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They are right. Just a bonkers approach to changing people’s behaviour.
Their approach simply doesn't work yet they won't change it. A bit like the people who they want to change not changing what they are doing...
And btw you are also wrong about wildfires – there were apparently two in Croydon yesterday, no one expects wildfires to be a routine part of a hot summer’s day in Croydon.
He’s wrong but then nobody with any sense would take him seriously, the person to listen to and take seriously is this fireman:
https://twitter.com/WYFRSDaveWalton/status/1549497851100684289?s=20&t=ggxSvwu4pNT9GOLd6tvNGA
What that Fireman says is profoundly true and needs to be shared widely...
Rather than doing annual winter fuel payments surely it would be cheaper in the long run just to give qualifying people a one off insulation voucher or something
The problem with vouchers is that only some companies sign up to the schemes and these businesses are often not the most reputable and do shit jobs. And they also charge the voucher amount + a premium so the resident ends up paying almost as much as going to a reputable supplier directly and get a shit job into the bargain. I am not saying that is *always* the case but it happens a lot.
Could the responsibility be devolved to local councils who get the funding to employ a team to do the work with much more direct accountability? I know councils aren't always squeaky-clean but I am sure that, on the whole, they would be a better bet than some bunch of randoms turning up in a 15 yr old Transit to do minimum work for maximum profit?
our local population of about 20 house sparrows have vanished 😕
Has all the local fruit been thrown from the trees?
It’s funny, I can remember a nice, long, hot summer, that followed a particularly dry winter, where reservoirs were dangerously low, heat was causing all sorts of infrastructure issues, there were wildfires all over the place as well. But I don’t recall the sneering, point-scoring attitude then that seems to be prevalent now. The government even had a Minister for Water, the situation was getting so bad, they seemed to be taking the situation seriously, instead of saying things like “in the 70’s, we didn’t need all this”; which, oddly enough, is EXACTLY WHEN IT HAPPENED! 🤬
Denis Howell; 1976.
And within days of Dennis Howell being made Minister of Drought the weather mysteriously changed and Britian experienced torrential rain.
They were proper politicians back then that took their jobs seriously.
No, I speculated that the weather forecast may have been wrong, which it often is. In this case it was spot on. I’ll take that my guess was inaccurate
Lounging around in the sun and drinking beer probably means you’re just not bothering to pay attention.
As my job for the last four years, up until March, involved me spending a ten hour day out of doors, I developed a particularly keen interest in the weather, and the weather apps I use, MeteoGroup’s WeatherProHD and Dark Skies are remarkably accurate, especially when there’s a radar update showing exactly what’s going on on an hour by hour basis.
But it’s always wrong, though, isn’t it. #rollseyes
That tweet from the fireman is a sobering read.
Thanks for sharing ElShalimo. Interesting to see mention of adaptation at the end. People get hung up on climate change mitigation - of course because we all want to take action. The fact is climate change is happening and it's awkward, expensive and annoying. We have to adapt.
I heard talk on Radio 4 a month or so back about the need to start adapting more to coastal hazards and couldn't believe this work hadn't begun in earnest a long time ago. I worked on a national pilot programme for coastal hazard adaptation nearly 10 years ago and it's an absolute shit fight due to the sensitivities of land use and landowners. My wife is working with councils now to develop adaptation strategies. It's another area of life that politics is inevitably going to make a mess off... but there's a lot to do so we better get a move on.
An interesting point I read in a paper was that a 40deg C temp in the UK had a 1 in a 1000 return period without anthropogenic forcing (man made emissions) but only 1 in a 100 when you add that element to the climatology modelling. This was also based on a slightly out of date base/reference level so the more likely return period is a bit lower than 1 in a 100.
Yeah but that would involve admitting that the folk who glued themselves to roads were actually right.
They are right. Just a bonkers approach to changing people’s behaviour.
I suspect it's probably entirely counter productive, it pisses off a load of people who then hate / want to spite the protestors by not making any changes etc.
Of course I’m fortunate in that I was able to pay for it. Ridiculous that we have things like winter fuel payments but can’t sort ourselves out to help with the cause and not just some of the symptoms.
The problem with vouchers is that only some companies sign up to the schemes and these businesses are often not the most reputable and do shit jobs. And they also charge the voucher amount + a premium so the resident ends up paying almost as much as going to a reputable supplier directly and get a shit job into the bargain. I am not saying that is *always* the case but it happens a lot.
