October 29, 20241 yr Loss of oxygen in bodies of water identified as new tipping point Oxygen concentrations in our planet's waters are decreasing rapidly and dramatically—from ponds to the ocean. The progressive loss of oxygen threatens not only ecosystems, but also the livelihoods of large sectors of society and the entire planet https://phys.org/news/2024-07-loss-oxygen-bodies.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkCgZ6yMNx8:122
October 29, 20241 yr Co2 is the gas of life. It has risen from a near extinction level to its present usable amount. It could double with only beneficial effects. Innumerable natural vents are releasing it all the time. I've also quoted details of numerous man-made emissions from coal mine & waste dump fires around the world. And the reply was "oh its too difficult to put out". E.g. the landfill in Rainham that's been burning for 10yrs, really, too difficult? Pleeaase, a solution looking for a problem that doesnt exist! in the past, levels of CO2 took millions of years to change even a couple of percents. In the last 20 years, CO2 level has gone up 11%. It's not natural.
October 29, 20241 yr Is the rise in co2 a serious problem? There are points on both sides of the argument that need to be taken seriously. The level of co2 in the atmosphere has almost doubled since the mid 19th Century. It used to be 240 parts per million. It is now 419 parts per million. I think we can be pretty sure it will be at that double point in the next few years. The big question is though; is this a disaster? Well we know from physics that more co2 causes more greenhouse heating. So what? The mean global temperature of the planet is sub 15 degrees C. This is pretty low by the standards of the last half billion years. You can see where we are now at the right hand end of the graph. We are in an inter-glacial period. Earth has mostly been very much hotter than now for the entire period when complex life existed, so we are not talking about global loss of life events if the planet warms up (which it is doing). The mean global temperature is about one degree c warmer than it was in the mid 19th century. As Mickel keeps saying, CO2 is the foundational cornerstone of all our living organisms on the planet. Carbon is the molecule which makes life possible. It is the scaffolding of all life and it comes directly from the co2 in the atmosphere. Plants absorb co2 and make complex sugars, which are the fuel of all animal life. The chemical formula of sugar is C12H22O11. Note the 12 carbon atoms. All plants and animals are carbon based and can not exist without it. We eat the plants directly, and we eat them indirectly in the form of meat and fish, which ate the plants for us, before we ate them. Mickel is also right that the optimum co2 level for growing food plants is about double the current level of atmospheric co2. Greenhouse growers artificially boost the atmosphere inside their poly tunnels to that sort of level. They do it because the plants grow faster and produce much more food. He is also correct that the periods of minimum co2 levels just below 200 parts per million which happened about 300 million years ago and again about 2 million years ago were not that far above the point where plants could have gone extinct. On the other hand, the temperature of the planet is not the same everywhere. That moderate average temperature of 15C varies hugely as you move about the earth. Human populations exist all over the planet, struggling in the more extreme areas, both hot and cold. Rising temperature may well improve life for some, but it will make other places uninhabitable and dangerous. There are plenty of places where the summer day time temperatures approach and even exceed the temperature at which humans and some other animals will die. You will be very uncomfortable and unable to exert yourself at 40c. If your core body temperature gets over 43 - 44 c you will die, so warming - which is certainly happening and will continue, will make parts of the planet uninhabitable. But of course, large areas of the planet are pretty much uninhabitable anyway. 2/3 of it is covered in oceans. You won't last long dumped in an ocean without a pretty good life support system called a ship. We can barely live in desert areas, or in the very cold polar and semi polar regions. People will die in very large numbers and they will move in very large numbers. They already are doing. Some areas which are now cold will be more comfortable and productive. Change is on the way for sure. Land use and farming will have to change. Crops grown in some areas will not be able to continue as staple products. Others will need to be found. They exist. We can do that. Some animals will need to change their normal range and many will die out. Others will take advantage of the new environment vacated by the less hardy. It is ridiculous to pretend that warming (which is already inevitable) won't cause problems. That said, living on the planet has ALWAYS given us and the animals around us plenty of problems. The changes will be faster than in the previous changes, because the release of fossilised carbon is at a very high rate. In general the only past prehistoric releases