Global Warming

[Xann]

21 minutes ago, VILLAMARV said:

still not getting it are they?

No, cos it'll mean them cancelling the new burner they've got planned in the NE.

They were hoping a thousand bonus jobs would offset some of the bad news about job losses in the region, as Secondary industry flees overseas post Brexit.

[Xann]

Govt fracking czar walks.

Barclays looking to unload their fracking interests.

[Xann]

Parliament declares climate change emergency.

[VILLAMARV]

Just to drag this over from the other thread

5 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

And it's not just vegetarians telling people to not eat meat.

It's scientists.

Less, not none. 

delivery is all important imo if you want people to engage with the evidence. Otherwise things descend quickly into vegans/commies etc and the point never gets addressed.

16 hours ago, mjmooney said:

Congnitive dissonance. I accept the meat v veg environmental argument 100%. But I can't do it. I just can't. I love meat, and the thought of living on just veg and fruit makes me feel depressed. 

Could you envisage yourself ever having a more flexitarian diet a la the article stevo posted? If i had to envisage a future without roast dinners or bacon and eggs, bacon sandwiches especially, a nice bit of ham at christmas, toad in the hole, a steak etc - basically all the meaty things I'd miss in a meat free dystopia - i'd be pretty depressed about it too. But they aren't things I eat every day

16 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

just to be uber pedantic, it's not the average person that needs to eat less meat, it's western diet peeps that need to eat less meat. meat

Nice graph be like India basically

17 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

yeah, it's difficult to name any one thing that would help, and it's no more fair to point at the millions of pets we feed than to ban driving on a Sunday or buying records or whatever

I agree. The game of poking it a bit here and seeing what happens has got to end though really hasn't it. Either we ignore the science and drive on regardless, or we make some serious changes to the way we do things.

17 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

On a personal level (I know the you wasn't me), but we're heading back towards being more veggie here.

Same here but not in any attempt to be more veggie, just thinking more about upping my fibre intake if anything and mainly thinking more about where things come from. Cutting out processed stuff and avoiding the supermarket as much as possible. We found a farm that delivers veg. I've got a few butchers I like and use. We're lucky in Cardiff to have the Fish Market on hand. Apart from the odd visit to stock up on tins and dry goods and popping in for bread eggs milk etc we don't go down the supermarket as much and even though we may be overpaying on leeks a bit in comparison we're saving overall on the food shop by not just grabbing some biscuits and crisps etc when we're walking around. And with our evening meal of the day we try and have 3 non meat meals a week. 2 with meat and 2 with fish. Not that that's going to save the world, but it's definitely healthier than how we were eating before that and it's making us get out of the rut of just cooking the same old things. After 10 years together the things we cook have been done a thousand times over, but when it's as simple as substituting a bit of Cauliflower for some chicken in a curry say or whatever there's hardly a substitution in taste. (I haven't had a veggie chilli that wouldn't taste better with meat in tbh although there's this roasted courgette and peppers enchilada thing that made me learn how to do refried beans that is absolutely lush)

Obviously from our posts in the gardening thread we're a bit inclined to grow a bit of food ourselves if we can. And growing up in a fairly rural community in Wales after we left The Midlands as I did, the idea of sheep grazing on mountains and hillsides needing to end is a bit nonsensical to me, but the argument of over farming or the impact of the chemicals cleaning up after BSE and Foot and mouth (the state of the rivers those years ), The slurry issues with huge herds on 'super farms', the lack of localised diversification and so on is absolutely undeniable. The idea of burning down the Amazon Rainforest to grow some Zebu cross breed or other to make sure there's a cheap source of "Beef" for findus lasagnes and cheap burgers or whatever is just utterly insane.

Going back to the graph thing though (and I understand the point you were making with it and that it wasn't this..) Do we really want our food sources dependent on market forces? is the question for me.

Sustainable systems could do an awful lot imo. It would need some serious joined up thinking though and a complete reversal of certain sections of the industry

[Stevo985]

49 minutes ago, VILLAMARV said:

Just to drag this over from the other thread

Less, not none. 

delivery is all important imo if you want people to engage with the evidence. Otherwise things descend quickly into vegans/commies etc and the point never gets addressed.

 

Same thing though really. 

