Global Warming prog on Channel4

Re: Nothing to lose?

Precisely. How bonkers is it to import dead chickens from the other side of the globe when our farmers are now being paid by the government for "stewardship" of the land.
How utterly nutty is it to send turkeys to Hungary and import, erm, turkeys from Hungary.
And neckties are an invention of the devil, as are tuxedos.

And why is it that because someone sneezes on the Far Eastern stock exchanges people go out of business and jobs are lost in the UK?

People would be better advised to attend to these ridiculous situations than twat on about something that is not our fault and not controllable. /forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif
 
Re: Nothing to lose?

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True scientists caveat their opions, as they know not 100% full

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Haven't noticed Brendan caveating any of his opinions on Global Warming as a result of man's activities.

Just because a single programme appears that shows the folly of the whole man-the-destroyer theory, the programme-maker and anyone who agrees with him (and had expressed the opinions well before) become the target and not the story itself.
 
Re: Nothing to lose?

agreed.

i now have to go to bed, get up early to blam along a motorway in large car alone, jump on airplane to paris and then another larger plane to caribee as the taxes are lower from paris, get boat docs and an hour later return via same route as the docs are for a large unsustainable plastic yacht which i need to pre-register cos i don't want to pay any vat tax when (after another trip out by plane with more people, all of whom have found it cheaper to book seats even on on unused return leg of airflight and hence create unuseable demand.. ) i return to uk with said large plastic boat. Whereupon i will muck about and then go back to caribbee, again, for no reason, really.
 
Re: Nothing to lose?

I'll get my mind back on 'interesting' subjects like this in a couple of weeks time. Got my mind on a few other subjects at the moment which are occupying me more than normal.
 
Re: Nothing to lose?

what has sex life got to do with global warming?
Fairly normal response from nay sayers, evade the issue and side track diversions
 
Re: Nothing to lose?

Joke B , you remember , it's when you hear something that makes the corners of your mouth bend upwards , you do remember how to smile don't you ?? , the thread I was trying to keep up top is more important than this one so let's retire to the lounge if you want another discussion / argument , there's people worried about relatives and kicking up here aint gonna help them
 
Re: Nothing to lose?

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I was not trying to save the 3rd world at all, merely stating what some experts on a TV programme that you didn't even see had warned, that cutting emmissions was a severe threat to 3rd world growth. They were talking about a 3rd world needing industrial quantities of power not merely powering a nightlight from camel dung.

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No I did not see it. That is because I live and work in the developing world. Reception of C4 is not too good here. Your ‘experts’ were quite right that some international law that required them to reduce their CO2 emissions would be a ‘threat to 3rd world growth’. It would be immoral and arrogant to deny the developing world developed world standards because of damage that was (some say) done by the developed world. However, there is no such law, no prospect of such a law and no way that such a law could be enforced. No-one denies that development requires energy. You keep talking about camel dung and solar panels, ho ho ho. I say again, the developing world is developing it is increasing its energy consumption and its CO2 production. There is nothing anyone can do about that. The concerns over climate change provide an incentive to provide help/support/inducement to make this process cleaner and more efficient. It is a win-win situation for the developing world. If you like, they can black-mail the developed world.

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If you seriously believe that companies even governments will throw money at this, cut down the required years of testing and trials and then having spent their millions on develpment, sell the products at 3rd world affordable prices then that is in my book pie in the sky. In the meantime a bit of affordable power, in unlimited quantities will allow them to use existing cheaper products and not wait for manana to bring these new all-singing expensive ones, because believe me new stuff will cost dear.

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(Should I mention anti-HIV drugs ? That is precisely what has just happened to them. But they are unusual and arose through a traditional route because they were needed by rich people.)

I then mentioned ways in which this could happen. Someone mentioned the need to keep vaccines cold. That is a nice micro scale example of this process in action. There are ways to keep vaccines cold in a dirty way, that is happening today and power supplies fail and cars break down and people and their livestock die because the vaccines are no longer effective. Improvements to this system are happening at multiple levels, some with short term impact, some with long term possibilities. No-one will ever tell a health system not to use mains power and coal-powered generators to keep drugs cold. But where there is no (reliable) mains they will (and do) provide simple robust solutions that are well suited to the challenge and also happen to be very ‘clean’.

Longer term, there are very often ways of formulating drugs so that they are more robust with little or no development and licensing cost. Thermostable vaccines are already in use, others are under development. There are even trivial solutions like including an irreversible temperature indicator with each vial which are currently under-used.