of carbon on this scale have occurred during strange geological events which created widespread volcanism and flood basalt flows like the Siberian Trapps and the Deccan Trapps. These upheavals caused extinction events and millions of years of climactic upheaval. None of them are recent. One unpredictable outcome will likely be the release to the atmosphere of frozen methane deposits from the soil in tundra areas, and from methane clathrates under the presently cool arctic seas. Methane has per volume, twenty times the warming potential of co2. Water vapour too is a warming gas and warmer oceans will mean more evaporation. These issues may form a positive feedback loop which could and likely would accelerate warming. On the other hand, more water vapour clouds may reflect more sunlight straight back to space. The picture is multi-dimensional and complex. Co2 levels are now double what they were during the entire lifetime of our species. There will be very large upheavals of our agricultural systems, and settlement patterns. Melting ice caps and sea level rise, including the submergence of many coastal regions and cities will mean migration and loss of infrastructure which will need to be replaced. We won't be going extinct though, but in some parts there will be famine, war, mass migration and upheavals. Whether you believe this or not, it is happening and will continue to happen because we have already put a lot of that fossil carbon back into the atmosphere. That is where it came from originally during the hot periods of earth's past. The coal we have been burning and the Chinese can't seem to get enough of right now, formed in hot swamp forests millions of years ago during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Trees pulled carbon out of the atmosphere, died and rotted under the swamps forming coal. Oil formed from the remains of carbon based plants and animals. People rightly point to Milancovitch Cycles in explaining periods of warming and cooling in the geological record, but co2 cycles were also very strong drivers of the rising and falling temperatures. Temperature is a mater of heat input from the sun AND heat retention by the atmosphere and the gasses in it. Climate is a complex system with more than one input. Whatever we think as a country and as individuals, we are going to have a hard time getting agreement on what to do about our inputs to climate change. Energy is such a liberating gift that many big emitters of co2 will not easily give up the advantages they get right now - whatever impact it may later have on their future. Politicians generally think on very short time scales. They won't risk severe unpopularity by advocating policies which make people's lives worse right now, even if the actions of today make things much worse in the future. If they do, people in democracies will get rid of them for short term gains. The best hope for ending our release of fossilised carbon, is probably new technological development, but it will take some pretty spectacular discoveries to make fossil fuels redundant. I wonder what they might be?
October 29, 20241 yr Stevie Nicks says Fleetwood Mac would have been ‘done’ without 1977 abortion Legendary singer-songwriter tells Rolling Stone new song was inspired by battle to reinstate federal abortion rights https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/oct/27/stevie-nicks-abortion-fleetwood-mac
October 29, 20241 yr The best hope for ending our release of fossilised carbon, is probably new technological development, but it will take some pretty spectacular discoveries to make fossil fuels redundant. I wonder what they might be? I don't think we need to make fossil fuel redundant. The point is sustainability. If you burn methane gas for example, and synthesise it again with solar energy, then the system is sustainable. The same has happened with wood chipping. The solar capacity increases about 29% last year and will continue for sometime, because it's the sheapest source of energy at the moment. I have just renewed my gas supply contract, it's gone back to 5p a kwH. BP shares dropped 4.5% today.
October 29, 20241 yr I don't think we need to make fossil fuel redundant. The point is sustainability. If you burn methane gas for example, and synthesise it again with solar energy, then the system is sustainable. The same has happened with wood chipping. The solar capacity increases about 29% last year and will continue for sometime, because it's the sheapest source of energy at the moment. I have just renewed my gas supply contract, it's gone back to 5p a kwH. BP shares dropped 4.5% today. I would not underestimate the appetite of countries like the USA and China for fossil energy. We may have reduced our co2 emissions by about half since 1990, but they have not. The USA has reduced them by only 3% and China now emits five times what it did in 1990. The scale of their emission of co2 is huge. China emits every year now 11.7 billion metric tonnes of co2 which is about a third of the total planetary emission and the USA emits 6.3 billion metric tonnes. UK emits only about 400 million metric tonnes. Compared to the giants, the UK's totals are just after the decimal point of theirs.