Less is better for the environment.  None is even better. 

 

But yes delivery is important. Eating no meat is the ideal. But don’t alienate people trying to explain it. 

[bickster]

That's it, I'm going full-on denier, the ice caps can complete melt for all I care but this must be stopped

Quote

Queen’s Brian May wants a Live Aid concert for climate change

No No No No No No No No No Nooooooooooooo

[Pelle]

8 minutes ago, bickster said:

That's it, I'm going full-on denier, the ice caps can complete melt for all I care but this must be stopped

No No No No No No No No No Nooooooooooooo

I just read that and when I came on here and saw that you'd posted in this thread I just knew what it was about and I had a clue what it would say. Serious question, though: Against the concept or that Queen probably would play?

[bickster]

37 minutes ago, Pelle said:

Serious question, though: Against the concept or that Queen probably would play?

Both, Live Aid and its subsequent siblings were utterly appalling events

There has to be better ways to raise awareness than a bunch of "Big" artists using the event to sell themselves

[Pelle]

58 minutes ago, bickster said:

Both, Live Aid and its subsequent siblings were utterly appalling events

There has to be better ways to raise awareness than a bunch of "Big" artists using the event to sell themselves

I think the original Live Aid was a perfect way to raise funds and awareness. Now I think they need to try and find other ways. Live 8 wasn't a success and I don't think it will be now. For many reasons. I actually think that the artists in the original one did it for a good purpose. It was big and they wanted to be a part of it mostly for the right reasons. Most of them didn't have to sell themselves. These days I think it would be mostly because of that and the artists today ain't as iconic as they were back then. I mean, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Paul McCartney, Phil Collins, etc, like them or not, but they didn't need to sell themselves.

[bickster]

22 minutes ago, Pelle said:

I mean, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Paul McCartney, Phil Collins, etc, like them or not, but they didn't need to sell themselves.

They all sold a shitload of product on the back of it though

[Pelle]

56 minutes ago, bickster said:

They all sold a shitload of product on the back of it though

They sure did, and good luck to them. They still did more than I have ever done for charity.  

[KenjiOgiwara]

2 hours ago, Pelle said:

They sure did, and good luck to them. They still did more than I have ever done for charity.  

Relatively speaking are you sure? Just did some rough maths and apparantly Norway gives close to 40 billion a year to aid. Add what you give personally and I wouldn't be surprised if most of us are donating 3% of our net earnings each year. 

Live aid raised 30 million for how many artists. I don't know what they made, but I am not sure they are morally above you. 

[Pelle]

7 hours ago, KenjiOgiwara said:

Relatively speaking are you sure? Just did some rough maths and apparantly Norway gives close to 40 billion a year to aid. Add what you give personally and I wouldn't be surprised if most of us are donating 3% of our net earnings each year. 

Live aid raised 30 million for how many artists. I don't know what they made, but I am not sure they are morally above you. 

I thought of this too, and of course. I don't know how many percents I donate, it's not that much. But still, I can't fault anyone giving something of their free will. Ok, if superous richus oil magnate gave £1 and that's it I wouldn't be impressed, but like Bill Gates, even though he probably can count off his donations and it's a very small perventage of his wealth, etc, etc, he still gives a lot of money to charity and it most likely makes a difference. And then there are people like the old italian football player Tommassi, I think it was. Just taking what he really needed of his wahes and gave the rest to charity. That's really admirable.

[OutByEaster?]

None of that will really help with climate change though.

Money isn't the issue - legislation is, the ability to stop massive energy companies finding more and more harmful ways to drag fossil fuels out of the ground is what will matter. The Alberta Tar Sands in Canada alone will produce more CO2 than the UK has in its entire history and that's a single site of Tar Sands Oil recovery. You separating your coat hangers or using a paper straw isn't going to fix that, you're spitting in the sea. 

You can spend the money on education, but the education we need isn't on climate change - most everyone knows that the answer to that is less fossil fuels - the education we need is on economy and understanding why we aren't doing anything to reduce the reach of the fossil fuel industry - the education we need is on how power works in our economies and societies.

One of the reasons Live Aid worked is that it chimed with the prevailing economic theory of our age - people are starving - let's give them money.

