning these statements is available in thousands of pages of reports, available on the same website.
@maximumhard 's post earlier about cutting down trees to make way for windfarms is an interesting one – while cutting down trees seems bad for the climate on the surface, in Scotland and on Forestry and Land Scotland land (which is where the article says the felling took place) this is actually a net carbon benefit or no change because of improvements in soil health and organic matter content.
Of all people, the [url= https://www.gwct.org.uk/wildlife/research/upland-biodiversity/planting-trees-carbon-removal-from-the-atmosphere/#:~:text=Trees%20are%20planted%20to%20take,biological%2C%20chemical%20and%20physical%20processes ]Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust[/url] did a pretty thorough study into this. While there may be some bias in it, they found that planting birch or pine trees (it’s likely to be pine that was felled) did not lead to increases in carbon in the ecosystem over a period of 12-39 years, and on one site there was even carbon loss.
I’ve done some studies in the far north of Scotland with the RSPB and a university. The RSPB bought the land from a commercial forester and then felled all the trees to improve bird biodiversity. As part of that, we were monitoring soil carbon and found that where the trees were felled soil carbon was increasing.
So, in terms of atmospheric carbon, felling trees to create a wind farm will have a significant benefit. Even if there’s no change in carbon levels in the ecosystem, you’re removing the carbon associated with a non-renewable method of producing energy. And likely improving biodiversity by removing dense commercial forestry. It’s an easy win that looks like a bad thing on the surface.
@crosshair - nature is not thriving in the current climate. These biodiversity stripes show the decline of biodiversity in the last 50 years, and the increase in global temperatures. There's been a catastrophic decline. While the larger stuff you see may be doing fine (although there's been an enormous drop off of most songbirds, and in agricultural areas kestrel populations are down over 85%) there's smaller stuff you don't that is struggling enormously. In developed nations, agriculture has a lot to do with it, but on the global scale climate is a major driver.
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We have tons of kestrels and voles 🤷🏻♂️
This family nest in the tree at the bottom of my garden.
The surveys show that you have less than you used to (although now I've double checked that >80% figure, that applies to Scotland, it's not so bad in England). A better marker UK-wide is probably the skylark, which has declined by over 75% since the '70s. Again, climate isn't entirely to blame but it is playing a major part in biodiversity decline globally.
https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/skylark/threats/
I'll try again with the image-
[img] [/img]
The only species I can think of here is the Lapwing. And we’re not great habitat for them anyway but since (ironically, as it’s for trendy soil health reasons) going away from growing forage maize, there’s nowhere safe for them to nest.
Habitat is king when it comes to biodiversity.
Again- I rode across Salisbury Plain recently and the place is as alive with Skylarks as it ever was.
Suggesting habitat not climate is king.
We have them here but only in one field.
All over the world animals are under pressure due to climate change. from polar bears with no ice floes to hunt from to birds that no longer have the food supplies to feed their young because of the earlier spring each year so the timings of the food plants availability have altered
Animal are moving their ranges north as a result of climate change. My pal lives in the Yukon. their town now has starving mountain lions entering it because the prey species have moved north. 20 years ago they were north of the mountain lion ranges.
do love a **** you "i'm alright jack" with a "panic over it snowed yesterday" and err "that's looking like socialism" all in one post.
munrobiker
Again, climate isn’t entirely to blame but it is playing a major part in biodiversity decline globally.
and here is the thing ... mitigate climate change and you mitigate biodiversity unfortunately you have the environmentalists that prefer saving larks to people.
The really worrying thing is the decline of insects. Dunno how much of that is climate change led but the decline in insects is huge and very worryuing
do love a **** you “i’m alright jack” with a “panic over it snowed yesterday” and err “that’s looking like socialism” all in one post.
+1!
Are the new members the same ones who demonstrated that they are hard of thinking on the COVID thread?
Are the new members the same ones who demonstrated that they are hard of thinking on the COVID thread?
there does seem to be a striking overlap in views.
Ah yes. Insect Armageddon. Anecdotally we're definitely bucking that trend here.
Again, it seems far more related to land use, crop rotation and pesticide abuse than anything climate related.
Coming back to my cake analogy- taking a prime arable field out of food production and plastering it with solar panels is like smearing icing on a turd.
Taking it out of production and letting scrub regenerate or growing a winter food mix for song birds on it would be what we should be doing FIRST- baking a solid cake.
What would you say about the studies that show skylark numbers of skylarks have declined by >75%? Are they wrong? The UK conservation status, set by the government's Joint Nature Conservation Committee, for the skylark is Red, and that's determined by data from the JNCC, RSPB and British Trust for Ornithology.
