I was amazed when there were reports of massive wildfires in Spain or Portugal a few decades ago as I had never heard of wildfires in Europe previously.
Now it seems to be an annual occurence in many areas of Europe.
Something has certainly changed.
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As I indicated above, yes there was a heat wave, but the extreme and record temperatures in Paris were due in part to micro-climate effects and the prevailing weather conditions. One has to also look at the temps without the micro-climate effects.
Australian’s or the export of our eucalpts may be partly to blame…
https://time.com/5631695/portugal-wildfires/
Not only does can we influence the weather, we have also been very good a modifying the landscape with vegetation for forestry etc.
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Or maybe the world is just getting warmer:
Lomborg likes to distract and deflect. That doesn’t change reality.
In case anyone thinks we can get away with playing around:
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I’m keen to understand the “reality” of your thoughts on @phb’s reply, rather than the “playing around” …
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The Pacific Nations have signed a Declaration called the Nadi Bay Declaration yesterday in Fiji to call on nations to “refrain from using carry-over credits as an abatement for the additional Paris Agreement emissions reduction targets”. This is being seen as a rebuff to Australian comment re meeting the Paris Targets. Australia uses past unused credits from the Kyoto talks/agreements to “offset” current emissions as counted in the Paris agreements.
As the Pacific Nations are already appearing to be suffering from the effects of rising sea levels and other effects of Climate Change, this is an affect on consumers both in their countries and ours and any efforts that seek to diminish our role in more carbon reduction efforts seem to be contrary to that impact Climate Change may be having now and may have on our futures.
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Another day another possible impact of using the wrong stuff to do a job. It appears that a rise in usage of a banned CFC (ozone depleting) product may be occurring in China. Many HydroFluoroCarbons (HFCs) which replaced many ChloroFluoroCarbons (CFCs) in industry are being phased out due to their Greenhouse effects on Climate Change (they are very strong global warming agents being up to thousands times more “strong” than CO2 per unit of measurement eg gram or ppm). HFCs are used a lot in expanded foam production for Fridges and other insulated products, plus refrigeration and air conditioning. With their removal from use the use of CFC-11 (trichlorofluoromethane) has snuck back in.
To read the article by the Yale Uni School of Forestry and Environment newsletter see:
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An article the effects of climate change being visible from the International Space Station.
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Reality has caught up with the man famously responsible for Conservatives preferring “climate change” over “global warming”.
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An article by Greg Jericho in “The Guardian” raised some interesting points about denialists and those who support that climate change is happening and Global warming is going to have very serious impacts. Even BHP is getting on board that we need to change from burning CO2 in the way we currently are or we may face impacts such that “The planet will survive. Many species may not”. The last few sentences of the article may find approval with many:
"But OK, here’s both sides of the debate – for well over 40 years scientists have been researching and testing evidence that climate change is occurring due to CO2 emissions. They have found conclusive evidence that there is a link and that on the current path by 2100 global temperatures will likely reach 3C above pre-industrial levels.
The other side is that they have kept researching and testing the data, and sorry, they were wrong – it’s even worse than they thought."
If we get to 1.5°C warmer globally there will be impacts that are bad, if we get to 2°C above we are headed to a whole lot more misery. From the Summary for policy makers for the currently draft IPCC report
“If emissions continue at their present rate, human-inducedwarming will exceed 1.5°C by around 2040 (high confidence)”,
“If all anthropogenic emissions (including greenhouse gases, aerosols and their precursors) were reduced to zero immediately [my highlight], it is likely that any further warming would be less than 0.5°C over the next two to three decades (high confidence), and likely less than 0.5°C on a century time scale (medium confidence)”,
& a warning of effect for us “On land, risks of climate-induced impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems, including species loss and extinction, are substantially less at 1.5°C global warming than at 2°C. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C has large benefits for terrestrial and wetland ecosystems and for the preservation of their services (high confidence). Temperature overshoot, if much higher than 1.5°C (eg. Close to 2°C), could have irreversible impacts on some species, ecosystems and their ecological functions and services to humans, even if global warming eventually stabilizes at 1.5°C by 2100 (high confidence)”.
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Interesting article from 2017 (originally the study was done in 2015) about the studies that find contrary evidence (around 3% of the papers). Well they have been researched and found to have all erred in at least 1 of three main ways.
From an article at Quartz (qz.com) "Many had cherry-picked the results that conveniently supported their conclusion, while ignoring other context or records. Then there were some that applied inappropriate “curve-fitting”—in which they would step farther and farther away from data until the points matched the curve of their choosing.
And of course, sometimes the papers just ignored physics altogether. “In many cases, shortcomings are due to insufficient model evaluation, leading to results that are not universally valid but rather are an artifact of a particular experimental setup,” the authors write."
To read the article in full see the Quartz link above or to read another article about the study on the Guardian site by one of the study’s authors see:
Meanwhile in Zimbabwe they are mandating Solar Installs in new construction and have removed all tariifs associated with Solar energy component imports. Where are we going with ours?
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The IPCC streamed a press conference to present the Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Climate Change and Land at (Geneva Time) 10 am Thursday 8 August 2019. Address to get more detail is https://www.ipcc.ch/2019/08/07/livestream-of-ipcc-press-conference-2/
To read the fact sheet on the Special Report see:
Conference was around 6 pm Qld time on the 8th
Link to the FB video of the conference for those who missed the live stream (avoid the first 8 to 9 minutes as it is just prep stuff) :
To download the report visit the following link to access all the parts of the report:
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The problem is conspiracy theorists and their political allies and leaders. This piece starts off topic but gets squarely on topic. @grahroll cited many things but the singular one that might catch the eye of a conservative denialist is his pocketbook. So far the movers and shakers in the US especially, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, have been comparatively isolated from financial carnage. That can only last so long before they take notice.
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An article about the huge ice melt this year in Greenland. Some of the slides in the article allow comparison between 2018 and now. Huge amounts of ice have melted (though much much larger amounts are still thankfully frozen). A consequence of all this melting of non sea ice as it continues over the years is increased sea levels in the world, this will impact coastal settlements we now have.
Conspiracist ideation is a fascinating subject. The 2012 paper, which Lewandowsky facetiously titled NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax in some publications, but is formally known as The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science (the abstracts differ, giving informative insights), is worth studying.
Conspiracies, it seems, are “self-sealing”. Evidence against the theory is seen as part of the conspiracy. The more the evidence, the bigger the conspiracy.
Reaction to the 2012 paper quickly descended into farce. It spawned a second, larger study Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation (the link is to a pdf at the University of Western Australia). That paper was originally published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. It sparked an even more rabid response, leading to retraction by the journal. There’s some analysis of the affair at Skeptical Science and a blog post by one of those peripherally involved in the retraction. The comments are worth reading.
Taken together, the two papers and surrounding events give worthwhile insights into the psychology of denial.
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One of the low hanging fruit (no pun intended) is the waste through the production of foods/agricultural products. The IPCC suggests that around 25%+ of agricultural products and foods become waste (which is comparable to some reports on Australia). This 25%+ has embodied energy from its production, and has the potential to result in methane generation from its disposal.
For the agricultural sector, it could be a very quick way to reduce emissions, while action on improved efficiencies etc are also taken.
The challenge will be educating the wider community that non-perfect agricultural products are equally as good as the perfect ones. If we can change consumer perceptions, then there may be a chance that the ‘quality’ or appearance of food sold by the retailers can also change to meet that which occurs in the paddock.
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