Climate Change

[renton]

5 minutes ago, hk blues said:

When's it all happening?  When can we expect to begin to see tangible and real negative impacts on our day-to-day lives?  At the moment, I'm not convinced people will sacrifice much now for the future generations to benefit.

Well, one of the things you can expect to see, as millions of people are displaced, as burgeoning populations over crowd into traditionally wild spaces and wild animals and humans are forced into closer proximity, is an increased prevelance in viruses adapting to human vectors.

Not something anyone today can relate to, I'm sure.

[hk blues]

2 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Now. Syria is primarily a climate change driven conflict because of crop failures. Honeymoon favourite the Maldives is sinking and seeing a rise in Islamist violence as puddles appear in Male as fast as they can sandbag the resorts. 50 degrees has been seen in Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, the USA, Australia recently. Fires in the latter two are going to make some communities uninsurable soon. We've seen 40 degree temperatures several times in the UK in summer (jauntily covered by the Met Office as if it's on record breakers and Roy Castle is clapping along) and a few Christmases ago it was 18 degrees one day between Christmas and New Year. Flooding of the kind that would be newsworthy is just a thing we have to accommodate now, regularly washing away infrastructure as Atlantic weather systems that used to be kept away by pressure fronts regularly break through and make the west of the UK unrecognisable to the kind of rainfall experienced in the 1950s.

Yes, but when are we all going to die?  Seriously though, when are we going to feel the impact as individuals?  If it's 100+ years from now then I'm not convinced people will make significant changes to their lifestyle now.  People are selfish fuckers at the end of the day.  

[hk blues]

6 minutes ago, renton said:

Well, one of the things you can expect to see, as millions of people are displaced, as burgeoning populations over crowd into traditionally wild spaces and wild animals and humans are forced into closer proximity, is an increased prevelance in viruses adapting to human vectors.

Not something anyone today can relate to, I'm sure.

I see what you did there.

[Donathan]

Instead of trying to stop climate change, which clearly isn’t going to happen, we should just let it happen and then learn to adapt to live in our new environment.

[D Angelo Barksdale]

It's too late now imo.

They're going to squeeze everything they can out of this planet before fucking off in their escape pods to Mars or their luxury underground bunkers.

The rest of us will either burn, freeze or drown.

[Falcor Roar]

Just wait till the northern permafrosts melt. It'll all zip along disastrously from that point onwards. The planet will adjust in 10,000 years or so I guess.

The only hope now is to delay the inevitable for long enough to give us time to engineer some solutions. 

[hk blues]

2 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

We're not going to in the west. People without air conditioning in Iran will.

It does have effects on food security - if it's flooding regularly across huge swaths of farmland to stop towns getting flooded, then there are no earthworms, springtails, nematodes, fungae, bacteria in these fields for miles around & that harms fertility & what you can grow in them. Right now we can import lots of potatoes from Morocco to make up the shortfall now. In 30 years when Paris is like Istanbul and Edinburgh is like Paris, what will Marrakesh be like? Stuff of this sort adds up to having a human cost. I should add focusing on the human cost is itself pretty typically myopic of us.

Yes, we are myopic but hasn't that been what's kept us around thus far?  Adapting to change rather than creating it in  a sense. 

The changes we have seen, and will continue to see, tend to be incremental so the urgency to change isn't there.  At least, for most of us anyway. 

[hk blues]

Just now, MixuFruit said:

Sorta. It's worth remembering our brains are still the brains of people 100,000 years ago who moved around in groups of 100 or so, hunted everything in an area then upped sticks to do it again somewhere else. We're just doing the same thing now except we're everywhere.

I don't really agree change is incremental anymore. The boiling a frog thing was true in the 90s but not now.

I suppose the word incremental is in itself too subjective - hasn't the earth's surface temperature only increased by something like 1% over the last 100 years?   For me, that's within a range I reckon most people can shrug off because it's perceived as being so little.  Now, whether they are right or not is another matter, but we are talking about why people are/aren't doing more now to protect the planet's future.  