While I see plenty of skylarks about that doesn't mean there's as many as there should be, and the Red list designation shows that even if there's lots they're declining at an unsustainable rate. The number of red list birds has increased from 36 in 1996 to 70 in 2021.
The BTO's take on it is that "Climate change and milder winters in regions such as the Baltic Sea have resulted in many of these species being less likely to migrate as far west and south as the UK, in a pattern termed 'short-stopping'." If you remove 75% of a single bird's population from the UK that has knock on effects for other bird species, insects and predators. It also has an impact on whichever cooler place they're ending up- if populations are increasing somewhere, that applies extra pressures to that ecosystem. And it's largely down to climate (along with changes to industrial farming practices).
If skylarks numbers were down because of climate change then the effect would be even more noticeable where the habitat is still suitable. It’s not. The skylarks are still there.
Which suggests it’s primarily a land use issue…
Thing is, even as someone with a seat at a land management table, with machinery and the knowledge to literally move the earth, alter crops and change habitats- I feel pretty powerless to effect change in a pro-wildlife fashion V the foresters, farmers, estate managers and land owners who also share that table with me. Everyone here is fighting over the same 3000 acres.
So I totally sympathise that for someone sat in a bed-sit in their poo stained pants with only the left wing internet as a peephole into the natural world, things must seem terrifyingly scary and ‘out of control’.
I’d strongly suggest getting out and about (heck, maybe even go crazy and spend a few carbon credits to get there) and seeing that IRL- things aren’t as bad as they are being sold to be.
Maybe these threads would be toned down a little and people could see that the solution to most of the REAL problems we face in the environment are largely in the hands of land owners, the supermarkets and big business and are nothing to do with the climate.
I’d strongly suggest getting out and about (heck, maybe even go crazy and spend a few carbon credits to get there) and seeing that IRL- things aren’t as bad as they are being sold to be.
I do, and I have. I've spent 12 years doing soil, air and water sampling and monitoring across the whole of the UK, now I review data, academic papers and government studies of the environment for an environmental regulator. I've worked with air quality experts, ecologists and arboriculturalists. I've seen the trends change, I've seen all the data first hand and collected a lot of it myself. I don't get any benefit from investigating and pushing the green agenda (other than my livelihood, but my job would still exist even if we weren't finding a problem), and in fact for most people I work with sorting out environmental problems costs them money and reduces their profits. There's no business or government gain from improving the environment in the short term.
We are damaging the environment in almost all possible ways, even in the UK, but we can do something about it. I'm not a Maltheusian downer - there will be technological and societal ways to prevent the problems we're causing. We just need to get everyone to recognise that there's an issue and then actually get on and do them.
Panic over guys - it's all ok in a corner of a field in Wiltshire. Job jobbed.
This is what my company thinks of it all & you could never accuse us of being socialists....
I think crosshair is a bot created by an angry ill-informed student at agricultural college
Thats a bit unfair chaps - crosshair is giving anecdotal examples from his experience which is very different to most of us. He was not being a denialist
…the point being that whatever corner of Wiltshire you think I’m referring to isn’t a biosphere immune from the effects of ‘climate change’.
Three legged stool of conservation- good food, clean water and shelter. Build it and they still come 🤷🏻♂️
I just think all this ethereal climate angst is so terribly misdirected when there’s real tangible stuff we could improve.
Suggesting that I've got a field full of bird species A so the wider population decline of that species isn't as bad as people say is a bit weird at best
I’m not saying that. I’m saying that if we have a field full of birds that are supposedly in decline “cuz planes and cars!!” then either our climate is unique or maybe they are in decline elsewhere for OTHER REASONS 😀
Even if all the expert bodies involved say that climate is a major reason for their decline?
And as tjagain points out- I’m not denying anything about the existence of climate change, man made or otherwise. I’m incredibly skeptical of the motives of the people behind it but the science is what it is.
Beyond that I’m just trying to apply logic to what I see with my own eyes.
I just think all this ethereal angst is so terribly misdirected when there’s real tangible stuff we could improve.
There is loads of stuff that man has ****ed up that could be improved. However, this thread is specifically about climate change rather than increasing the number of hedgehogs (and I saw one of those last year so they are okay really aren't they)
@crosshair - Do you also have an abundance of puffins in your fields despite their wider decline around Europe due to the ocean's warming up ?
I live in W Yorks half way up the hill to the Moors. We see lots of lapwings and curlews up on the moors yet across the UK their numbers are rapidly falling. That doesn't mean that I walk around shouting they are not in decline 'cos I saw 3 on Sunday
I think group think and funding models can make people say all sorts of things 😉
As I say- it’s just logic at the end of the day. If bird A is thriving in a place where habitat is being managed correctly and locally extinct 50 miles away, then it is fairly unlikely “climate” is to blame.