October 29, 20241 yr all of my robots are made in china and get free postage as well and come air mail and no import fee either
October 29, 20241 yr Author Pleeaase, a solution looking for a problem that doesnt exist! So, you are saying global warming doesn't exist? .
October 29, 20241 yr No, there appears to be no global warming trend. But there is a strong "sceance" data tampering trend, driven by $€£ .
October 30, 20241 yr No, there appears to be no global warming trend. But there is a strong "sceance" data tampering trend, driven by $€£ . Nonsense. This is total rubbish. The Internet allows crazy people to manufacture nonsense that appeals to idiots and the ignorant. They then spread it, recruiting an army of fools. That video is ignoring the fact that NASA has satellite data for the whole planet since the mid 1970s. There are several satellites measuring IR temperature recordings multiple times a day for every part of the planet. The data from the sensors is calibrated carefully and they agree with one another. WHY would NASA falsify data? To suggest it is absolute madness. An army of dedicated, highly qualified scientists devise and create fantastic technology which can sense and map planets millions of miles away, put long lasting robotic rovers on Mars which crawl about sampling rocks and performing absolute miracles of research and send back the data. They have meticulously monitored our own planet, guide us on our satnav devices to an accuracy of a few feet, and provide pin point accuracy for weapons systems, but that buffoon who made that video thinks they can't measure the temperature of the earth. There is absolutely no doubt that the planet is slowly warming up. There is doubt about how bad it will get though, and it is my belief (it can only be 'belief' because we do not know) that it will not be as bad as many people think. I wrote a long post the other day about it above here. The stupidity of this conspiracy nonsense is beyond annoying. Of course - it will find support on here... Disgusting stupidity.
October 30, 20241 yr No, there appears to be no global warming trend. But there is a strong "sceance" data tampering trend, driven by $€£ how do you explain why a few things happen around the world in our lifetime: shrinking polar ice cap, antartica ice shelf, disappearing glaciers in all mountainous countries, great barrier reef coral bleaching, el niño in the Southern ocean?
October 30, 20241 yr how do you explain why a few things happen around the world in our lifetime: shrinking polar ice cap, antartica ice shelf, disappearing glaciers in all mountainous countries, great barrier reef coral bleaching, el niño in the Southern ocean? No - it's all a conspiracy for the HillBilly fraternity. Don't show them photographs of the Antarctic Ice Shelf or retreating glaciers, and for God's sake don't show them measured temperature changes - don't you know they have been doctored by Kamala's people, or senile Biden dreamed them up during one of his morning, afternoon, or evening naps. You just wonder why these people never seem to have had an education. They are like those people who believe in bleeding and weeping statues, and miracles. Total delusion and stupidity.
October 30, 20241 yr No - It's not real. It is a conspiracy. It is caused by cloud seeding. Tell me anything but that it is the result of rising temperatures.... I don't want to hear anything about that...... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93qlpp5gxvo Valencia Spain has a year's worth of rain in eight hours. Meteorologists believe the warming of the Mediterranean, which increases water evaporation, plays a key role in making torrential rains more severe.
October 30, 20241 yr "You concentrate and you try to make sense of something that’s essentially nonsense and, actually, that’s part of getting you hooked further in." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8vddmjl01o https://psychwire.com/profiles/18tw0as
October 30, 20241 yr After several years of incompetent government by people I voted for, I really hoped we would see some sound government. The jury is still out, but having already settled pay disputes by paying massive rises to people who were already by any standards well paid, and having made around £20 Bn of commitments to those public sector people, I am starting to wonder if we are going back to the Labour style of the 1970s when directly through pay inflation, government ended with 28% inflation. Most of the inflation we saw in the last couple of years which touched 10% was NOT down to what government had done. It was down to the rise in energy prices caused by the Ukraine war. The same kind of levels of inflation affected countries across the world and were seen in Europe and America and inflation is playing out as an issue in the Presidential election there right now, so it wasn't simply a UK thing. I accept the disastrous Truss mini budget put up interest rates, but they were still down at historic levels which had been like that for over a hundred years until the 2008 crash. I hope this government will do well. If they don't, we are all going to suffer, one way or another.
