Temperature not freaking everyone out?

[JKDcot]

Meant to be 23/24 degrees in London next week? Not usual for early October… anyone else think it’s bonkers that climate change so obvious and still nothing being done my government and corporates

What would you suggest the government do.....the UK is responsible for only 1% of the world's emissions

I agree. Whenever we have warm weather at this time of year and people are astonished by it I often bore them by reminiscing about how it was 30 degrees in London when DS2 was born 12 years ago yesterday, 30th September. The following day was just as hot and therefore became the hottest October day on record. People just don’t remember, even though it’s the same people who bang on about how remarkable it is at the time.

The U.K. has halved carbon emissions in recent years.

The last Labour leader promised to re-open the coal mines.

I accept that climate seems to be changing but I’m not convinced that human activity has caused it or that we can change it by our actions.

I'm sorry what? You don't think human activity is causing climate change?!?!

To those who say it's always this warm in October, when does the weather tend to become autumnal? I can't stand this dull, humid heat.

There has always been climate change for millions of years. It all depends on which scientist you listen to how bad it is. One says it hasn’t changed or warmed up in 15 years. We’ve had a terrible wet summer so if we get a few good warm days in October I say great, plus like another person has said we often get a good spell in October. How a few warm/hot days can worry anyone is beyond me.

Why does it matter to you that a random person on mumsnet has a different opinion to you?

Now I'm not agreeing but if you go to the natural history museum they have a room about this with a timeline which literally says we are entering a global cooling phase. Which seemed a bit at odds with the message to me!

If it weren't for the release of green house gases, primarily from burning fossil fuels, it's true that the earth would have been cooling until recently. The earth has been warming, burning fossil fuels is doing so much damage it has over ridden our planets natural cycles.

Human activity causing climate change isn't an 'opinion'. It's scientific fact. Like evolutionary biology. Unless you are a flat earther who thinks we descend from Adam and Eve?!

You seem to be getting unduly hung up on semantics. Why have you referred to me as being "merely aware" of CO2e? My objection is the fact that this gives an erroneous impression of certainty. It is a fact that the sensitivity of climate to CO2 is not definitively known - hence modelled outcomes necessarily have a range of values.
In reality, there isn't the data or computational power to include all of the necessary initialisation information when running computer modelling simulations - put simply, the climate system has a huge number of attributes that science cannot currently translate into model parameters at the required scale. This means that whilst models are repeatedly 'tuned' in order to try to get them to match the actual observed climate patterns, they are incapable of replicating its complexities - thus the differences in model output when it comes to even attempting to describe the known temperature changes of the last century - and the subsequent uncertainties when they run those models to predict global temperatures for the next hundred years. What is known is that they have tended to be too sensitive to CO2 - this certainly implies that there has been an inadequate modelling of natural forcing agents and/or an inclusion of levels of positive feedback that are not reflected in the reality of the climate system - which may favour processes of negative feedback (increased cloud cover in response to higher temperatures/water vapour being a simple case in point).

Only just seen the graph you posted earlier in the thread - I agree with @IslaWinds ' position. Part of the problem is that graphs like this are presented to the public without the contextual information to adequately explain their limitations.
The IPCC's assessment reports cannot rely on a single model - because no single model has been able to accurately describe past temperature changes, they use an 'ensemble' of various models - under the direction of the CMIP (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project). At the resolution required to attempt to detect the impact of anthropogenic GHGs on climate, there is significant disagreement both between different model output and between that output and observed real world changes. What we are shown in the sort of headline graphs that give an impression (at first glance) of certainty and inevitable trajectories are actually simply averaged results that mask these differences. These differences reflect huge levels of uncertainty - if the models were simply reflecting the known physics of the climatic systems' variables, they would not produce such a range of results. For example, when attempts are made to model average global surface temperature, the ensemble range is around 3 degrees centigrade - a figure 300% higher than the total warming experienced during the last century - this raises significant doubts as to whether they have the resolution to unpick the element of the actual small amount of warming (because a proportion will be due to natural causes) that can be attributable to human influence. These differences between the temperatures that the models simulate is partially overcome and masked by referencing temperature changes (anomalies) rather than actual temperatures! The graph that you posted describes those averaged anomalies rather than actual surface temperatures for a reason - and that reason is linked to model uncertainty!

@Bogwood
In addition, there is disagreement as to the input on the models as well as output. One example off the top of my head is not counting the water vapor created by trees which is also a greenhouse gas and accounts for 97% of water vapor in our atmosphere. Instead the IPCC models only count water vapor from aeroplane contrails.

Finally, after the fact, IPCC either runs more model simulations or discards “outlier” models to purposely ensure an average model line that is close to the observations. So the idea it’s all ok, we just need to average all the models and we will have a good prediction is the impression they want to give off but it’s fabricated. It’s not real.

To be clear- climate change is real as is humanity’s impact on climate change. The difference in opinion is in whether we are headed for catastrophe/extinction event caused by climate change. For example the UK nature report most of the cause of native species becoming endangered is due to overpopulation and over urbanisation as well as pollution- basically habitat destruction not climate change.

Not necessarily. We are in an interglacial period and most prior ones the polar ice caps did in fact melt entirely. The planet naturally warming is the baseline our effects are on top of.

Just going to put this out there because of what the OP said about government and corporates not doing anything about global warming.

you really don’t have a clue

try going to other countries where there is NOTHING done. Yes, could do more but the people themselves need to do more

congestion zone and ulez - people are sabotaging the cameras, they’re complaining it is only about making money. How about taking public transport??? Save the environment from taking individual transport and instead the electric buses, ride a bike that is available to rent (or your own), cycle lanes created for safer cycling?

we have loads of recycling and food waste collections, apps for left over food, community shops where you take your own containers to reduce packaging.

wind mills and solar panel farms - that everyone complains about.

there’ll soon be the ban on installing gas boilers in favour of other “green” initiatives.

so much that does not exist elsewhere plus do much that do many people are simply complaining about but are not doing anything themselves to help. People have to support initiatives and think themselves how to do their part.

Human activity causing climate change isn't an 'opinion'. It's scientific fact

This. But people don't like the idea of having to give up their polluting SUVs or ski-ing holidays so deny it.

While the UK is only responsible for 1% of emissions, and therefore probably can't do a lot on its own about climate change, it can do something about local pollution. The "war on motorists" is completely the right thing to do, so of course, this government is doing the opposite.

Disclaimer: I don't think requiring drivers to consider pedestrians and cyclists is a "war" on them!

Further disclaimer: October often has warm, fine weather.

The ULEZ outrage is ridiculous - it only applies to 10% of cars and presumably that percentage will get even smaller as those cars get to the end of their lives.

Climate change is definitely a thing but UK weather has always varied wildly in my memory of 40 years.

October could be warm or even hot sometimes but other years cold and stormy.

March was always a lottery where you could have snow one year and get sunburn the next.

And? Unless she's building her own coal mine why does it matter?

i haven't been able to find that thread please add the link

It's cold today. We've put he heating on.
glad we got on and enjoyed the warmer weather yesterday rather than freaking out about it.

Ha ha, it's not cold in the SE. Really warm and muggy, about 23 degrees at the moment. Forecast to be 24 (feeling like 26!) at the weekend.

Huge thunderstorm here, south east.

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