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The Great Climate Change Debate- Continued


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Posted
  • Location: Lincoln, Lincolnshire
  • Weather Preferences: Sunshine, convective precipitation, snow, thunderstorms, "episodic" months.
  • Location: Lincoln, Lincolnshire

There have been many threads on this topic that have gone around in circles. Here's a recap on the main points for discussion, and an attempt to differentiate facts from opinions (as the line between the two can be blurred sometimes).

Global warming

This is simply the rise in the mean global temperature. The globe has warmed by approximately 0.5C in the last 50 years, as is well illustrated by these graphs provided by independent organisations:

http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/resea...-jan-dec-pg.gif

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

"Global warming" does not mean that all parts of the globe are warming, or that they are all warming at the same rate, or that low temperature extremes cease to happen. I'm well aware that the media love to scaremonger by blaming every extreme weather event on global warming- pointing to individual weather events as "proving" global warming, or lack of it, is a poor line of argument. Long term trends should be used as evidence for climate change (conversely, lack of long-term trends indicates lack of climate change).

So, the challenge for those who dispute that the planet is warming, is to find evidence that there hasn't been a long-term upward trend in temperature.

What about the apparent levelling off in the past 10 years? I don't think 10 years is long enough to make a judgment, given how chaotic and variable the atmospheric system is- the El Nino of 1998 played a large part for example. The temperature trend of the next decade, and particularly what happens when we next get an El Nino, should confirm whether it's a blip or a stalling of the warming trend, though I suspect the former is by far the more likely.

Human influences

There are a number of 'natural' factors that cause global and regional climate change. Human activity is very likely to be producing extra forcings, through release of pollutants, deforestation etc, most of which are towards warming, which add to the natural forcings already in existence.

It's important to bear this in mind- some of those who dismiss AGW talk as if the idea of AGW is that human-induced forcing somehow replaces natural forcing, when in reality it doesn't, it adds to it. Thus, the AGW argument amounts to "the planet is probably getting warmer than it would be if it wasn't for human activity".

What is still uncertain is the extent to which this human activity is causing the current warming. It could well be that some of the warming is due to 'natural' forcings- though it's also possible (perish the thought!) that natural factors might have worked the other way, and masked the effects of AGW. Even the top climate scientists are unsure of the extent to which humans are responsible- the latest IPCC report predicts a warming between 1.1C and 6.4C in the next 100 years, for example.

Action and mitigation

If we are to address the issue of pollution, and potential contributions to AGW, there are a few delicate balancing acts that we may need:

  • The action itself- inaction could lead to dangerous climate change, but too much action too soon could force a destructive return to primitive lifestyles
  • Realism- avoid assuming we can achieve things we can't, but also avoid assuming we can't achieve things that we can
  • "Sticks" (taxes, emissions limits etc)- being too draconian, especially if we haven't implemented good "carrot" policies first, can be very destructive and punish many of the wrong people, but if we don't use enough sticks, the less conservation-minded may abuse the system

When it comes to change, realistically speaking I'm pretty certain we can engineer change, but it's unlikely to happen overnight- such change will have to happen slowly over a number of decades. But even if we only succeed in slowing the rate at which all the fossil fuels are used up, it might make enough of a difference to save us from a dangerous degree of anthropogenic-induced warming.

Some specific issues include the limited availability of fossil fuels (which will help assist change from an economics perspective), the short-termist electioneering of governments, and the excessive consumerism which generates a strong economy but often at the expense of environmental and social progress. Another question that I don't have a clear answer to, is whether it would be useful, or counterproductive, to think of a specific vision of a society based on sustainable living and aim towards it. If everyone were able to broadly agree on one, it would be an excellent idea, but the problem is the likelihood of different people having conflicting views on what the vision should be.

I'm only scraping the surface of the issue here, but hopefully, plenty of points above for discussion.

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Posted
  • Location: just south of Doncaster, Sth Yorks
  • Location: just south of Doncaster, Sth Yorks

I wish you luck Ian that the thread does not get hijacked by the ya boo brigade as others have with pro and anti GW and AGW simply re stating their views impervious to the other viewpoint.

Some good points in there for people to read, mull over, and then give their view backed with realistic data.

I tend to sit on the fence as the more I read from each viewpoint the less I am sure which is the major player, nature or man.

I do believe that the western world should take heed and try and get some kind of consensus of what we do IF the less startling of the various projections for 50-100 years down the line turn out to be near the mark, to begin a co-ordinated plan to try and meet the problem. The problem being hundreds of thousands being forced from their homes by sea rises and even more being affected by not enough food in areas which become more arid by the probable temperature increase.