There are also solutions beyond drugs and vaccines. The disease I spend most of my time working on is unlikely to ever have an effective vaccine for interesting biological reasons. The drugs available are old, toxic and often useless because of resistance. But there are a number of possible solutions. Some of these are being developed in partnership with the pharmaceutical industry – you say they will want to recover the costs of such an expensive exercise. Well it really is not as simple as that. It is true, that even if today I handed a compound that cured a disease which killed millions of people a year in Africa, big pharma would have no interest in it as a drug because they would never recover the cost of licensing it. But there are many different ways of approaching this issue in partnership with the pharma world, not easy to go into here, but which do show a novel way forward. Some of the most effective solutions don’t require any pharmaceutical intervention at all. Developing (in fact using) crops and livestock that are resistant to disease and pests, understanding the way resistance works and using novel combinations of genotypes is a really powerful way forward that IS ALREADY WORKING and having have an amazing effect. This is not pie in the sky and it is beyond simple pharmaceuticals. It is worth emphasizing here that more people die in Africa from animal and plant diseases than from human diseases.

So skipping a generation of technology is not pie in the sky, it is already happening. No-one is dying because they are waiting for blue sky solutions, they are dying because existing solutions are not robust enough. No-one is saying stop developing existing technology, they are simultaneously developing innovative solutions which invariably are also ‘cleaner’.

The mobile phone, as I said and as you derided, is another perfect example of the opportunities presented by not requiring a slavish trailing of the path of the developed world. You said it was impossible (I will treasure your paragraph about deserts and jungles); it happened 5 years ago.

All of the above applies regardless of climate change! Now if climate change is happening, then making more robust systems becomes more important, and if reducing CO2 will reduce the effect of climate change then it becomes more important still.
 
Re: Nothing to lose?

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True scientists caveat their opions, as they know not 100% full

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Just because a single programme appears that shows the folly of the whole man-the-destroyer theory, the programme-maker and anyone who agrees with him (and had expressed the opinions well before) become the target and not the story itself.

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Hmmmm .. the program mmaker had a dodgy reputation anyway .. the program was'nt balanced and you bang on constantly about how its all rubbish grabbing any titbit that reinforces your strongly held extreme view and then whinge when peeps disagee with you.

FWIW no matter what you think global warming is happening, I suspect the billions of tonnes of carbon bunged into the air is a factor in it, It certainly is'nt the only factor and very probably global warming would be happening even without it. However the danger is that the methane sumps will go and if the carbon emmisions have caused a rise of only a couple of degrees on top of alreay happening GW then that is significant.
 
Re: Nothing to lose?

We can build reliable electicity generstion systems that don't use fossil fuels. We cannot manufacture, at this stage, cost-effective and relaible personal transport that does not use fossil fuels. If the Prius was that good, everyone would want one. If the bicycle was the answer, it would need to be supplied free and out of town offices and shoplexes would be banned.

Ergo keep the fossil fuesl for transport purposes and move all power generation no non-hydrocarbon primary energy supplies. Sorry, that's going to be nuclear fission with current technology unless some cleverclogs manages sustainable fusion all of a sudden. We will also need to wave goodbye to our estuaries as they will probably all need tidal barrages. Probably more windmills too.

Energy demand is proportional to population growth and will therefore tend to go up, unless there are a large number of volunteers for sterilisation or euthanasia.
 
Re: Nothing to lose?

I can't really be arsed to look back to see if you saw the programme. Several people have posted about how they disagree with it's premise but admit they didn't see it.
So that's a case of "I don't care what it said, it's wrong" which would seem not to indicate an open mind.

Similarly you haven't read any of my posts in which I agree that Climate Change is occuring (not necessarily Global Warming) and that we need to conserve our dwindling finite resources.
But that isn't an admission that carbon is a driving factor in climate change. The opposing scientific opinion is that CO2 levels are a symptom of global warming and that water vapour is the driver.
 
Re: Nothing to lose?

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Several people have posted about how they disagree with it's premise but admit they didn't see it.
So that's a case of "I don't care what it said, it's wrong" which would seem not to indicate an open mind.

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I hope you are not referring to me! I did not see it. I do care what it said on one particular issue. No-one has argued that I am misinterpreting what it said. If it said what several people said it said, then it was wrong!
 