[jamamafegan]

Basically we are fucked unless the governments of the world put and end to practises. Humans will continue to fuel the fire, there are good folks out there like our man Mixu who are doing their best to reduce their carbon footprint - but the reality is that changing people’s behaviour would take years and years. It’s time we don’t have.

You need governments to take strong action and standing their ground. We could ban plastic bags by this time next week - instead we see banning single use bags and charging 10p for a plastic “bag for life” as progress. The use of palm oil in products could be banned, potentially forcing companies to simply change the type of oil they use in their products if they want to continue selling it here. Instead we have people using apps trying to avoid buying palm oil products. Then it comes to recycling, something we are all encouraged to do, and it turns out that only 30% of everything that goes to recycling gets recycled. Its utter madness. Sadly there are still far too many climate change deniers holding real progress back.

[Derry Alli]

I invested in a bike to do my part but tbh, its fucking pishing rehn and windy AF so I'm thinking about buying a car. 

I'm sorry. 

[hk blues]

13 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

The end result of global warming isn't 'like now, but 2 degrees warmer' it's the (effectively instant on the scale of a species existence) shift of the range of possible temperatures so many species are being seasonally exposed to temperatures & dependent things like level of oxygen in water that they have never experienced in their evolution. So to take the big example, coral reefs are largely doomed because every year they experience temperatures that induce heat shock in the symbiotic algae that live in their skeletons for long enough that they leave. The corals struggle on for a while but are eventually overcome by seaweed & die.

It's that all over the world in all kinds of areas. Crops that are cultivable now in one country probably won't be, which is fine if they can be replaced with something else, but what happens if there's nothing else? At the moment we can adapt but it's a dangerous game to be playing.

That's the problem though, isn't it?  The changes that are happening are mostly invisible to Joe Bloggs - does he really know or care about the depletion of coral reefs and does he think it impacts his life?  I think no.

Again, we're a selfish bunch in the main.

[DA Baracus]

The only way any meaningful change will happen is if the usual folk can make big profits from doing so.

Monetise the means to stop global warming causes and we might have a chance.

[hk blues]

15 minutes ago, Mr. Alli said:

I invested in a bike to do my part but tbh, its fucking pishing rehn and windy AF so I'm thinking about buying a car. 

I'm sorry. 

Thinking about it is fine.  

[Derry Alli]

1 minute ago, hk blues said:

Thinking about it is fine.  

Tell that to Johnathon Hunter! 

[hk blues]

2 minutes ago, Mr. Alli said:

Tell that to Johnathon Hunter! 

The problem is he didn't keep his thoughts to himself.  Come to think of it...

[G51]

This is a good time to talk through this issue, because the Scottish Government just released it's Programme for Government yesterday. Therefore we can examine it's commitments on environmentalism, particularly in regards to renewable energies.

It's important to bear in mind that the overwhelming majority of renewable capacity in Scotland lies within the Highlands and Islands.

First off, the good:

£6.9m for a scheme in Fife that will allow hydrogen to be used for domestic heating, in addition to a Hydrogen Action Plan and Policy Statement to be delivered by year end. Good start, even if hydrogen is a little unconventional for heating homes. There's also the promise of a "drivetrain testing facility" in 2021 that will develop hydrogen fuel cells for cars and other vehicles, though the details on this are vague.

Heat pumps are a big focus too, expert group being set up and will produce recommendations in the new Parliament. Heat pumps though do not work well in the northern parts of Scotland, so it will be interesting to see how the group accounts for this.

The really bad:

There is not a single mention of marine renewables in the document at all. Why is this bad? Well, did you know that there is an experimental tidal wave turbine scheme in the Pentland Firth that is producing outstanding results? And did you know that tidal turbines can produce exponentially higher levels of energy compared to wind turbines? I'll wager most folk didn't. Tidal turbines are so good, that they have the potential to utterly transform Scottish power generation and turn Scotland into a world leader in electricity exports. But the Scottish Government doesn't appear to have any interest in introducing new sites for tidal turbines. Perhaps because there are few viable sites in the Central Belt?