Edited by johnholmes
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Posted
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
  • Weather Preferences: Snow and heatwave
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
I wish you luck Ian that the thread does not get hijacked by the ya boo brigade as others.......................

The problem being hundreds of thousands being forced from their homes by sea rises and even more being affected by not enough food in areas which become more arid by the probable temperature increase.

What you actually mean is you hope people don't post opinions that differ from yours ?

So if I said 100,000 + cold deaths a year would be avoided globally by a 2c rise it would not meet with much favour

Its this hundreds of thousands approach that make any 'debate very difficult'

I'm well aware that the media love to scaremonger by blaming every extreme weather event on global warming- pointing to individual weather events as "proving" global warming, or lack of it, is a poor line of argument.

If only it were true

I'm afraid you don't hear about the cold in china as it's not a 'global warming event'

Record heat in china would be on the front page of all the tabloids

Remove the bias that comes from the global warming brigade and you may get a debate

Note not about temp rise (that's happening)

But is it man made and more importantly the impact and the 'variation in weather' .

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Posted
  • Location: just south of Doncaster, Sth Yorks
  • Location: just south of Doncaster, Sth Yorks

re this

What you actually mean is you hope people don't post opinions that differ from yours ?

not at all Stew;

as a newcomer you are probably unaware of the problems the Environment section have caused with exactly what I posted, people unwilling/unable to accept that there is a viewpoint different to their own. Please read the other threads about it to see what I tried to comment on. You are very welcome to disagree with me, that is what discussion and debate is about. Just not the personal comments.

and welcome to NW I'm sure you will enjoy it on here, but could you put your town/area in your avatar please, it helps when we all report our weather - thanks

further to the difference about how many people will be affected.

Fine we can all give a figure which to us seems reasonable but others may disagree, as you do.

I honestly have no idea how many would be affected both by flooding and drought but if the more 'conservative' figures on the overall rise in temperature are correct it will affect very many people.

what I would prefer the world governments do is, rather than argue about what is causing it, who is to blame etc, sit down and work out a plan to ensure that those who are affected will be fed, and housed adequately.

Edited by johnholmes
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Posted
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
  • Weather Preferences: Snow and heatwave
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
what I would prefer the world governments do is, rather than argue about what is causing it, who is to blame etc, sit down and work out a plan to ensure that those who are affected will be fed, and housed adequately.

Thank you , I'm not sure how you add the things you suggest but ill get around to it B)

So what do you want spend a 100 billion on reducing global warming by 0.3c in the next 50yrs

or spend 100 billion on housing food etc ? You cant do both

'Cool It' and books like that i find interesting

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Posted
  • Location: Derby - 46m (151ft) ASL
  • Location: Derby - 46m (151ft) ASL
Thank you , I'm not sure how you add the things you suggest but ill get around to it B)

So what do you want spend a 100 billion on reducing global warming by 0.3c in the next 50yrs

or spend 100 billion on housing food etc ? You cant do both

'Cool It' and books like that i find interesting

I have to admit SF, I think you perhaps took JH comments the wrong way above.

However, your point above. Why cant we do both? And just out of curiousity, where does the 100billion come from?

Also, re your point on reducing cold deaths by 100,000+. GW has not given us so far an even increase in temperature across the globe. We have in fact, extreme spots. Take the above average figures for the CET compared to the global increase. Its far more excessive. So we also get these extremes in other countries. So, like previous years, we would see more deaths due to extreme conditions, such as increased flooding, increased 'hot' periods inducing heat related deaths.

Really, theres 2 sides to every coin.

Edited by ChrisL
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Posted
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
  • Weather Preferences: Snow and heatwave
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
I have to admit SF, I think you perhaps took JH comments the wrong way above.

However, your point above. Why cant we do both? And just out of curiousity, where does the 100billion come from?

Also, re your point on reducing cold deaths by 100,000+. GW has not given us so far an even increase in temperature across the globe. We have in fact, extreme spots. Take the above average figures for the CET compared to the global increase. Its far more excessive. So we also get these extremes in other countries. So, like previous years, we would see more deaths due to extreme conditions, such as increased flooding, increased 'hot' periods inducing heat related deaths.

Really, theres 2 sides to every coin.

