Off Topic News & Current affairs

But Greta and DA are not just speaking as you suggest, they are calling for immediate and drastic changes to how we currently live our lives. But they don’t then go on to explain what these changes would actually mean for ordinary people in terms of all the things that Lardi mentions. I think Greta is too young and naive to understand the implications and those like DA and Charlie don’t care as they know it won’t affect them too much as they are insulated from the real world. I certainly can have more empathy towards Greta than those two, who are complete and utter hypocrites.

But at least we’ve found some common ground about XR and IB !

 

Can't agree that DA doesn't care. He's old enough to know how quickly time passes, and he has children and grandchildren. I can remember the Queen's Coronation, 68 years ago, I ran crying to my mother because I didn't win a race against other 5-year-olds, and in 68 years time...... well, look at the predictions for yourself. It won't affect me, doesn't mean I don't care, not that it makes a scrap of difference whether I do or not! Virtue signaller? Ooo-er missus.

 

But DA's children and grandchildren will not be affected in the same way that normal people will, by what he and others are demanding, whilst he and they carry on with their lavish lifestyles. That's why he doesn't care about the implications of what he's demanding (I'm not suggesting he doesn't care about the initial problem).

I find it sickening tbh to hear him lecturing others about how they need to cut down on their carbon footprint, while he and others like him feel it's ok for them to fly around the world with huge teams, tons of equipment and all the expensive trappings of modern life, to make entertainment programs.

He's a hypocrite pure and simple. His ideology and facts may be right, but he doesn't practice what he preaches to others and won't be harshly affected by the measures he would like to see brought in. As long as he's getting paid he will continue to ignore his own preachings but will still demand that everyone else abides by them.

 

I like David Attenborough a lot.

The 'Life on Earth' series made in the late 1970's is still in my view the finest Natural History programme ever made.
I've watched it through countless times, and it never fails to fascinate me.
I would even say Life on Earth outshines the more modern 'Planet Earth' type productions, for although the technical quality of the images is far better on the more recent programmes, they lack the scientific incisiveness and educational quality of Life on Earth.
They are romantic musings - beautiful to look at and beautifully sound-tracked as well, but much more about emotional heart-string pulling than actually understanding the natural world.

But there is no denying that Attenborough has a carbon footprint bigger than King Kong.
And so do most of the others who preach about Climate change. Prince Charles and his lot in particular probably generate as much carbon as a whole industrial town - for no good reason either. Hereditary privilege is something I absolutely hate.

The one exception is Greta - who at least tries to live what she is preaching.
But of course the huge media circus around her and her entourage as she sails around the world generates plenty of carbon too.

As always with powerful leaders getting together to discuss global warming, it's "do as we say, not as we do".
This Climate conference could have been done wholly by video.
Politicians can be just as insincere to each other by Zoom as they can face-to-face.
The whole thing is a circus - to promote the star performers, not save the planet.

 

It's possible that in the next decade or two we'll have a new source of power- nuclear fusion. Scientists have been working on it for decades, with many governments pouring money into the project, and about 20 private projects to try to bring it to fruition. I've been reading an article in Science Focus, and although I won't pretend to understand how exactly it works I'm full of admiration for the scientists who do (understand). China is leading the way in harnessing solar energy, some fantastic things are happening there, and I actually think they could deliver on their net-zero target. Having said that I try to avoid buying Chinese rubbish, but the shops are all so full of it that it's hard. It's a race against time, and we're reliant on the brilliance of the world's scientists to save the future.

 

Agreed. The answer to this would be to find a way of replacing fossil fuel energy production but in a way that can produce as much if not more energy than fossil fuels can produce. We won’t do that by stopping using fossil fuels before we have that solution in place because we need to innovate and make discoveries not regress decades or centuries.
It is a race against time to see if we can do this before the fossil fuels run out.

 

IB and ER have successfully deflected public debate away from the environment and on to themselves. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

The road to Hell is blocked by protesters

 

Just a short word on one subject raised today, regarding cutting down consumption of meat - particularly beef and lamb.
I understand sheep and cattle are regarded as the worst for carbon, because they are grass eaters.

Until less than two centuries ago, and for uncounted thousands of years, vast herds of Bison roamed across what is now the United States of America.
Millions upon millions.
One single herd it is said, covered the land area of an entire State.

How much carbon and other substances contributing to global warming were they producing?

Is it possible that they were 'polluting' the atmosphere more than the Industrial Revolution in Europe?
(at least in its early decades).
Surely the domestic cattle farmed in the US today constitutes only a fraction of the historical Bison population.
So was virtually wiping the Bison out a 'good' thing for the planet?

