Forum menu
Regarding who's to blame has the 2008 Pitt report been mentioned?
Flood defence spending has been shown to be a long term cost saver
After the report flood defence spending was increased & the government accepted all recomendations as the report mentioned but then the Tories got in & austerity came along & the Tories slashed it all
https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Pitt_Review_Lessons_learned_from_the_2007_floods
(1)Where’s it changing from?
(2)What was the old normal?
(3)How many years worth of data was used to establish the normal?
(4)How do we deduce that change is dramatic enough to hashtag it as climate change/emergency?
Have you heard of the hockey stick graph? Its a reconstruction of average temperatures over recent (gologically speaking) earths history. It' goes back about 1000 years or so, but some researchers have pushed back the graph further. It shows a remarkably stable period of temperatures before the onset of the industrial revolution and a rapid uptick in temperatures since the industrial revolution. The long period of stable temperatures during which our modern society came about, our agriculture matured and cities developed is probably worthy of considering as a norm.
https://skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
Slackalice - ice cores back to c.200,000 yrs, stratigraphy, going back c5bn years. How's that?
Obviously the rock stuff is 'lower resolution' but the ice cores are very accurate.
Typical Tory bullshit of “saving” money today by borrowing it from the future.
they believe their own climate change denial and are betting against the consensus.
slackalice
What was the old normal?
it doesn't really matter. In fact even if the last 1000 years was a total outlier, that doesn't matter either, because it's still pretty much the climate we need. Normal doesn't come into it.
The question isn't if what's coming down the pipe towards us is normal or abnormal, it's the effect it will have. If it did turn out to be normal, that won't unflood Bangladesh, or unfail harvests.
(4)How do we deduce that change is dramatic enough to hashtag it as climate change/emergency?
From what we know of earth systems the response of ecosystems, and physical systems like oceans, the cryosphere and the atmosphere will be profound to a rapid increase in temperatures (and in the case of ecosystems to increase in CO2 ). These changes will eventually involve (but are not limited too) an increase in sea level which will affect low level land close to the current ocean - including many cities of course, but also agricultural land. Current crop growing areas may not be able to support crop growing in future..the people reliant on growing those crops will need to move or find something else to do - this is a source of political instablity. There are more consequences too...increased heatwaves some parts of the planet becoming effectively uninhabitable without aircon, different rainfall distributions again altering political stabilities.
Are these emergencies - thats a subjective assessment...something like a conger eel population than may be able to expand its territory into the New York underground system as it becomes submerged may not think so, but people who can't take the train to work may well do so. Someone will ultimately need to pick up the tab for relocating populations or building the stuff that keeps the water out, or we could just stop throwing out CO2 into the atmosphere so that the higher end impacts don't materialise..remembering of course that we (and our immediate ancesteros) have already committed us to some lower end impacts - which will have to be paid for.
The sooner we reduce the amount we are kicking out - the cheaper and easier it becomes for us and future generations - thats where the "emergency" bit comes from (although its not really a sciency expression). The more we put off emissions reductions the harder and more expensive the systems changes will be to stop the higher end impacts occurring
slackalice - maybe have a look here?
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
And also:
https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php
This BBC program gives a good summary of why the focus has shifted to tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere and net zero
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000fgcn
Awesome, I do like this place! Thank you for your responses people, I shall read and digest appropriately.
I must confess, I was wondering what level and type of response I’d get, so Once again, thank you for responding to my questions without prejudice.
I haven't read the whole thread so maybe this sort of thing has been mentioned, but years ago when there were floods in the south of England (Chichester) the initial response was along the lines of "act of God" but if I remember correctly the people actually deemed responsible were the people (EA?) who messed around with the waterways higher up in the hills and pointed the "floodwater paths" down towards peoples properties.
Slackalice .... if MOOCS are your thing the freebie Exeter uni one is quite good for someone genuinely interested in this
https://lifesciences.exeter.ac.uk/research/ess/mooc/
Every flood has conspiracy theories about someone opening dams or sluices to flood location x to save location y. Current stories on Faceache in South Wales blaming the recent Taff floods on DwrCymru opening the dams in the Beacons.
but years ago when there were floods in the south of England (Chichester) the initial response was along the lines of “act of God” but if I remember correctly the people actually deemed responsible were the people (EA?) who messed around with the waterways higher up in the hills and pointed the “floodwater paths” down towards peoples properties.
I’ve heard most of them but this is the best to date. River Lavant is a groundwater fed winterbourne. It literally comes out of the ground in East Dean. There are no hills or ‘waterways’.