Alarming aspirations from latest climate report...

[Vader]

Do you have any reputable references for for that?

This seems to suggest the opposite:

Declining solar activity linked to recent warming - Nature

The Sun may have caused as much warming as carbon dioxide over three years.

www.nature.com

"If the climate were affected in the long term, the Sun should have produced a notable cooling in the first half of the twentieth century, which we know it didn't,"

Forgot where I read it.
Kept it on file while ago.

The link you posted talks of 11 year sun cycle, not 100,000 years or ice ages.

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

Forgot where I read it.
Kept it on file while ago.

The link you posted talks of 11 year sun cycle, not 100,000 years or ice ages.

Exactly. It's from Nature though, an "A list" peer reviewed science publication so relatively reliable. About the best I could find quickly.

 

[C.J]

Man made CO2 didn't bring us out of the last Ice Age.

 

[Vader]

Not quiet same, but interesting..

Milankovitch (Orbital) Cycles and Their Role in Earth's Climate

Small cyclical variations in the shape of Earth's orbit, its wobble and the angle its axis is tilted play key roles in influencing Earth's climate over timespans of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.

climate.nasa.gov

 

[Vader]

Biggest trouble with climate science is that they don't know for sure about it.
Ffs, their modeling can not weather right 48hrs from now most times, so what clue they got long term models.

All early modeling said no polar bears and we all living on rafts by now.

They are in fact clueless to what's going to happen as do many factors effect climate and they keep finding new stuff as well.

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

Biggest trouble with climate science is that they don't know for sure about it.
Ffs, their modeling can not weather right 48hrs from now most times, so what clue they got long term models.

All early modeling said no polar bears and we all living on rafts by now.

They are in fact clueless to what's going to happen as do many factors effect climate and they keep finding new stuff as well.

You've been looking at different sources to me then. Around 2002 I was part of a full day briefing by the Met Office Exeter climate modeling team (in Mr EA days) at which they clearly laid out the range of outcomes and timescales along with the uncertainty. 18 years later they weren't far off so far. The trouble is the press focus on their extreme scenarios for shock value. This just feeds scepticism.

We were actually told in that presentation that it was feasible, but unlikely, that eventually the ocean currents bringing warmth to the UK could fail causing our winters to become similar to Northern Canada. Their key warnings were longer dry periods but greater total rainfall which will fall less frequently and in bigger events. Sound about right?

Also, much of the climate change denial comes from research scientists whose field is not climate. They are barely more qualified to make their comments than you or I.

 

[Vader]

You've been looking at different sources to me then. Around 2002 I was part of a full day briefing by the Met Office Exeter climate modeling team (in Mr EA days) at which they clearly laid out the range of outcomes and timescales along with the uncertainty. 18 years later they weren't far off so far. The trouble is the press focus on their extreme scenarios for shock value. This just feeds scepticism.

We were actually told in that presentation that it was feasible, but unlikely, that eventually the ocean currents bringing warmth to the UK could fail causing our winters to become similar to Northern Canada. Their key warnings were longer dry periods but greater total rainfall which will fall less frequently and in bigger events. Sound about right?

Also, much of the climate change denial comes from research scientists whose field is not climate. They are barely more qualified to make their comments than you or I.

It started off as global warming, but when the ice did not melt enough , and increasing co2 did not lead to as big temp rise they renamed it climate change.
Course it does, climate changes through out history.
Yes we need to cut pollution, but the co2 is just bollox fear to get a carbon trading market going to make traders more money.
The green lobby fear mongering probably done more damage to the planet than co2 ever will.
Cutting down rain forests to grow palm oil to ship half way round the world so Europe can say they use green fuels...
China destroying the environment for rare earths to power electric cars.
All for $$$.
There is to many things effect the climate to do a proper model. You really think couple of wet years mean they got it right?

Sun spots, pole tilt, ocean currents, solar radiation, volcanic activity, etc all effect the climate and weather and as none of them play ball, then you can not actually model it.

But the models perfect excuse for the gov yo bring in new laws and tax..

 

[Cowabunga]

There is no global warming anymore because the sun is going into a 100,000 cooling cycle we are pretty much in a pickle here. Less sun activity means less magnetic field in the Van Allen belts around the earth. Less magnetic field to off set the earths magnetic field means volcanoes are coming alive under the oceans.

Lets see more 2000 degree lava under the oceans means more water vapor in the air. More hot water vapor in the air means the heated air will push into the polar regions and displace the colder air there (less summer sun light to warm the north pole up). So it will get colder and colder then get displaced by warm air coming up the pacific ocean and Atlantic ocean. Warm moist air coming up across Mexico from the pacific ocean and from the gulf of Mexico mets cold air coming down from the north pole and causes tons of freezing rain and snow.

This pattern is only going to get worse until Chicago is back under a 2 mile thick layer of ice. Thought the change would be faster than people would think but it seems to be happening a lot faster than I imagined it would. Global warming would be great more plant food in the atmosphere (you do know C02 is what plants grow with) and more warmer places to grow food and hence increase the mammal population. It was the increase of mammals causing more CO2 to be produced and thus trapped in the greenland ice samples a result of warming not the cause of warming. They got that one wrong they developed a function for CO2 vs temperature and that function for our level of CO2 shows we should already have temps well above 100 degrees year round. The Model is using an effect as the cause which is why its predictions are totally wrong.