Overall, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the programme is misguided, and is heavily biased towards an area with very little renewable capacity in the Central Belt, which is a shame. It underlines the requirement for self-determination for the people of the Highlands and Islands, who once again get jobbed by remote Parliaments in Edinburgh and London.

[hk blues]

1 minute ago, MixuFruit said:

It's just an emblematic example. No reefs = no reef fish = no artisanal fishing or tourism. You can extend this to anywhere - Flooding = no soil microbiome = no fertility = heavy fertiliser use = flushing of fertiliser into water bodies = unseasonal algal blooms = mass mortalities of fish and shellfish = no langoustines in that nice wee pub you used to go to when you came on holidays.

I don't intend to go through hundreds of examples, it's just the principle that climate change destroys biodiversity and we as a society depend on biodiversity whether we know it or not.

No, I get it.  But, when the chain reaction has too many links people loose sight of what they can do to break the chain.  Or just don't care enough about some things to sacrifice.  If people are going to make sacrifices they generally need to think their is a benefit for them in some way. 

I think I've said it before - people are selfish. 

[The Moonster]

45 minutes ago, G51 said:

There is not a single mention of marine renewables in the document at all. Why is this bad? Well, did you know that there is an experimental tidal wave turbine scheme in the Pentland Firth that is producing outstanding results? And did you know that tidal turbines can produce exponentially higher levels of energy compared to wind turbines? I'll wager most folk didn't. Tidal turbines are so good, that they have the potential to utterly transform Scottish power generation and turn Scotland into a world leader in electricity exports. But the Scottish Government doesn't appear to have any interest in introducing new sites for tidal turbines. Perhaps because there are few viable sites in the Central Belt?

I had no idea about the scheme at the Pentland Firth, seems to be doing very well. Scratching my head a little as what could be the problems with it that we don't want to extend it to other areas. I'm less inclined to believe a central belt conspiracy, surely there's been a bit more said about the pros and cons of it?

[Alert Mongoose]

21 minutes ago, The Moonster said:

I had no idea about the scheme at the Pentland Firth, seems to be doing very well. Scratching my head a little as what could be the problems with it that we don't want to extend it to other areas. I'm less inclined to believe a central belt conspiracy, surely there's been a bit more said about the pros and cons of it?

Probably not related to the reason for funding issues but there are issues around how it changes the ecosystem ‘downwind’ of these.  Large scale use has the potential to impact tide patterns as well.

[G51]

32 minutes ago, The Moonster said:

I had no idea about the scheme at the Pentland Firth, seems to be doing very well. Scratching my head a little as what could be the problems with it that we don't want to extend it to other areas. I'm less inclined to believe a central belt conspiracy, surely there's been a bit more said about the pros and cons of it?

The scheme has been piloted in the Pentland Firth on the basis that it's one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world, with one of the fastest currents (3 - 5m/s). This is a result of it's unique geography - the position of the British Isles forces water filling the North Sea from the Atlantic Ocean (and vice versa) to use the Firth. That the turbines have proven so resilient in that water is a testament to the engineering and the technology underpinning their design.

The real issue is that in order to generate significant power from tidal turbines, you'd have to invest in the grid in the Highlands and Islands. The government is not long finished upgrading the Denny - Beauly line, with the Beauly - Dounreay line scheduled to be completed this year (though f*ck knows what's happening with that now). They've shown no incination for the further investment that would be required outside of the 275kV line, save for the HVDC cable they're laying between Wick and Moray.

You ask local people in the Highlands what the problem is, and they'll tell you that it's because they're ruled by a distant, unpreresentative Parliament that has no interest in investing into the area. That Parliament is in Edinburgh. It's hard to disagree with them.

Edited September 2, 2020 by G51