Global Warming

[Xann]

Danish meteorological team get a surprise when they try and collect their equipment.

This photo was taken 5 days ago in Greenland by Steffen M Olsen.

[sne]

 

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Satellite images of Chennai from last year and this year show how extreme drought dries the landscape.

India's sixth largest city, with 4.6 million inhabitants, is about to run out of water. 

People flock to the streets to fill containers with water.

The long-lasting heatwave and extreme drought in India have so far harvested 137 lives. 

Of the nation's 1.3 billion inhabitants, 600 million are estimated to suffer from acute water shortages, CNN reports . 

"Drinking water problems have arisen in Chennai"

https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/klimat/miljonstaden-i-indien-fore-och-efter-extremtorkan/

[VILLAMARV]

 

 

 

  Sometimes, I love this city.

[Xann]

7 minutes ago, VILLAMARV said:

Sometimes, I love this city.

Bristol

[VILLAMARV]

3 minutes ago, Xann said:

Bristol

 

Edit: (no real need to press play I just liked the analogy!)

Edited July 15, 2019 by VILLAMARV

[chrisp65]

The four lane road in front of Cardiff Castle splits two main tourist areas in half.

That road is always busy. Except for when the close if for pop concerts. Oh, and except for when they close it for rugby internationals. Oh, and the Wales football team. Tour De France winners. James and the Giant Peach. International Conferences. Christmas. Pride. St David's Day.

It's so much nicer with that road closed.

It added exactly zero time to my commute in to town today having that road closed.

It would make environmental, safety and tourist sense to permanently close it to all but emergency vehicles.

[sne]

Shouldn't this have gotten more room in the news?

Massive and very interesting piece in the Guardian. Barely gotten a mention in Swedish news despite the papers being filled with pieces on the environment and Greta Thunberg

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Can planting billions of trees save the planet?

When Clare Dubois’s car skidded on an icy road in Stroud, Gloucestershire, a tree prevented her vehicle tumbling into a ravine. It was, she says, a sign. Humanity is nearing a precipice. Trees can stop us going over the edge.

This calling was so strong that Dubois, a business life coach, founded TreeSisters with a friend, Bernadette Ryder, to take on a daunting mission: to reforest the tropics within a decade.

In 2014, their new charity funded its first 12,000 trees by encouraging western women to make small monthly donations to reforestation projects in the tropics. Today TreeSisters is planting 2.2m trees (average cost: 33p a tree) each year across Madagascar, India, Kenya, Nepal, Brazil and Cameroon.

Forests can stop runaway global heating, encourage rainfall, guarantee clean water, reduce air pollution, and provide livelihoods for local people and reserves for rare wildlife. Politicians are waking up to the potential of “natural climate solutions” – reforestation and other ecological restoration – to capture carbon and tackle the climate crisis. Such solutions could provide 37% of the greenhouse gas mitigation required to provide a good chance of stabilising global heating below the critical 2C threshold.

In March the United Nations announced a Decade of Ecosystem Restorationand has set a target to restore 350m hectares – an area bigger than India – by 2030.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/19/planting-billions-trees-save-planet

[chrisp65]

Or, save all the hassle of planting trees by stopping deforestation.

By buying less shit.

That's the problem we've got, our very economic model we judge ourselves on, relies on buying ever more shit.

They've just re furbished the Morrisons supermarket by me. You can now put loose apples in a paper bag. Which is an improvement.

There is also now a whole department or area, called 'Party' where you can buy balloons and candles and disposable plastic shite for parties.

On the whole, I'd say a negative refurb.

[VILLAMARV]

Probably as good a thread as any for this one.

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River Frome tributary turns bright blue

A tributary of a river has has been turned bright blue by a mystery substance.

The Environment Agency said it was carrying out tests on the the tributary of the River Frome in Somerset after the water turned a luminous colour.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-49305056

[VILLAMARV]

On 17/07/2019 at 13:55, chrisp65 said:

Or, save all the hassle of planting trees by stopping deforestation.

.............................................

That's the problem we've got, our very economic model we judge ourselves on,

 

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Contractor admits felling Penllergaer redwood tree

• 12 August 2019

A self-employed tree contractor unlawfully cut down 70 trees, including a 200-year-old giant redwood, near a housing development. Arwyn Morgan was contracted by Enzo's Homes Ltd to carry out felling next to woodland in Penllergaer last year. He pleaded guilty at Swansea Magistrates' Court to contravening a tree preservation order after initially denying the charge. Company director Fiorenzo Sauro pleaded not guilty and his trial continues. The court heard a Tree Preservation Order had been put in place to protect the redwood tree at the site in Swansea. The city council's tree officer Alan Webster said he had visited the site in November after a local councillor contacted him to say the rare redwood had been felled the day before.

'Irreplaceable'

He told the court the cost of replacing the tree would be around £250,000 - but added it was practically "irreplaceable".

"This is ancient woodland dating back hundreds of years. It is important," he said.

"You couldn't replant a tree of this size but this [its size] is used to extrapolate a valuation."

Counsel for the prosecution Annabel Graham Paul said Mr Sauro either knew the trees were being cut down by Morgan or had been "reckless".

"Mr Sauro is an active and hands-on director with day-to-day involvement in business, and is at least neglectful of what was going on onsite," added Ms Paul.

Mr Sauro's denies the charge and his trial continues. Morgan will be sentenced on 24 September.

'Coz, you know, money.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-49318054

[limpid]

8 hours ago, VILLAMARV said:

'Coz, you know, money.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-49318054

Mature trees do not produce oxygen from carbon dioxide. Only trees which are growing do this.