October 30, 20241 yr We have reached bottom with liz truss. The only way is up. I don't think pay rise for the junior doctors is a mistake. We need to retain them here and stop them leaving for Australia.
October 30, 20241 yr Is the rise in co2 a serious problem? There are points on both sides of the argument that need to be taken seriously. The level of co2 in the atmosphere has almost doubled since the mid 19th Century. It used to be 240 parts per million. It is now 419 parts per million. I think we can be pretty sure it will be at that double point in the next few years. The big question is though; is this a disaster? Well we know from physics that more co2 causes more greenhouse heating. So what? The mean global temperature of the planet is sub 15 degrees C. This is pretty low by the standards of the last half billion years. [ATTACH type=full" alt="60447]60447[/ATTACH] You can see where we are now at the right hand end of the graph. We are in an inter-glacial period. Earth has mostly been very much hotter than now for the entire period when complex life existed, so we are not talking about global loss of life events if the planet warms up (which it is doing). The mean global temperature is about one degree c warmer than it was in the mid 19th century. As Mickel keeps saying, CO2 is the foundational cornerstone of all our living organisms on the planet. Carbon is the molecule which makes life possible. It is the scaffolding of all life and it comes directly from the co2 in the atmosphere. Plants absorb co2 and make complex sugars, which are the fuel of all animal life. The chemical formula of sugar is C12H22O11. Note the 12 carbon atoms. All plants and animals are carbon based and can not exist without it. We eat the plants directly, and we eat them indirectly in the form of meat and fish, which ate the plants for us, before we ate them. Mickel is also right that the optimum co2 level for growing food plants is about double the current level of atmospheric co2. Greenhouse growers artificially boost the atmosphere inside their poly tunnels to that sort of level. They do it because the plants grow faster and produce much more food. He is also correct that the periods of minimum co2 levels just below 200 parts per million which happened about 300 million years ago and again about 2 million years ago were not that far above the point where plants could have gone extinct. On the other hand, the temperature of the planet is not the same everywhere. That moderate average temperature of 15C varies hugely as you move about the earth. Human populations exist all over the planet, struggling in the more extreme areas, both hot and cold. Rising temperature may well improve life for some, but it will make other places uninhabitable and dangerous. There are plenty of places where the summer day time temperatures approach and even exceed the temperature at which humans and some other animals will die. You will be very uncomfortable and unable to exert yourself at 40c. If your core body temperature gets over 43 - 44 c you will die, so warming - which is certainly happening and will continue, will make parts of the planet uninhabitable. But of course, large areas of the planet are pretty much uninhabitable anyway. 2/3 of it is covered in oceans. You won't last long dumped in an ocean without a pretty good life support system called a ship. We can barely live in desert areas, or in the very cold polar and semi polar regions. People will die in very large numbers and they will move in very large numbers. They already are doing. Some areas which are now cold will be more comfortable and productive. Change is on the way for sure. Land use and farming will have to change. Crops grown in some areas will not be able to continue as staple products. Others will need to be found. They exist. We can do that. Some animals will need to change their normal range and many will die out. Others will take advantage of the new environment vacated by the less hardy. It is ridiculous to pretend that warming (which is already inevitable) won't cause problems. That said, living on the planet has ALWAYS given us and the animals around us plenty of problems. The changes will be faster than in the previous changes, because the release of fossilised carbon is at a very high rate. In general the only past prehistoric releases of carbon on this scale have occurred during strange geological events which created widespread volcanism and flood basalt flows like the Siberian Trapps and the Deccan Trapps. These upheavals caused extinction events and millions of years of climactic upheaval. None of them are recent. One unpredictable outcome will likely be the release to the atmosphere of frozen methane deposits from the soil in tundra areas, and from methane clathrates under the presently cool arctic seas. Methane has per volume, twenty times the warming potential of co2. Water vapour too is a warming gas and warmer oceans will mean more evaporation. These issues may form a positive feedback loop which could and likely would accelerate warming. On the other hand, more water vapour clouds may reflect more sunlight straight back to space. The picture is multi-dimensional and complex. Co2 