Remember just a few years ago Al Gore predicted that by now snow would never happen again in America because of global warming.

Folks we are going into the big 100,000 year old ice age and there is no way out and it has nothing to do with CO2 but the sun cooling off. After about 100,000 the sun will contract enough to get its nuclear fires burning hotter and start warming the earth again. Remember the sun is two forces fighting each other the nuclear force trying to blow it apart and the gravitational force pulling it together. As the nuclear fire dies off a bit the sun will contract and as we all know geometry (read as closer together) is how nuclear power works. The more concentrated the nuclear material is the more power it has hence that is why atomic bombs explode and destroy cities and nuclear power plants mere get hot enough to melt their enclosures like the one recently in Japan. The explosion was due to the hydrogen gas build up explosion being greater than the containment building's design to keep it from happening structure. Oooops they messed up on that calculation.

Anyway expect more and more very heavy snow and ice storms in the coming years they are not going to get better I am sure we have reached the tipping point. We were already at least 10,000 years late for the start of the next ice age.

Good luck everyone. That is why they changed global warming to climate change and soon when reality really starts to bite they will call it correctly and that will be ice age.

I agree it is quite possible that we may, in a certain timescale, hope that increasing greenhouse gases would mitigate the far greater disaster of a far colder climate than we have currently. The start of the next ice age is overdue.
The thing is, nobody knows. They pretend to know but in a period like this there is no way of knowing how or how fast things will change. There is a slight possibility the the poles might flip. They have done so in the past and the theory is that it coincided with neanderthals suddenly retreating into caves and painting their faces with substances that prevented the high radiation levels from burning their skin. They then used the skin protection products for cave painting. The poles flipping would undoubtedly be spectacular but every communication and electronic device everywhere would probably be ruined as would food production and the majority of civilisation and the human race. At least until it hopefully stabilised or flipped back.

Nothing we can do about it of course. One of the imperatives for the long term survival of the human race against the guaranteed occurrence of a cataclysmic extinction event in the future is to colonise at least two other habitable planets. One in our solar system but eventually one in another solar system or galaxy. Unless we manage this in time, the human race will extinguish permanently. It is as inevitable as we currently believe and have confidence that night follows day. One day the night might never end and the Earth, should it survive in any physical form whatsoever, may become just another barren lifeless rock floating around in the cosmos. The Earth may even be sucked into a black hole and be compressed into the size of a tennis ball, but hopefully at least some will have abandoned ship by then and sailed away to somewhere nice. I doubt it though. Personally I think we are just a transient blip in the expanding universe where everything is getting further and further away from us and that an extinction event is eventually inevitable. It might then take another 1000 million years of evolution on another planet billions of light years away for the very beginning of a different kind of life and evolution to once again start to develop. It will probably be nothing like life on Earth as it is currently.

No, I am not on the pop!

 

[Cowabunga]

You've been looking at different sources to me then. Around 2002 I was part of a full day briefing by the Met Office Exeter climate modeling team (in Mr EA days) at which they clearly laid out the range of outcomes and timescales along with the uncertainty. 18 years later they weren't far off so far. The trouble is the press focus on their extreme scenarios for shock value. This just feeds scepticism.

We were actually told in that presentation that it was feasible, but unlikely, that eventually the ocean currents bringing warmth to the UK could fail causing our winters to become similar to Northern Canada. Their key warnings were longer dry periods but greater total rainfall which will fall less frequently and in bigger events. Sound about right?

Also, much of the climate change denial comes from research scientists whose field is not climate. They are barely more qualified to make their comments than you or I.

Not really. Rain is fairly well spread out over the year with much more in Winter than in Summer still. Everywhere. With annual variations. Winter's are fairly consistently milder than they were in the 80's and 90's but they were not as dry then as the 1960's and 70's in my recollection when cows here were often grazing cale on dry fields for most of the Winter. However some years, like 1947, '63 and 1982 had a lot of heavy snow. This Winter has had more snow over much of the country than we have seen in at least a decade. Colder weather too.
Some people were predicting that snow would be a long forgotten memory in the UK and N America by 2020 yet here we are with Texas absolutely crippled by frost and snow because the power grid listened to the nonsense and had stopped winterising their systems for the last quarter century.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Why do internal combustion engines need cooling, if what humans are doing isn't creating any heating effect?

 

[C.J]

Why do internal combustion engines need cooling, if what humans are doing isn't creating any heating effect?

Electric motors have fans and cooling fins

 

[white_stuffed]

I have downloaded all the supplementary notes/tables/databases and read a lot more of the Poore and Nemecek paper. I keep ending up with more questions than answers so I've just emailed Joseph Poore another batch of questions as follows, I'm hoping he takes the time to answer them.

The questions are set out below (with thanks to @holwellcourtfarm for some of them).

