Is the flooding related to global warming?

[superstarheartbreaker]

thoughts please?

[OhYouBadBadKitten]

Specifically, without hand waving show us the actual data that refutes that climate change is currently happening and is almost certainly being caused by man. Lots of pointers to research that supports anthropogenic climate change has been posted on this thread - all you have been able to do is give us your theories.

[inde]

Nobody is disputing that the climate has changed in the past. What has that got to do with the AGW hypothesis?

[Jaisalmer]

We are a tiny jot but we are causing unspeakable damage whilst we are here.

[OhYouBadBadKitten]

I just read your previous post - are you really saying that there is no funding to look at the other side of the coin? That large parts of the us government, very many of whom deny climate change, the oil industry etc has not been able to come up with any funding to look at this? Why would they not? You really think the green lobby is more powerful than them?

I didn't put you down as a conspiracy theorist.

[Dromedary]

I know what you mean, Morebeta. When George Bush, an oil man with many friends in the oil business, was President of the United States, he was so cowed by the green lobby that he veto-ed all objective research on climate change. Yeah right.

[MoreBeta]

OYBK - the process of scientific inquiry requires a null hypothesis to be rejected at a given level of confidence.

You know very well the UEA data controversy so lets not rehearse it here but the fact is the global temperature record we have is simply not long enough or reliable enough to show whether this recent rise in temperature is anything other than a normal and inevitable cyclical rise after the mini ice age in Victorian times or part of a longer trend. It simply does not prove anything to any degree of acceptable statistical confidence.

Despite that we are spending billions on an unproven theory and supressing every other alternative theory. My theory is that this could be a temporary cyclical rise in temperature and you do not have the data to reject that null hypothesis. No one does.

[JassyRadlett]

MoreBeta, evidence from around the world, considered by scientists representing governments who can agree on nothing else, completely disagree with you on what can and can't be determined. Is there evidence to back your assertion?

As an aside, humans have been around a lot longer than 50,000 years unless you are relying on a theory that has much less evidences and is much more disputed than anthropogenic climate change.

[Lazyjaney]

Climate has always changed, it's what it does.

I'd be more inclined to bet on human error and greed- 30 years of crap settlement development, ripping up hedgerows and other natural breakwaters, muddled objectives for the EA, the unspoken but increasingly clear evidence that the priority has been on homes and that the countryside has been deliberately used as a floodplain for the urban areas, and that the probability of something like the current storms is such that every x years we get one like this.

[KissesBreakingWave]

MoreBeta's got a valid point though. What if we accidentally build a better, cleaner, more sustainable world with renewable energy, not held hostage by oil cartels, because of a mistake?

WHAT THEN?

[Dromedary]

Morebeta prefers the wait and see approach - wait until half the world is uninhabitable and it's decades too late to take effective action. Of course his children and children's children will be stuffed, but he'll have enjoyed his long haul holidays etc, so that's alright then. That does seem to be the mindbogglingly selfish approach that most people are taking.

[Lazyjaney]

^^
You do realise that there is nothing anyone in the UK can do about anthropogenic climate change (whether you believe in it or not), as we are only about 2% of global man made CO2 output. You can build a beautifully cleaner energy Britain but given the developing world's rush for coal it's going to make f-all difference.

We are coming out of a mini ice age, places like the Somerset levels were much further under water in medieaval times, the Cinque ports were on the sea shore etc etc. All the kings horses, wind farms and whatnot aren't going to stop that happening again.

But you'll hear none of this from the Climate Change lobby, whose interests are already invested.

[OhYouBadBadKitten]

Lazeyjaney, thats why we need to work together with other countries. We don't need to do this unilaterally (nor can we).

You need to look beyond just what is happening in Britain - look at weather headlines over the past few years across the globe. You can't blame extreme events across the globe on our land management. You cant blame terrible storms on anyones land management.

Kisses - that would be terrible

[HesterShaw]

I agree OYBBK, but I don't think that if international action is proving difficult, it means we should do nothing. We should take action because it is the right thing to do. Idealistic perhaps.

[MoreBeta]

Dromedary - I do prefer the wait and see approach because that is the best approach. We can exploit technology as yet unknown and uninvented that will solve the problem for us if we wait a little longer.

What is the point in killing our economy by investing in energy sources that are twice as expensive as current best available ones when we could wait for 20 years and have a much better technology. I just hate to see us going down the same road of 'picking winners. that lead us to nuclear power which is still not economically feasible (£90/MWh) and always at great risk of a devastating nuclear accident.

For example, go back 20 years, and look at the newest combined cycle gas turbines back then and compare then with the ones we have today. At best in 1993 the CCGT we had then were doing 45% thermal efficiency and emitting 450 kg of CO2 per MWh of electrical output. Now today we are doing 55% thermal efficiency with 60% in sight in the most modern CCGT. The old CCGT are now closing down along with the old coal stations. In fact, the old coal stations which were the backbone of our power station fleet back then were doing just 35% thermal efficiency and emitting 1000kg of CO2 per MWh of output.

The best CCGT now does 325kg of CO2 per MWh of output. That massive progress in 20 years with emissions of CO2 dropping by 2/3 against what we had back in 1993 with the best available most economically viable technology of today and with not a single £1 of Government subsidy making that happen.