 

Ruminants produce methane, which is far worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, although in New Zealand they are developing sheep which produce less and less methane. As Ian Dury said "There ain't half been some clever bastards".

 

What an excellent point Lardi. But don't let the BBC here you talking like that. It doesn't fit in with their model of the world and it's problems.

 

Granted, there was a lot more Amazon rainforest a few hundred years ago than there is now.
Indeed there were a lot more forests everywhere.
Here in the UK there was apparently 95% ancient forest cover (virtually no open fields as we see them today) until the Romans began chopping a lot of it down.

But the deserts of the world have been expanding for tens of thousands of years.
The Sahara was only about half its present size when the first human art works were scratched onto rocks in North Africa something around 17,000 BC.
Forest was giving way to grass land, which gradually gave way to deserts.

This is part of a natural cycle.
40,000 years ago the planet was gripped by an Ice Age. Only the most recent of dozens, going back 5 million years or more.
In 40,000 years time (or less) there will be another.
Ice ages wipe out thousands upon thousands of species, and allow the evolution of thousands more.

I would speculate that even if every Human being dropped dead tomorrow, the deserts would continue to spread. The Earth would continue to warm. The polar ice cap would continue to shrink. Vast areas of low lying land around the world would still flood, and eventually be lost to the rising sea.
We delude ourselves we have the power to change the weather.
But we are not Superheroes.

Yes, we should be preventing plastics getting into our oceans.
Yes, we should be looking at all kinds of ways to combat man-made pollution.
Yes, we should be developing energy that is as 'clean' as it can be.
Tidal and Geothermal and Solar preferably. Nuclear fusion, though ingenious, seems to have too many dangers attached in my opinion - particularly terrorist related.

But we cannot just reverse the mightiest force of nature that drives all life on the surface of our planet.
And it is wrong for some people - whatever their agenda - to promote the lie that we can, in a decade or two, halt a natural process that has been going on for ever, involving forces we literally cannot imagine.

Communities in poor countries that are regularly flooded or victims of extreme weather in other ways should be helped and protected by engineering and architectural technology that will defend their homes against the weather. Or, frankly, they should be helped to live somewhere else.
Even in this country, we should only be building flood-proof homes (on stilts or however it is done) on flood plains. But are we? Not that I know of.
Thousands of new homes are still being built that will be flooded again and again in decades to come, ruining the lives of the people living in them.
Like King Cnut we proclaim ourselves capable of reversing the tide.
When we should be using our great evolutionary strength - our adaptability - to render the rising tide harmless to us and our children.

Let's have total honesty on Global warming.
Not be sold an idea that fits conveniently within our conceited delusion that we can put right everything we believe is wrong in this world (environmental, political, religious...) - by making other people behave the way we think they should. Whether that be by persuasion, disruption, coercion, indoctrination or just naked force.
That is the ultimate vanity.

 

Do you think the climatologists are not being honest?

 

While I can see where you are coming from @Lardi, I disagree with virtually all of that. Yes, climate change i part of the evolution of the planet. Deserts form, ice ages come and go. But that has no bearing on what we are seeing now. There is not one single factor you can isolate, it's all contributive and nearly all bad. The ruminants emitting methane, but also the deforestation - they've been talking about that for years but who is planting trees? All those aerosole CFC gasses to kill the ozone layer, and I'm told they are still being used. Did you know the same guy who thought they would be a neat way of helping refrifgerators to work also introduced us to leaded petrol.
As the Penguin said, the fossil fuel lobby worked tirelessly to try to counter what they knew they were doing, as did the gasoline companies, who knew lead was leathal but fought tooth and nail to say the opposite. So now a few people put their heads over the parapet to argue for change and get scolded for a carbon footprint. So should they shut up?
The fact is that saying people are outrageously asking us to change our ways rather defies the fact that it will happen anyway, and in a way we won't be able to control. If we can't control emissions, develop non catastrophic fuels and learn to recycle, how exactly do you think we'll be living as sea levels rise, the temperature kills the plants and the insecticides kill the bees? What will we be eating when the arable land goes under the waves? The same way most species meet this sort of world wide cataclysm? By becoming extinct. Lots of animals are already going that way. We may well yet turn this around, but it will need some changes, and if we don't make them voluntarily, we'll be given others which will be worse.

 

The best source of information is probably New Scientist, but I stopped getting it because it's expensive and I could never get through it all. We get Science Focus now, which is a bit more dumbed down but that suits me. As I said before, if your boiler breaks down you get a central heating engineer in; if you want to know about climate change read what climatologists say.