We could have allowed them the freedom to profit from their own natural resources, or removed the debt that was crippling them, or opened our borders to them or helped them develop farming for themselves and their own communities - but we didn't, we mined their copper, we took the oil out of their land, we forced them to farm the things we needed and we saddled them with a massive debt for the privilege. Business as usual - but with the sticking plaster of millions of pounds raised by normal people who genuinely wanted to be helpful.

Millions of people who genuinely want to be helpful won't affect climate change with the two quid at the bottom of their purse - millions of people who genuinely want to be helpful can affect that by taking control of the democratic devices that should protect them from the avarice of our corporate structure and using those devices to stop the most harmful practices of our energy industries and of our trade agreements and of the global economic structure.

if pop stars want to help, they can chain themselves to a tractor somewhere and be tear gassed. In Brian may's case, that'll have the additional bonus of sounding better than anything else he's produced to date.

 

[VILLAMARV]

Basically, it turns out that song was wrong and money doesn't make the world go round after all.

[Xann]

Quote

Hundreds of “severely emaciated” puffin carcasses have washed ashore on an Alaskan island, and researchers believe thousands more have died at sea as warming waters continue to shrink their food supply.

Between October 2016 and January 2017, inhabitants of St Paul Island in the Bering sea found the starved bodies of more than 350 seabirds, primarily tufted puffins.

Analysing the location of bird carcasses and wind data, Timothy Jones at the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues estimated that between 3000 and 9000 birds died in total.

When they examined some of the bodies, they found no signs of infection or unsafe levels of toxins.

“Collected specimens were severely emaciated, suggesting starvation as the ultimate cause of mortality,” Jones wrote...

... These mass deaths are increasing in frequency and magnitude, and two other largescale seabird die-offs in the region have been directly linked to a marine heatwave starting in 2013, Jones wrote.

“Whether seabirds are resilient to these changes will ultimately govern their long-term viability in an increasingly variable climate,” he added.

New Scientist

[Xann]

Quote

The government has been taken to task by its own MPs for sending billions of pounds overseas to help build power plants that burn fossil fuels while claiming a climate victory on home soil.

The environmental audit committee said the UK is sabotaging its climate credentials by paying out “unacceptably high” fossil fuel subsidies to developing nations, while claiming to lead world in tackling the climate crisis. It called on ministers to stop by 2021 using taxpayer funds to lock poorer nations into a fossil fuel future.

The rebuke is the clearest cross-party criticism of the UK’s fossil fuel subsidies and comes after mounting international criticism in recent months.

Environmental activist Greta Thunberg said in April the UK’s “active, current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels” was “absurd”. The audit committee report found that UK Export Finance (UKEF), which provides lines of credit and insurance to help companies win business overseas, spent £2.6bn in recent years to support the UK’s global energy exports, of which £2.5bn was handed to fossil fuel projects. Only 4% of its funding, or £104m, was used to support renewable energy projects.

Earlier this year, former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon called on the UK to stop funding fossil fuel projects in the developing world.

Grauniad

[HanoiVillan]

Yeah, but it's fine though isn't it, that's their atmosphere, as long as ours is fine we're golden

[Xann]

Whilst India cooks in a heatwave, China has altogether different problems.

 

[Xann]

Quote

For the last week Britain has been encircled by a gigantic loop in the jet stream, the result of which has been some remarkably wet weather for the east of the country. While welcome for places that had been suffering a long drought, it is a stark warning of weather patterns to come.

The warming Arctic and loss of sea ice has meant that the jet stream does not flow strongly, as it once did, from west to east, pushing weather systems steadily across our shores and onwards into the continent. These days, because there is no longer a stark temperature difference between the Arctic and the Atlantic, the jet stream meanders, causing weather extremes by pushing cold air south and warm air far to the north. This can leave giant high-pressure systems, or in our case last week, a large low, trapped and static between these loops.

Research shows that this is likely to be a continuing pattern in the future, causing extreme weather events in North America and Europe as the Arctic continues to warm. The good news is that the loop over the UK is breaking down today and the jet stream is reforming. Longer term, however, it appears Britain’s benign weather will become more extreme, more often.

Grauniad

Whilst f*ckwit Tory climate change deniers try and ignore it.