1. Would it be possible to re-run the LCAs in the original meta-analysis using GWP* as the methane metric, instead of GWP100? This new metric is particularly relevant to us and it would be helpful if it could be assessed as an additional ‘sensitivity’ of your study.

2. I can’t find how the land use change figures within the LCAs are calculated. I have looked at the tables in the main database which attribute which crops are responsible for emissions from land use change, forest burning etc. The step I don’t understand is how this is then attributed across the various food products, particularly animal products. The results (Table S2) would suggest that all the animal products have land use change but relatively few of the crop products? Bovine meat from the beef herd is allocated approx 22% of all the land use change so it would be really interesting to see how that is arrived at.

3. Animal feed – I can’t find how the quantities of animal feed are measured. I note from the instructions in the planetary diet calculator that it says, “To split the arable land use in feed into domestic and imported I used the percentage of animal feed imported on mass basis relative to total feed demand at the country level (did not differentiate by animal system or production system).” Please can you let me know the source of the imported feeds on mass basis. And also the source of the total feed demand at country level.

4. I am interested in the allocation of oilseeds. I know this is mentioned in one of the sensitivity analysis sections of the Science paper. It states that soya’s environmental impact is split according to economic allocation with 60% apportioned to animal products (being animal feed soya meal) and 40% human (soya oil). Please can you let me know the source/calculation for this assumption? As I understand it, South American deforestation is used for grazing when initially cleared (government policy) but soya and palm oil production is often the eventual use of the land? Should there be some sharing out of the deforestation element of the land use change to account for this?

5. It feels as if the afforestation/deforestation is being double counted? The initial impact of deforestation is already wrapped up within the animal products LCA figures. The potential carbon sink created under the no animal products is then credited again? It seems counter intuitive to set a ‘penalty’ within the livestock LCA figures (for initial deforestation) as well as then crediting the no animal products scenario with the reforestation factor?

6. In the planetary diet spreadsheet instructions it states... “Assuming that imports remain the same under each diet scenario and assuming that the environmental impacts of imported food can be proxied for by average global environmental impacts.”

I understand from the WWF ‘Bending the Curve’ document that the ‘no animal products’ scenario assumed that 2/3 of the animal product would be replaced by pulses; 1/3 by fruit and vegetables. I would assume that that imports would definitely have to be increased to provide this revised diet. Also that those imports would have a disproportionately high food miles impact being from crops we either cannot grow or suffer long ‘hungry gaps’ when grown in the UK.
Is there any way that this can be taken into account in the calculations?

7. UK imports of pork/beef/dairy tend to be from very efficient producers, local to us in the EU. So it seems far too harsh to use the global land use factors for UK imports. Does your data allow you to run more detailed analysis of the routes of imports? I am afraid that there is a very simple buy local message here which is overshadowed by the data which rolls up South American deforestation impacts and feedlot beef systems and allocates it to the UK.

 

[white_stuffed]

I've also sent Joseph Poore my 'simplified' (!) spreadsheet of the specific beef environmental impacts in the screenshot below. I've asked if he can fill in the gaps, the question marks about how the figures are derived.

 

[Cowabunga]

Why do internal combustion engines need cooling, if what humans are doing isn't creating any heating effect?

I don't know. Why do internal combustion engines need cooling? Is it just to transfer the heat to the atmosphere to stop us all freezing? Is that what you are getting at?

 

[Cowabunga]

Electric motors have fans and cooling fins

So does the top of my tractor's cab. Which reminds me that the one in the Same has packed in and needs repairing before silage time.

 

[Ffermer Bach]

The rest of the industry has been putting a lot of pressure on Red Tractor to include carbon footprinting and they have resisted this far. It is a means of putting our carbon capture on their books.
I still think 'offsetting' carbon is a rather bizarre idea. It would be like paying my neighbour to destroy some natural habitat to create a pond. This pond could then be filled with clean water to 'offset' me pouring slurry in the river.

or having another child, so you can go off and bump someone off, "well, I offset the life my lord!!"

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

I've also sent Joseph Poore my 'simplified' (!) spreadsheet of the specific beef environmental impacts in the screenshot below. I've asked if he can fill in the gaps, the question marks about how the figures are derived. View attachment 944317

If using GWP* then, as the UK ruminant livestock numbers are slowly declining, should the figure outlined below not be near or below zero in reality?

 

[Kiwi Pete]

I don't know. Why do internal combustion engines need cooling? Is it just to transfer the heat to the atmosphere to stop us all freezing? Is that what you are getting at?

The question came from our 7 year-old; he'd overheard our discussion about cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias and just dropped it on me
I thought I'd ask the experts on cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias

 

[DaveGrohl]

Do you think you lads could start your own thread? Then you can amuse yourselves and allow this thread to get back on course?

 

[Cowabunga]

View attachment 944002

Man made CO2 didn't bring us out of the last Ice Age.

Or the little ice ages. Hopefully it just might mitigate at least slightly against the next severe dip in temperature, which is certainly due soon. Or it should if the majority of climate scientists are to be believed.