The problem with stats you can throw out any figures you like

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004552.html

---------------

For Britain, it is estimated a 3.6°F increase will mean 2,000 more heat deaths but 20,000 fewer cold deaths. Likewise, another paper incorporating all studies on this issue and applying them to a broad variety of settings in both developed and developing countries found that “global warming may cause a decrease in mortality rates, especially of cardiovascular diseases.”

----------------

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Posted
  • Location: Lincoln, Lincolnshire
  • Weather Preferences: Sunshine, convective precipitation, snow, thunderstorms, "episodic" months.
  • Location: Lincoln, Lincolnshire

Re. cold deaths, it may not be as simple as to say that the warmer it gets, the less cold-related deaths there will be. It is way too simplistic to make conclusions like "for every 2C above average, cold deaths go down by X, therefore if winters warm by 2C over 50 years, in 50 years' time deaths will have declined by X", because there is a difference between short-term variation and long-term trends.

If winters continue to get milder over a period of time, it's likely that people will become less prepared for certain degrees of cold, therefore offsetting the relative lack of cold. This is why Britain has at least as many cold deaths per unit population as Russia despite Russia's winters being 10-15 degrees colder. I'm amazed that no surveys seem to have taken this into account.

On the flip side, the same 'preparedness' factor might help mitigate against some of the excess heat deaths that are being predicted.

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Posted
  • Location: Derby - 46m (151ft) ASL
  • Location: Derby - 46m (151ft) ASL
The problem with stats you can throw out any figures you like

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004552.html

Not totally true if you use knowledgeable well endorsed figures (say, WHO for example). Probably best to always keep to the same source too, otherwise an analysis could be deemed unfair.

The thing is as well, it only takes into account the heat Vs. cold deaths. The theory is GW is causing climate change, and climate change is bringing about more extreme weathers. So the post above does not take into account the increased deaths from flooding, increased snow fall (deaths caused by non-temperature issues), increasing numbers of extreme cold (remember, climate change is theoretically a result of GW, but overall, even with extreme cold in some areas, there is still a 'global' increase in temperature), increased tornado/hurracine activity and so on.

You could even take the extreme of the theory, that there could potentially xnumber of lives lost due to rising waters/sea levels, caused by climate change, caused by GW.

Edited by ChrisL
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Posted
  • Location: Lincoln, Lincolnshire
  • Weather Preferences: Sunshine, convective precipitation, snow, thunderstorms, "episodic" months.
  • Location: Lincoln, Lincolnshire

Good points by Chris above. In addition, even if the UK can cope well, it doesn't mean that the less developed regions will be able to cope- indeed many developing countries are in areas where the climate is already marginal for sustaining its population as it stands, and could change to being wrong side of marginal. The main problem is 'global' warming not 'UK' warming as such.

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Posted
  • Location: Rochester, Kent
  • Location: Rochester, Kent
You're not referring to Eskimo nasal music are u?

Of course not :lol:

During the Little Ice Age tree rings are much closer together creating much denser wood -which is perfect for creating stringed instruments such as guitars, violins, cellos etc. Look up Stradivarius' birthday ...

No more Little Ice Age - no more dense wood - no more quality instruments.

:o

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Posted
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
  • Weather Preferences: Snow and heatwave
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
Good points by Chris above. In addition, even if the UK can cope well, it doesn't mean that the less developed regions will be able to cope- indeed many developing countries are in areas where the climate is already marginal for sustaining its population as it stands, and could change to being wrong side of marginal. The main problem is 'global' warming not 'UK' warming as such.

The main problem isnt 'global warming' its how you react to it

Unfortunately the world's population has gone from what 10 to 6.5 billion and no doubt 10 billion by 2100?

This does imply a few more people live on the margin and whether that's flood plains /desert or the Maldives

Now Bangladesh for example had great floods in 1787, 1917, and 1943 but post 1953 the human impact is greater

Why ??? More people live there

The question is do tell these people to spend trillions reducing something that may or may not cause global warming or say

Go build more 'defenses' I would assume in 2000BC there were far more cold deaths per head of pop then there are today

How did they over come that? Spend billions trying to alter the climate by 0.2c or something else ??

Edited by stewfox
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Posted
  • Location: Lincoln, Lincolnshire
  • Weather Preferences: Sunshine, convective precipitation, snow, thunderstorms, "episodic" months.
  • Location: Lincoln, Lincolnshire

Firstly, reducing pollution isn't just about reducing "global warming"- there's also issues with air quality, contamination, disruption to habitat etc. Then there's reducing waste and inefficiency, which is never a bad thing. I mean, even if the increased efficiency did end up offset by people consuming more elsewhere (which can be legislated against through taxes, emissions caps etc if desirable), it would mean a better quality of life globally with at worst a similar amount of pollution. Then there's sustainability- if we continue the way we're going, at some point fossil fuels will become scarce and prices will shoot through the roof.