They do, we qualified for cavity wall insulation, it felt a little tenuous but we weren't going to turn down free stuff.
The criteria was pretty much are you working age and 100% healthy, if not it's free.
Work was done by one of the big facilities/outsourcing companies council get to do all their housing work. Think it was insta-group. They came in transit van with a big shredder/blower machine and a pallet load of compressed glass/plastic fluff bales.
The only quirk of the system is you couldn't book via the council, the system was 100% outsourced because that's how the grants worked. The council can't insulate your private house, just give you a phone number to call to the company that will do it and claim the voucher on your behalf.
10/10 would recommend it to anyone if you get a flyer through the door offering it.
I suspect it’s probably entirely counter productive, it pisses off a load of people who then hate / want to spite the protestors by not making any changes etc.
I'm not sure, you'd have to be certifiably mad to not insulate your house with energy prices as they are. It used to be ~5 years to pay for cavity wall insulation, well if prices have/will treble before this winter that's more like 18months.
But then again, this was people voluntarily commuting on the M25 🤷♂️
I suspect it’s probably entirely counter productive, it pisses off a load of people who then hate / want to spite the protestors by not making any changes etc.
It might be, who knows, but the alternative of sending a strongly worded letter to The Times wasn't working so well, and this got the issue in the papers at least.
I suspect it’s probably entirely counter productive, it pisses off a load of people who then hate / want to spite the protestors by not making any changes etc.
Just goes to show how passively accept when smoke from a grass/forest fire blocks a motorway and they have to sit in 40º heat for an hour.
it seems that having peoples homes burn down is the only surefire way of making them take notice of climate change.
I’ve come home from a hotel stay to find out Mrs K has left all the windows closed while I’ve been away and it’s still 27.5 degrees inside our house. 🙁
Keeping the windows and curtains closed on the exposed or south side of your house during the day and then opening them when the temp drops in the evening is probably the best approach.
By the way, with wild fires the embers can travel a very long way so can jump across firebreaks.
They're very scary.
Any ideas on how to convince my Dad to have their cavity walls insulated. They live in a 1930s semi and my Dad is convinced that if they have the cavity walls insulated the insulation will catch on the wall ties which will then make a bridge between the outer and inner wall causing damp. It's taken my Mum about 10 years to convince him to get rid of the open coal fire and we've been trying to convince him to do the walls for longer than that. Any ideas?
Any ideas?
Glue yourself to his drive until he agrees?
Tell him he'll be dead a long time before any potential damp issues surface
Any ideas
This seems to suggest it depends... but can usually be done?
https://www.twistfix.co.uk/cavity-insulation-wall-ties
There is a school of thought that cavity insulation can exacerbate the tie corrosion process if it becomes damp or wet. The insulation may become wet through rainwater ingress at vulnerable openings or by driving rain being absorbed through the wall itself. Indeed for this reason, building control does not recommend retrofit cavity insulation where a wall is exposed to driving rain and the cavity is less than 75mm wide.
Got to be at least worth getting the walls surveyed, even if only to check the pointing and wall tie condition, as that can cause damp by itself anyway in in disrepair.
Have to say Tuesday was horrible! I’m a bus/coach cleaner in a yard with no shade. I refused to clean upstairs on double deckers. The official temperature was 39 degrees in Leighton Buzzard, but the thermometer i had in the yard said it was over 50 from lunchtime and peaked at 52. I was so hot i stopped sweating even though i went though over a litre of High5 electrolytes an hour. On Wednesday i went home ill after a couple of hours as i realised i had pretty bad heat exhaustion with a raised temperature of 40 according to a medical grade ear thermometer. If I hadn’t gone home at 3.30 on Tuesday that probably would have progressed to full on heatstroke. Still not feeling great now.
Any ideas on how to convince my Dad to have their cavity walls insulated. They live in a 1930s semi and my Dad is convinced that if they have the cavity walls insulated the insulation will catch on the wall ties which will then make a bridge between the outer and inner wall causing damp. It’s taken my Mum about 10 years to convince him to get rid of the open coal fire and we’ve been trying to convince him to do the walls for longer than that. Any ideas?
We've just had ours done earlier this spring, as part of the process they did a survey with a borescope. They did leave some recommendations along the lines of future windows should have trickle vents, etc to replace any breathability lost. The insulation is hydrophobic though so shouldn't get wet.
Depends where you live though, it's not recommended for exposed westerly walls.