Water vapour and its role in GW

"We should not pretend that the effects of carbon dioxide are unimportant in the greenhouse effect. While the atmosphere has always contained a significant amount of water vapour, it is the apparent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the period of industrialization that is causing so much concern. It turns out that typical abundances of carbon dioxide are sufficient to make most of its absorption bands relatively opaque (see figure 3). Because the strong absorption bands are saturated, adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increases its absorptions logarithmically rather than linearly - a fact that is recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere is strongly related to temperature, as can be seen in figure 1. It might therefore appear that an increased greenhouse effect, which causes the atmosphere to get warmer, would also lead to more water vapour in the atmosphere. This would result in a positive-feedback system that causes the Earth to become increasingly warmer. However, as is often the case with atmospheric processes, the situation is not quite this simple. Water vapour in the atmosphere can change phase, which leads to more clouds, and greater cloud cover means that more sunlight is reflected straight out of the atmosphere. Crude calculations suggest that the two effects approximately balance each other, and that water vapour does not have a strong feedback mechanism in the Earth's climate."


full article here

http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/16/5/7/3
 
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The first part has been sound bites without their full context. Anyone want to give odds on whether there is going to be any real science presented - before the end of the prog /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif

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I watched the first half of the programme last night to see what all the fuss was about. Irrespective of whether there was any merit in the science behind it the programme itself was utter rubbish.

I am not an expert on the arguments but I am enough of a scientist to know the difference between what might be good scientific presentation and what is pure tosh - and this was the latter.
 
Tonight 10.00pm on More 4. The great global warming swindle repeat.
I expect we will then get another batch of totally polarised opinion saying "It's all rubbish!" or "It's all true" after it.
I also expect it to wander off the subject again just as before.....
Be interesting later in the week after the re-run, to have a poll.
Who thinks climate change is entirely due to man made Co2?
Who thinks man made Co2 has nothing at all to do with it?
Who thinks it's down to a variety of causes including Co2 increase?
For those who forgot and have drifted off the plot, this was the issue in the first place I think was it not?
Interesting having spent Sunday out in the glorious spring weather to return today to see how the issue has drifted.
Twisty has compared burning burning fossil fuels (bad) with burning wood and dung (good) which is irrelevant. This is an argument relative to sustainable energy sources not Co2 release. Set fire to anything and you release Co2!
We have all drifted off into talking about how the west is supressing development of the third world by arguing that they should not burn fossil fuels which is a secondary argument. Valid but not the key issue.
And Lakesailor might as well not post as he has a completely closed mind on the subject and sounds more like a religious fundamentalist in a knocking shop than someone attempting to contribute to a debate!
For the record I believe that all extreme views are suspect.
The sun's pretty big so minor variations on output will cause big changes down here. Co2 must have an effect but I am a bit uncertain about the chicken or egg argument, and I just think that the climate is such a complex thing that there can't be just one cause....
Lets leave the programme to run again and have a vote!
 
Re: Water vapour and its role in GW

Possibly true Jimi lad, I am quite happy to accept that in principle as a sensible argument, but do you think the argument presented for the cyclic activity of sunspots to long term change in temperature is false? Or do you think (as I do) that all the arguments put are over simplistic and both things are possibly true?
And can you also see the argument that an increase in temperature for whatever reason will actually cause an increase in Co2 which might possibly contribute to the correlation between the two things?
 
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Twisty has compared burning burning fossil fuels (bad) with burning wood and dung (good) which is irrelevant. This is an argument relative to sustainable energy sources not Co2 release. Set fire to anything and you release Co2!


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Not really - that is one of the BIG mistakes the programme made - not all CO2 production is equal.

Burning organic matter that has recently grown does not increase the CO2 in the atmosphere because that is where the Carbon came from in the first place (it's called the Carbon Cycle).

The only two things that really impact the CO2 is (a) releasing into the atmosphere Carbon that has been out of the carbon cycle for a long time (i.e. burning fossil fuels) and (b) significant reduction in the biomass on the planet (e.g. burning the rainforest and not replanting)

The fact that the programme didn't realise the difference was one reason I found it totally unreliable
 
Re: Water vapour and its role in GW

Too true Mike, there are very many factors and correlations... all too complex for me to understand fully. However as I understand it, sunspot activity and solar irradiance is at its high point for over 1000 years and is undoubtedly of major significance. However over the last 20 years this level has remained constant whilst temperatures have continued to rise thus indicating either a lag mechanism or some other factor.

Lane, L.J., M.H. Nichols, and H.B. Osborn 1994 in their research, Time series analyses of global change data, deduced that the combined effects of sunspot-induced changes in solar irradiance and increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases offer the best explanation yet for the observed rise in average global temperature over the last century. Using a global climate model based on energy conservation they constructed a profile of atmospheric climate "forcing" due to combined changes in solar irradiance and emissions of greenhouse gases between 1880 and 1993. They found that the temperature variations predicted by their model accounted for up to 92% of the temperature changes actually observed over the period, an excellent match for that period. Their results also suggest that the sensitivity of climate to the effects of solar irradiance is about 27% higher than its sensitivity to forcing by greenhouse gases.
 
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