 

I'm not saying we should do nothing.
Like in all other areas of life, we should try to do good by the natural world because it's right. No other reason needed.

But one decent sized volcano erupting does more to "harm" the environment in a month than London does in 10 years.
We really are insignificant in the grand scale of things.

 

You think that greenhouse gas emissions are insignificant? I'm not quite sure what you're saying. It's true that if and when Old Faithful erupts we're doomed to a nuclear winiter, in fact it's well overdue, but I don't see the relevance of other volcanic activity to the specific issue of the effect of greenhouse gases on the global environment. The debate about what we should or shouldn't do is not one I take part in, but the scientific facts are important.

 

This is a small but very interesting discussion in my opinion.

I can see the logic in both sides of the argument put forward by Lardi, Shabs and the Black and White one. Tbh I tend to be a cynic and I don't trust what the climate change lobby are saying completely and I also don't trust what the fossil fuel lobby say completely either. There are plenty of examples where both have been wrong. I do not know the ultimate truth in all this and I would suggest that no one else does either, and I'm not talking about posters on this forum, I'm talking about the so called experts. Some would end up being right and some would end up being wrong but it would take a long long time to prove it either way and things change very quickly in modern life. There are undoubtedly correct statements being made on both sides.

What is of greater concern to me is the immediate impact of the route that we seem to be taking. The fact is we do not have a viable alternative to extensive fossil fuel use and yet we are being encouraged to stop using it. We simply can't do that. We just cannot produce enough energy by other means to sustain our modern way of life, like it or not.

That's why all our efforts need to be focussed on finding another way, but we can't just ditch fossil fuel use until we find that other way, if we ever do.

My biggest fear is not climate change, my biggest fear is the breakdown of law and order if we hurtle down the route we have started on. We cannot produce enough clean electricity to power electric only cars for everyone. We cannot heat our homes to the same standards as gas boilers can by using heat pumps. We cannot sustain our global economy and all the benefits it brings if we stop using fossil fuels to transport goods, people and animals. We cannot continue to make the medical and scientific breakthroughs that we currently do if we can't travel around the world, build modern facilities and fund research. We cannot produce enough food to feed the world without using intensive, modern, harmful farming methods and there are countless other ways in which we will have to act differently. In some cases that will be a good thing BUT if you try to take all these things and more away from people then you will end up with the breakdown of law and order and a period of anarchy. And that scares me a lot more than a slow and relentless rise in sea levels or a gradual rise in temperatures over decades or centuries, especially as those will occur naturally in time without our input in any case.

I have been in the middle of a lawless society, where civilisation has broken down and trust me it is the most frightening thing you can imagine, (more so than the effects of global warming) and that is what we must avoid, ahead I'm afraid of the man-made portion of climate change.

We must not turn our world back towards the past until we have a way of replacing what we are giving up and at the moment we simply don't have that way.

 

I don't know how much of the scientific evidence you have read, and I'm not referring to Greta, Charlie, or any politicians, and it's irrelevant whether DA is a hypocrite or not, the great body of genuine expertise is unanimous (apart from a few with financial links to the fossil fuel industry) about where we are heading if we use up all the fossil fuel available, so I won't bang on about it. The best we can hope for is to use up the reserves available now without opening up new oilfields or coal mines, and hope that by then alternative energy is available. The signs are not good for global co-operation, but you never know. And build those bloody flood defences, not the HS2 vanity project.

 

I’m not trying to disprove anyone’s evidence - I’m not qualified to do that. What I am saying is that if we in fact accept the climate change argument (and for the moment let’s do that) then my fears for what will happen if we go down the route that the activists would have us take, are that we will face a more frightening, immediate and definite situation instead. And I think that will happen in my lifetime and certainly the lifetime of my children. If we can’t power our cars, heat our homes, feed our people, manufacture all the things we currently have, travel in the way we do then law and order will break down. And it will happen if we discard our current way of doing things without the means to replace it all. And I still maintain that living in a society without law and order is far, far worse than living with rising sea levels, rising temperatures and the like.

I speak from experience of the former and if anyone thinks it won’t happen then they are in for a very nasty shock. There really is a very, very thin line between order and lawlessness.

But as far as flood defences go, I’m afraid I have to disagree. You cannot hold back the seas no matter what you do. All you do is shift the problem somewhere else. This has been seen over and over again when we’ve tried to protect certain communities along rivers and just push the problem up or downstream. Likewise sea defences. We are not as clever as we think I’m afraid. Every time we build a new spit or protected harbour we merely push the water somewhere else and cause greater erosion than if we had left well alone. The seas will do what they do regardless of us and by interfering we just make things worse.