levels are now double what they were during the entire lifetime of our species. There will be very large upheavals of our agricultural systems, and settlement patterns. Melting ice caps and sea level rise, including the submergence of many coastal regions and cities will mean migration and loss of infrastructure which will need to be replaced. We won't be going extinct though, but in some parts there will be famine, war, mass migration and upheavals. Whether you believe this or not, it is happening and will continue to happen because we have already put a lot of that fossil carbon back into the atmosphere. That is where it came from originally during the hot periods of earth's past. The coal we have been burning and the Chinese can't seem to get enough of right now, formed in hot swamp forests millions of years ago during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Trees pulled carbon out of the atmosphere, died and rotted under the swamps forming coal. Oil formed from the remains of carbon based plants and animals. [ATTACH type=full" alt="60448]60448[/ATTACH] People rightly point to Milancovitch Cycles in explaining periods of warming and cooling in the geological record, but co2 cycles were also very strong drivers of the rising and falling temperatures. Temperature is a mater of heat input from the sun AND heat retention by the atmosphere and the gasses in it. Climate is a complex system with more than one input. Whatever we think as a country and as individuals, we are going to have a hard time getting agreement on what to do about our inputs to climate change. Energy is such a liberating gift that many big emitters of co2 will not easily give up the advantages they get right now - whatever impact it may later have on their future. Politicians generally think on very short time scales. They won't risk severe unpopularity by advocating policies which make people's lives worse right now, even if the actions of today make things much worse in the future. If they do, people in democracies will get rid of them for short term gains. The best hope for ending our release of fossilised carbon, is probably new technological development, but it will take some pretty spectacular discoveries to make fossil fuels redundant. I wonder what they might be? Wrong conclusion. Ignore the paid 33% "sceance-tists". The tech advances hoped for, like ev's, are being built in the East with untold amounts of co2 emitted from their manufacture. Far more than they'll ever supposedly "save". So even by your own metrics. It's one step forward, two steps back. ( P.s. Greening from more co2 will improve the "climate".) Let's look at "Safe" Pre-Industrial co2 level Weather, oops, I mean "Climate"..
October 30, 20241 yr Or go back even further.. Nothing to do with man. The planet does, what the planet does, and all we can do is hold on.
October 30, 20241 yr The tech advances hoped for, like ev's, are being built in the East with untold amounts of co2 emitted from their manufacture. Far more than they'll ever supposedly "save". So even by your own metrics. It's one step forward, two steps back. the amount of CO2 in the manufacturing of EVs and old cars are roughly about the same, ICE cars continue to burn fossil fuel throughout the hundreds of thousands of miles while EVs don't. The carbon credits given to EV manufacturers account for the difference.
October 30, 20241 yr We have reached bottom with liz truss. The only way is up. I don't think pay rise for the junior doctors is a mistake. We need to retain them here and stop them leaving for Australia. Doctors are not badly paid. Not at all. My partner was a doctor for forty years. GP average salaries vary between £70,000a year and £114,000. Hospital doctor salaries are as follows: Specialist training: A basic salary of £43,923 to £63,152 Specialty doctors: A basic salary of £52,530 to £82,400 Specialist grade doctors: A basic salary of £83,945 to £92,275 Consultants: A basic salary of £99,532 to £131,964 Starting pay for a primary or secondary school teacher in England starts at £31,650, with higher pay in London. What is more, teachers and doctors have a rising scale of pay as they gain in experience. Over time this makes a significant difference to pay. Senior staff can earn a lot more than the starting salaries. In the mid 1990s the head teacher at our local comprehensive school where my sons were, was on £100,000. Senior staff at that time were on £60k and £70k. That was 30 years ago. Train drivers are paid between £30,000 and £70,000. TFL drivers pay is between £57,217 and £61,620. If you think these people are badly paid and in need of huge increases, then you live in a different world to me.
October 30, 20241 yr Let's look at "Safe" Pre-Industrial co2 level Weather, oops, I mean "Climate".. the problem is those who don't believe global warming happens don't believe climate scientists. Still, here are their general findings: CO2: contributes 76% to global warming through green house effect Methane: 16% NO2/NO: 2% Flkuorines: 2% Other sources: 4% We have to reduce the rapid growth of emissions to give time to scientists to develop more sustainable solutions.
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