As mentioned on the other thread, not doing it at the moment is daft. The payback time is <2 years, and he'll probably qualify to have it done free anyway.
The longer range forecast models are getting more accurate
https://twitter.com/davethroup/status/1549453062120562688?s=21&t=iYW8PhmRPWb6vFqu58cKKA
https://twitter.com/khaustein/status/1549495973939920897?s=21&t=iYW8PhmRPWb6vFqu58cKKA
Models predicting another heatwave soon
https://twitter.com/simonleewx/status/1550226960101548033?s=21&t=iYW8PhmRPWb6vFqu58cKKA
The 7day forecasts were so accurate due to the blocking large high pressure hence the uncertainty was radically reduced in the calcs.
There is much more uncertainty about next months' GFES forecast. Don't forget that ensemble models are just that, they are a collection of different models with varying weight factors assigned to individual contributions. Some of the members of the ensemble will be extreme views but the ensemble is chosen to get a more balanced distribution/perspective. You can select one of the extreme ensemble members and make it appear like it's representative of all and then portray that as the forecast. We might get 40C next month, we might not
Interesting visualisation of the temperature increase of the last 150 years
https://twitter.com/i/status/1549009663378788355
Proof, if needed, that these ‘wildfires’ are caused by wilful human stupidity and negligence, and those responsible should be tracked down and fined heavily to try to pay for the damage they’ve caused, and the effort that emergency teams have had to put in unnecessarily to try to control the fires. 🤬
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-62277575
We had a warning here in China about thawing Arctic glaciers and potentially failing dams.
I live in the SW, but I hope they don't build estates in the potentially affected areas like they do here. I have been above a number of dams locally and seen entire communities/villages in front of the dams if they fail, and larger, more modern communities further down the valleys.
I have been above a number of dams locally and seen entire communities/villages in front of the dams if they fail, and larger, more modern communities further down the valleys.
Crikey. Still not learning?
around 5 million homes lost
anything up to quarter million deaths
the dam was designed to survive a once-in-1000-years flood (300 mm of rainfall per day) but a once-in-2000-years flood occurred
Another wildfire, human attribution. 🙄
I was out on the gravel bike on Tuesday night (it was still 28 degrees even at 9pm!) and rode up along the back road from Hope to Yorkshire Bridge and encountered the full response to that fire. Narrow road, difficult and steep trails to get up to the summit. It was still burning the next day and they had to get a helicopter in to drop water on it. It wasn't a raging fire but it was burning steadily.
And then I got to the far end of the res and there was a group of about 6 lads with a barbecue - it was actually a proper "off the ground" one and it was on a gravel turning circle far away from the bushes but even so. They were literally line of sight to a wildfire and they're there frying up burgers. 🙄
Return Periods (1 in 100 years flood ,1 in 2000years rainfall event) are I think best understood as estimated measurements of magnitudes of unusual events.. not of the frequencies of those events. In any case with many if not most weather events they are now effectively irrelevant - as they are based on statistical tests of past events that took place in a climate that we just don't have any more.
I don't think anyone should be using or quoting return periods to media/public these days.
@gwaelod - I partially agree.
They need more explanation as a statistical tool but some new models are climate conditioned by time horizon and RCP scenario. Therefore some of them can present hypothetical RPs given a future climatic state. They will show you that a 2015 1-in-100yr event could be a 1-in-75 year event in 2035 under RCP4.5 etc. etc.
They have their uses but as it is so complicated it's hard to be concise and explain to a lay person what it all means. Climate Change and its impacts, be that physical or transition risks, are just like Covid in that we really need good scientific communicators to step up and explain it in a way that we at least feel we understand it.
Time for a USA style system of fire bans in some areas drought conditions?
Looks like it was penned by the Propane And Propane Accessories Marketing Board, IMO
Two interesting articles on the BBC today.
First one about the weather presenters being abused by morons (very similar to the idiotic STR comments)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62323048
Second one about how 40°C is due to manmade climate change
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62335975
depressing.... we're heading straight back to 'we've all had enough of experts' territory.
Next step. Because of the warnings given and people being sensible, we will not see the numbers of excess deaths that worst case scenario predictions cautioned against. Which will be used as 'evidence' that we overreacted.
Good to know Spain's PM is being constructive - he's suggested that men should stop wearing ties during the heatwave over there to...save energy!
He thinks this will reduce demand on AC units and so lower electricity usage.
Yep, you read that correctly.