We will certainly need to mitigate against warming, much as John said above. But relying upon that alone would be addressing the cure rather than the prevention. It may be all very well if the AGW effect is towards the low extreme of the spectrum, but if it's towards the high end, the cost of building the defences to cope with the effects of a 4 to 6C warming may be massive and "too little too late"- it's a big risk to be taking. Then we have the aforementioned issue of sustainability and the finite availability of fossil fuels. As illustrated in Chris's posts above, we're probably best off doing some of both.

How do we know that reducing pollution will only reduce the rate of warming by 0.2C? It's hypocritical to point out the uncertainties in the system, and then draw conclusions from the assumption that the current warming is at the "natural" extreme of the range of possibilities.

The 2000BC analogy is largely irrelevant, as the cold-related deaths back then had nothing to do with climate change, natural or man-made. AGW was not a significant issue back then, so of course it wasn't addressed, as it didn't exist.

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Posted
  • Location: Rossland BC Canada
  • Location: Rossland BC Canada

If the world community really believes that the northern ice cover is about to disappear and that this is an unacceptable outcome, then the only way to prevent it is by engineering a solution. You can reduce carbon dioxide as quickly as any idealistic projection might imagine and it would have almost no effect on the natural cycles at work, so given our low level of understanding of these natural variations, we would have to intervene before the point of no return, which means basically the next five or ten years on current projections.

I hope people understand this, because the current approach is not only unrealistic (in terms of both overestimating human contributions to the warming and our real capability of reducing carbon dioxide), it is potentially harmful to the economy. In other words, it is a total waste of time except for the people who get to go on expensive junkets to Rio, Bali and (not so much) Montreal.

So if people want to solve this problem, they need to get together a large-scale plan to keep warm water out of the polar basin. The only obvious way of doing that is to build a large dam across the Bering Straits, something that would take probably five to ten years and perhaps a hundred billion dollars. I'm not sure on the engineering studies done by the Soviets in their heyday, but this project was once considered as a source of hydro-electric power generation so that concept must have involved a certain amount of flow back and forth, whether that would still reduce the inflow or not, I am not qualified to say.

You could also consider smaller but still very costly projects between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, and Novaya Zemlya and the Russian mainland.

Projects like this would have very large uncertainties about future climate outcomes, although it would stand to reason that if the arctic ocean was maintained at a current or slightly colder level, then Greenland and North America if not eastern Siberia would probably all remain near their current temperatures even if a natural warming effect was still underway. If the natural cycle seemed to be reversing, I suppose these dams could be engineered in such a way that water transfer could resume.

One would have to weigh this project and its costs and uncertainties against the alternatives, less uncertain and predictable disruptions to large populations and economic interests (not to mention entire island nations) about to be flooded by the northern meltdown (the rise in sea level likely to be 1 to 1.5 metres). That would probably cost far more than a hundred billion dollars (my billion is a thousand million by the way).

On the other hand, choosing to adapt rather than prevent would remove uncertainty -- we would know what we might be facing and what needed to be done, whereas the engineering solution would not guarantee a solution. The natural warming cycle might prove to be too robust to overcome even with this rather large shift in the natural balance of heat and energy.

Other engineering solutions that come to mind would include enhancing precipitation (snowfall) over northern Canada and Russia in transitional seasons to extend the length of the winter season back to perhaps early 20th century levels. That lies pretty much at the frontier of our current understanding and would have unknown but presumably large costs in the dozens of billions of dollars, at a minimum.

Another approach would be more aggressive desalinization in arid regions such as California, Mexico, Chile, Africa and Australia. Here the solution would be to remove excess seawater and provide large-scale irrigation for extension of agricultural production zones. Indirectly this might feed back into the global climate in terms of increased rainfall in these zones.

Large-scale engineering projects that were tried in the former Soviet Union often ended up in widespread natural disasters, such as the death of the Aral Sea, so I am not necessarily a big fan of this approach, but I am just putting these ideas out for discussion because if people really want to solve what they see as a problem, there is very little point in doing something very expensive and very ineffectual to seek a solution. If the problem needs solving, then engineering is probably the only chance we have, and we need to get started on the Bering Strait project very soon because it won't happen overnight.