[VILLAMARV]

 

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The giant coastal redwoods of northern California are breathtaking—literally. They are the tallest trees on Earth, growing to more than 350 ft. (106 m), with trunks that can be more than 25 ft. (7.6 m) across. The oldest redwoods date back to the time of the Roman Empire, though few of that age still remain, since more than 95% of the original old-growth forest has been lost, mostly for lumber. And the trees are unparalleled living carbon banks—a large redwood can sequester a ton of carbon from the air in its trunk and roots.

Despite the redwoods’ beauty, though, scientists have long assumed that very old trees like them absorb less and less carbon as they age, slowing down like the rest of us as we get older. That idea has important implications for global warming: climate scientists assume that younger trees will take up carbon more rapidly than their older counterparts, which means youth is valued when it comes to using trees as carbon stores.

But according to a new study published in Nature, it turns out that the oldest trees are actually still growing rapidly, and storing increasing amounts of carbon as they age. An international research group led by Nate Stephenson of the U.S. Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center reviewed records from forest studies on six continents, involving 673,046 individual trees and more than 400 species, going back as far as 80 years ago. For 97% of the species surveyed, the mass growth rate—literally, the amount of tree in the tree—kept increasing even as the individual tree got older and taller. Even though trees tended to lose leaf density as they aged—which, as a victim of male pattern baldness, I can sympathize with—the total amount of leaf cover kept increasing as the tree itself got bigger and older. In other words, the number of leaves per cubic foot fell off but the leafy surface area grew and grew. That enabled the tree to keep absorbing an increasing amount of carbon as it aged.

For some species of trees, that increase could be enormous. A single big tree could sequester the same amount of new carbon in a year as might be contained in an entire mid-sized tree.

................................................

Still, on a forest by forest as opposed to tree by tree basis, youth does beat age, with younger stands of trees sequestering more carbon overall than ones near retirement age. That’s because as trees in an area of forest age, some of them will die, leaving older and bigger trees but fewer of them, sort of like the way a high school class will begin to thin out as the reunions pile up over the years. But on a tree by tree basis, elderly trees are carbon vacuums.That’s one more reason to appreciate—and conserve—these ancient, majestic forests.

http://science.time.com/2014/01/15/study-shows-older-trees-absorb-more-carbon/

[limpid]

30 minutes ago, VILLAMARV said:

http://science.time.com/2014/01/15/study-shows-older-trees-absorb-more-carbon/

Every day's a learning day. I thought trees stopped growing - from this report that's not the case.

[VILLAMARV]

12 hours ago, limpid said:

Every day's a learning day. I thought trees stopped growing - from this report that's not the case.

Even if the thinking is changing on that which effects the net O2/CO2 argument I can't help wondering where the wood ended up in that particular case. The net production argument surely pails into insignificance next to the tonnes of Carbon probably sequestered in that 200 yr old redwood alone. I doubt it's off to be turned into tables or beams if it's been done on the sly. And 70 trees in total. So where does all that carbon go now?

And the benefits to the general bioculture with the presence of mature trees has never really been questioned has it? That's before the carbon storage arguments and with that surely the benefit of storage over long periods of time is the optimal achievement given our current plight?

Anyway trees trees trees. I mentioned in another thread about the last couple of years of flood defence work near enough to where I am. The first we knew about it (because we don't go down the council every day to check what it is they are 'consulting on!) was when chainsaws turned up and started felling trees. Over 30 of them and proper mature trees too. From a water storage standpoint a strange decision you might say. There is still a lot of anger from local residents about it. But without digressing into an NRW/Cardiff Council rant, that's why I've read up on trees a bit over the last few years and feel the need to stand up for the old ones

 

Edited August 14, 2019 by VILLAMARV
needed editing :)

[VILLAMARV]

 

'Man' "enjoys" his own 'joke' about kids being drowned at sea. He didn't mean it! he just said it out loud publicly is all. Ho Ho Ho. How the proles reacted when I poked them. Ho Ho Ho.

I dont think I'll ever post anything that bad again JHB, Banks and Caroline Lucas all in one go. I'm going to wash now

[Xann]

We live in hope of a karma bomb for Banks.

[VILLAMARV]

 

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture is supposed to use the “latest available science” to help the nation’s farmers avoid risk, according to its own mission. So it was more than a little surprising when, last year, the agency decided not to promote an alarming study (that two of its employees had contributed to) that showed climate change could lessen the nutritional value of rice — a crop the agency says the U.S. is a “major exporter” of.

https://grist.org/article/the-trump-administration-tried-to-bury-a-climate-study-on-rice/

[VILLAMARV]

21 hours ago, VILLAMARV said:

'Man' "enjoys" his own 'joke' about kids being drowned at sea. He didn't mean it! he just said it out loud publicly is all. Ho Ho Ho. How the proles reacted when I poked them. Ho Ho Ho.

I dont think I'll ever post anything that bad again JHB, Banks and Caroline Lucas all in one go. I'm going to wash now

just for context on the the JHB quote I quoted there. I think it might have been sarcastic after getting pelters for this one

 

[Xann]

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Jokes about drowning teenage girls are hilarious, insist people who had a fit when people made jokes about milkshakes

Ardent leavers have rallied around Arron Banks, who is being criticised for joking that Greta Thurnberg would die while crossing the Atlantic, highlighting that many brexiteers still live under the threat of being doused by dairy products.

Newsthump

[sne]

The fires in the Amazon rain forest is so bad now that the smoke has turned day to night in Sao Paolo

Satellite pictures also pretty grim

Record number of fires this year, the dry weather combined with farmers starting fires to clear land for cattle farming is the reason behind it.