Image Credit : Climate Change News
There are a couple of compilations of facts out this week that are a mix of the good, the bald and the beautiful.
Note to any journalists reading : if you don’t understand the significance of any of the following facts, don’t hesitate to ask.
My attention has been turned, once more, to the writing of James Delingpole this week.
This article, in my view, contains a number of pieces of misleading information, which in my view should be re-framed into their proper context by the author.
Dr Richard Betts of the British Meteorological Office speaking at the 4 Degrees (and beyond) conference in Oxford this week :-
https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/programme.php
“It’s important to stress it’s not a doomsday scenario, we do have time to stop it happening if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.”
Some of the potential problems from a four degree average rise in global temperature are being outlined to the conference.
There are spectacular regional warming issues, most notably for the Arctic region.
People always talking ’bout two degrees. For the last ten years. But now, almost overnight, people whispering four degrees under their breath. And shivering, in a kind of anxious, fearful manner.
What, I want to know, happened to the three degrees ? Why do we have to jump all the way to four degrees straight away ? Can’t we do it gradually ? Give ourselves some time to adjust, and chill.
This could all happen within 50 years ? You mean it’s all happening sooner than we thought ? Oh. My.
June 2009 doesn’t quite rank with the hottest Junes ever in 130 years of data records, but it comes awfully close.
NASA GISS have this evening released their graphs of the data for June 2009, and it is sobering, nay, disturbing :-
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
My two favourite charts are the ones that say the most powerful things in the most simple way.
Despite the fact that there are only about five (and dropping) Climate Change “sceptics” in the British Parliament; and despite the fact that all major scientific and academic bodies, institutions and societies all declare their support for cuts in Global Warming pollution; the Media are still galumphing about in the murky mud of the 1980s in terms of public psychology.
It is essential that there is meaningful debate in the public realm about what Climate Change is doing to our world, and how we can control emissions and work to protect against damaging outcomes.
The evidence is all around us. And gradually, increasing numbers of people are adjusting their mental aerials to tune into the greater ideas and the bigger picture. What we don’t need just now are obfuscation and turbulence and gleeful mischievous wreckers.
You can take the soul out of an engineer with a boring, stressful or ethically suspect career, (like the Manhatten Project), but you can’t take the engineer out of a soul.
I have a persistent interest in things engineering, and some say I waste too much of my time thinking about systems engineering and the Laws of Physics.
I also have a persistent interest in the minds of engineers. How do we work ? What makes us tick ? And do we have an overview on social organisation that could be useful ?
As some of my more regular readers will be aware, I have been re-reading Nicholas Stern’s book “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet : How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity”.
He signed the book for me : “zero carbon or bust”, at his Book Launch at the London School of Economics, which, I think, shows his commitment to the “Defining Challenge of our Age” (now, who exactly said that first ? And about what ?)
The best way to halt Global Warming in its tracks is to “soften” the volume of international trade.
The Recession has done a fine job in securing just that aim, but if the fabled “green shoots of recovery” are just around the corner/mountain, then we will need pragmatic approaches to keeping trade in its place, lying flat in the dog basket.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology have issued some seriously educational material about the risks of Global Warming, by contrasting the range of outcomes with and without Policy :-
It sometimes seems that truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s out there, somewhere, way beyond our active recall.
We all know from our early years education that Petroleum Oil is a finite resource, unless we were home-schooled by Creationists.
I’m starting to read Nicholas Stern’s new book “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet : How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.” No hint of megalomania, grandstanding or grandiosity, there, then.
The notion that the industrialised countries were somehow responsible for the awful drought which desiccated the Horn of Africa in 1984/1985, through Global Warming pollution, has been dealt a blow, and some support, all in the same week, from the same research paper, but through different media channels.
Climate Change Denialists, or Sceptics (Skeptics) as they like to call themselves, will not be liking this piece of research one single teensy-eensy-weensy bit.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16892-natural-mechanism-for-medieval-warming-discovered.html