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Posted
  • Location: South Shields Tyne & Wear half mile from the coast.
  • Location: South Shields Tyne & Wear half mile from the coast.

Extreme solutions for extreme problems..

Dont know if a dam is though, just for sheer volume of

ice that would gather would certainly test the integrity of such

a structure and the construction would undoubtedly

be a logistics nightmare...!!

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What impact would the creation of a dam across the Bering Straights have on the Northern Hemisphere Climate, apart from the obvious effect of restricting milder air getting into the Arctic circle and thus increasing Ice Cover.

We ofter talk about AGW, however I have another question, we all know about the urban Heat Island effect. How much effect does all those homes heated in the winter and the direct effect of human heat have on the UK as an example.

So, if tomorrow, in the entirely hypothetical situation of all the heating systems being switched off across Europe. would this mean material immediate differences to the temperature, and if so how much.

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Posted
  • Location: Rossland BC Canada
  • Location: Rossland BC Canada

I think it is pretty well documented that urban heat islands are quite strong even in mid-sized cities of say 20,000 to 50,000 people. They operate more effectively at night and in clear conditions, but over the course of a year, a smaller city of that size would have an urban heat island of about 1.0 C degree, whereas a large city like Birmingham might be closer to 2 C degrees and London about 3 C degrees. By the time you get up to the size of London there is an appreciable increase in daytime temperatures as well.

About forty years ago now, I was involved in some urban heat island studies in even smaller urban areas and we found that under ideal conditions in winter you could find strong urban heat island effects in very small towns, theoretically even a town of 2,000 people could generate a 4 C heat island on a clear winter night.

These effects of course have spread out to cover larger portions of all countries in recent decades. I don't think that this is behind global warming directly, but it has to be seen as one factor. Of course the studies on climate change attempt to factor out urban heat islands, by reducing some stations' temperature data, and trying to incorporate mainly unaffected stations.

You would have to think that the temperature records for Valentia or Lerwick would reflect the ambient temperature increases at work in recent decades.

Urban heat islands would not disappear if the power went out and homes and factories were not being heated. The change in terrain also stores up heat from solar radiation and releases it into the atmosphere at night. The average albedo of an urban area can be much lower than the albedo of the natural landscape that it replaced. This is one reason why maintaining greenspaces in cities is important to human health.

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Posted
  • Location: Worthing West Sussex
  • Location: Worthing West Sussex
If the world community really believes that the northern ice cover is about to disappear and that this is an unacceptable outcome, then the only way to prevent it is by engineering a solution. You can reduce carbon dioxide as quickly as any idealistic projection might imagine and it would have almost no effect on the natural cycles at work, so given our low level of understanding of these natural variations, we would have to intervene before the point of no return, which means basically the next five or ten years on current projections.

I hope people understand this, because the current approach is not only unrealistic (in terms of both overestimating human contributions to the warming and our real capability of reducing carbon dioxide), it is potentially harmful to the economy. In other words, it is a total waste of time except for the people who get to go on expensive junkets to Rio, Bali and (not so much) Montreal.

So if people want to solve this problem, they need to get together a large-scale plan to keep warm water out of the polar basin. The only obvious way of doing that is to build a large dam across the Bering Straits, something that would take probably five to ten years and perhaps a hundred billion dollars. I'm not sure on the engineering studies done by the Soviets in their heyday, but this project was once considered as a source of hydro-electric power generation so that concept must have involved a certain amount of flow back and forth, whether that would still reduce the inflow or not, I am not qualified to say.

You could also consider smaller but still very costly projects between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, and Novaya Zemlya and the Russian mainland.

Projects like this would have very large uncertainties about future climate outcomes, although it would stand to reason that if the arctic ocean was maintained at a current or slightly colder level, then Greenland and North America if not eastern Siberia would probably all remain near their current temperatures even if a natural warming effect was still underway. If the natural cycle seemed to be reversing, I suppose these dams could be engineered in such a way that water transfer could resume.

One would have to weigh this project and its costs and uncertainties against the alternatives, less uncertain and predictable disruptions to large populations and economic interests (not to mention entire island nations) about to be flooded by the northern meltdown (the rise in sea level likely to be 1 to 1.5 metres). That would probably cost far more than a hundred billion dollars (my billion is a thousand million by the way).

