UK cold weather: New maps show exact day brutal ice storm crashes into Britain
BBC weather for the week ahead summary: Strong jetstream is going to bring lots of depressions from the west -- windy, wet and relatively mild -- with no sign of that setup changing until the middle of December at the earliest.
There really can only be one explanation for this total failure of "journalism". Somebody at the Express is tasked with watching all of the various weather predictions, looking out for extreme outlier predictions of very cold weather, and then indiscriminately writes a version of this story.
We must deal with reality or it will deal with us.
First story on the BBC news this morning: We've breached 1.5 degrees. Ten minute interview with person from Norwich university saying its bad but insisting viewers don't get despondent or lose hope, because "we know how to do this. What is needed is radical action now."
Second story on the BBC this morning: The incoming Labour government is ditching its £28bn green investment plan in a major U-turn, because it is too expensive. Radical action is impossible, because it will crash the economy.
No cognitive dissonance there then
We must deal with reality or it will deal with us.
Spot on. There is zero chance of this civilisation pro-actively choosing to change behaviour such that warming remains below +2C. Even if it were technically possible - which it is, if we literally stopped burning stuff by next week, the ramifications are utterly unacceptable to virtually everyone so politics will never deliver.
The *only* chance to avoid +2C is a major external shock with the next few years - a global economic collapse at least as fast/deep as the USSR experienced (with no recovery), major atmospheric cooling via nuclear winter, asteroid impact etc, a killer pandemic with double digit % fatality rate (which also tanks the economy)...
Anyone, especially scientists (including social and political scientists) who really should now better, still saying "we know how to do this. What is needed is radical action now." is either lying or mistaken. We absolutely *don't* know how to do this, if by this they mean change the behaviour of global civilisation such that warming remains below +2C.
Our atmosphere, where yellow is nitrogen, blue is oxygen, red is argon, and green is carbon dioxide. The little white dot you can hardly make out in the upper right corner is carbon dioxide produced by human activities, while the rest of the green is naturally occurring carbon dioxide.
We are certainly trashing the planet's living systems and are currently living through a human induced mass extinction event. But, the CO2 shtick is just that; a ruling class shtick that is being employed for reasons that have got nothing to do with "saving the planet" and have everything to do with implementing tyranny in order to keep an increasingly restless population under control in the teeth of the Long Emergency of industrial resource depletion that is now well under way.
No, northernmonkey, we don't need this kind of rubbish here. You know, or could find out in seconds how misleading that (Italian?) chart is. If you actually believe
CO2 shtick is just that; a ruling class shtick that is being employed for reasons that have got nothing to do with "saving the planet" and have everything to do with implementing tyranny in order to keep an increasingly restless population under control
...then I'm sorry to say you are a victim of propaganda.
To see the effect of a 100% CO2 atmosphere you need to look no further that the planet Venus. It is covered in highly reflective clouds that reflect a lot of sunlight and still manages to get temperatures of more than 400 degrees Celsius at the surface.
Also do not forget that CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas. Water vapour, methane are also contributors to the global warming that has stopped the Earth being a frozen snowball with an average surface temperature of -18C instead of +15C if none of those gases were in the atmosphere.
Gas molecules containing more than two atoms are able to absorb energy at the frequency of infrared radiation whereas those which constitute the majority of the atmosphere and coloured yellow, blue and red on your diagram are not. It is really a matter of doing a course in physical chemistry called spectroscopy which was taught in the first year of my Chemistry degree course back in the day.
The oceans also do a very useful job of absorbing a lot of manmade CO2 and keeping it out the atmosphere but supposedly there are signs that this is not going to continue much longer.
You are right about the CO2 famine. The Earth has been much warmer in the past due to higher CO2 levels. Fern fossils in Antarctica etc. I think the sun is getting a bit more luminous also so maybe if we went back to those levels now it would be a bit too hot for ferns.
I understand how CO2 interacts with the rest of the atmosphere and its properties vis a vis the greenhouse effect. But, it remains the case that the earth has had much higher CO2 levels for much of the history of life on Earth and the earth has been much greener as a result. It also remains the case that the size of the fluctuations in CO2 that have regularly occurred on earth make the current human contribution to CO2 levels little more than noise in the historical signal.
Of significant concern, however, is the very real collapse of ecological systems around the planet due to human industrial activity and the sheer number of humans now on the planet and the impact this is having on biodiversity and, ultimately, the food chain on which humans rely.
What we face is the end of complex industrial civilization and, if we really mess things up, the end of complex civilization per se or, if we really, really mess things up, the end of humans altogether. Though, I see that last event as exceedingly unlikely.
I do take some comfort in the fact that the rest of life will, in time, recover just fine once we get to the bottom of the other side of Hubbert's curve. But, there is some serious fuckery to get through before then. Indeed, the fuckery has already begun in earnest in the political and wider cultural realms.