Nobody mandated we should build CCGT, its just advances in technology made them worth investing in. It was a proven technology, it just needed a profit incentive to make it better. That's what we should rely on - economic progress to deal with climate change if it is ever proven to be happening. Not Government mandated investment in tackling an unproven theory.

[Dromedary]

Almost all of the many scientists working on climate change worldwide agree that it is largely man-made. I think you should stop pretending that you know more about the science than all of them. You are a layman who likes to use plenty of petrol etc, that is all.

And of course it makes no sense to do nothing (except increase emissions year on year) in the at the very best near certainty that it is leading us to huge and irreversible problems, in the childish belief that some form of new technology will come along just in time to save us. "We can exploit technology as yet unknown and uninvented" -FGS, that's the stuff of fairy tales. This is real life, and your children will suffer too (regardless of financial circumstances).

[Lazyjaney]

"Almost all of the many scientists working on climate change worldwide agree that it is largely man-made"

Well they would, wouldn't they. If they disagreed they'd be drummed out the service.

But it doesn't actually matter why you think the climate is changing, the question is what you do about it. And the UK making a unilateral decision to return to near medieval levels of energy production with neo medieval technologies is daft, firstly because it doesn't help us, and secondly it does f-all to solve global CO2 emissions anyway.

We are better off making a dash for coal and spending all our intelligence in developing clean coal, that will have a far bigger impact both on Chinese CO2 emission than faffing around with a few windmills in the UK. And then spend what we save by not propping up an overpriced energy industry on propping up underwater farmlands.

[oricella]

Please stop being so disingenuous about conventional technologies being all hi-ha-hurray market driven and efficient. Every technology is subsidised one way or another - whether it is directly in providing a FIT or in picking up the tab for coal related diseases or the clean up of disasters, or indeed the advances in technology. And yes, fossil fuel gets subsidised directly too: "The IEA’s latest estimates indicate that fossil-fuel consumption subsidies worldwide amounted to $544 billion in 2012"

[MoreBeta]

Dromedary - I don't have a car but do use taxis sometimes and buses and trains and walk a lot. I do that out of choice - not to save the planet. I want to see some science that proves to a reasonable level of statistical confidence that climate change is happening.

The theory that anthropogenic climate change is happening is not proven its just the debate has been shut down. That is what annoys me intensely.

The most shocking thing about the whole climate change debate is the utterly vile use of the word 'denier'. The use of that word was very deliberately chosen by the climate change lobby because it echoes 'holocaust denier'. It is the level of debate we have got to where scientists with serious and well thought out concerns and research questions get bullied and labelled as deniers and then their funding is cut.

We need honesty about the degree of confidence we have in the data and not just bullying people into silence who ask legitimate questions and suggest alternative ways of approaching the issue.

[FarmerSueTickle]

For those who refer to the ice age as though it was a long time ago and over, well actually we're still in it and have been for 2 and a half million years. As long as there is ice at the poles, it's an ice age. We are likely in an interglacial period. It'll be interesting to see if anthropogenic global warming extends this current interglacial or prevents the next glaciation completely.

[HesterShaw]

MoreBeta do you mean proof of global warming or AGW?

[inde]

Well they would, wouldn't they. If they disagreed they'd be drummed out the service.

It really worries me that people actually believe this nonsense. Science doesn't work like that. Do you really think that 97% of climate scientists are falsifying research, that the people who peer review their research are also in on this conspiracy? And every scientific organisation in the world is also in on it? It's total rubbish.
And before anyone else mentions "climategate" they should read this.
www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/
The emails didn't show that the scientists were falsifying data. What's really disturbing is that the journalists who try and make out that it was a big scandal must know that the quotes are being taken out of context.

[inde]

It is the level of debate we have got to where scientists with serious and well thought out concerns and research questions get bullied and labelled as deniers and then their funding is cut

Another conspiracy theory. Where is your evidence that they get their funding cut?

[inde]

Their is actually very good money to be had if you deny the overwhelming evidence that AGW is happening.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/28/climate-change-sceptic-willie-soon

[MrsCosmopilite]

Probably already been said but I'm joining the thread late. "Global Warming" is something of an incorrect term, but it's the one that was first put about and has stuck. "Climate change" is more correct. Greater and more frequent anomalies are occurring, which appear to be attributed to the way we have reshaped the planet with regard to landcover, and our outputs of greenhouse gasses.
What Cameron and his crew are missing is that dredging the rivers won't work. The way rivers work is complex, and the substrate (stuff at the bottom) has to build up over time to function. If you remove it, the river will not work properly as water will flow through too quickly, and take debris with it, causing problems further along.
What they are also missing (and what George Monbiot was on about when I saw a TV interview) is that the landcover has been changed. If you strip out trees and hedges, and keep grass short through constant grazing, there is nowhere for water to be soaked up. If you build houses on floodplains then you're really asking for trouble.
None of this is really the fault of the people who live in these flood-stricken areas, but we really need to address how we are managing our land use. We can't change the weather, but we can create better coping strategies.

[Lazyjaney]

I didn't have to mention Climategate - and pretending that vested interests don't falsify scientific results is naive.

There is actually a lot of scepticism inside as well as outside of the Climate Change community towards AGW, which is the reason this particular industry turned to politicians and campaigners and use language likev"deniers" etc. If they had a solid case that would be unncessary.

The unfortunate truth is that even a fairly rudimentary use of high school maths shows that AGW data is subsumed by the standard deviation in good old planetary climate change.