On the other hand, choosing to adapt rather than prevent would remove uncertainty -- we would know what we might be facing and what needed to be done, whereas the engineering solution would not guarantee a solution. The natural warming cycle might prove to be too robust to overcome even with this rather large shift in the natural balance of heat and energy.

Other engineering solutions that come to mind would include enhancing precipitation (snowfall) over northern Canada and Russia in transitional seasons to extend the length of the winter season back to perhaps early 20th century levels. That lies pretty much at the frontier of our current understanding and would have unknown but presumably large costs in the dozens of billions of dollars, at a minimum.

Another approach would be more aggressive desalinization in arid regions such as California, Mexico, Chile, Africa and Australia. Here the solution would be to remove excess seawater and provide large-scale irrigation for extension of agricultural production zones. Indirectly this might feed back into the global climate in terms of increased rainfall in these zones.

Large-scale engineering projects that were tried in the former Soviet Union often ended up in widespread natural disasters, such as the death of the Aral Sea, so I am not necessarily a big fan of this approach, but I am just putting these ideas out for discussion because if people really want to solve what they see as a problem, there is very little point in doing something very expensive and very ineffectual to seek a solution. If the problem needs solving, then engineering is probably the only chance we have, and we need to get started on the Bering Strait project very soon because it won't happen overnight.

Now come on, Roger, The Bering sea is freezing nicely this year, the problem is the North Atlantic. We don't need a dam, just a 100m deep floating barrier to stop the warm currents from the south, stretched across the Atlantic at about 50 deg N. We would then know exactly where the Atlantic weather would form, where we could place our windfarms and within 50 years exactly where we could farm our Ice for freshwater for all the rest of the arid world. :nonono:

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Posted
  • Location: Steeton, W Yorks, 270m ASL
  • Location: Steeton, W Yorks, 270m ASL
The problem with stats you can throw out any figures you like

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004552.html

---------------

For Britain, it is estimated a 3.6°F increase will mean 2,000 more heat deaths but 20,000 fewer cold deaths. ...----------------

Stew, John is the last person on N-w to take a too didactic view of anything.

I'm hugely amused by the 20,000+ a year in the UK dying from cold. I assume you're confusing 'having a cold' with 'being cold' since I for one cannot remember the last time when it was remotely cold enough in the UK for anyone to die.

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Posted
  • Location: Rossland BC Canada
  • Location: Rossland BC Canada

Problem is, Chris, and I realize you were being semi-facetious, my research strongly suggests an external cause for weather systems so that location is not entirely dependent on thermal gradients, although these will clearly influence the dynamics.

With the external source for storm tracks, it is therefore more significant than some might theorize, what the surface conditions are in terms of precipitation. The storm track will not shift south because we dam the Bering Straits, but it will change some rainfall to snowfall on average because the arctic source region would cool off for longer periods of time.

I am sorry to report that based on my research perspective, you are stuck with this winterless circulation pattern for the time being in western Europe, if anything, it may get worse rather than better because the hemispheric circulation may be re-setting to a deeper trough over N America and a stronger ridge over the eastern Atlantic.

That does not rule out some one-time anomaly blowing away this pattern in favour of something more conducive to winter weather in Europe, but I think the trend may be towards an even larger contrast between anomaly regimes in the medium-term. Longer-term there could be natural cooling for all, if the solar variability theory is accurate. I don't consider that my strong suit so I am as much of a spectator as anyone else in that debate.

I'm pretty sure that assuming that future climate patterns will resemble present or past ones is a guaranteed accident waiting to happen. This never works and you can pretty much assume that the longer term future trends are as unpredictable as economic or political trends over the event horizon. It is pretty similar to trying to imagine what will be major political concerns in the year 2028. When I look back twenty years, the current world situation might have been vaguely imaginable, but what about forty years ago? And change is accelerating, so I tend to think that the 1968 to 2008 analogy might be more valid than 1988 to 2008.

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Posted
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
  • Weather Preferences: Snow and heatwave
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
Stew, John is the last person on N-w to take a too didactic view of anything.

I'm hugely amused by the 20,000+ a year in the UK dying from cold. I assume you're confusing 'having a cold' with 'being cold' since I for one cannot remember the last time when it was remotely cold enough in the UK for anyone to die.

Do you think it needs to be -12c for people to die from the cold ? The point is such facts are ignored by advocates of global warming.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articl...o_feature.shtml

Thousands of old people die needlessly

Thousands of older people die each year from cold-related illnesses in the winter months, according to Age Concern. The charity told BBC London's Evadney Campbell that in six years more than 150,000 over 65's died.

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