Climate Change - Time to start refocusing efforts?



maygo said:
I'm not a climate change denier, far from it, but my teenage son told me about the elliptical orbit of the earth and how we may be at one of the close to the sun periods at the moment- got me thinking, can we really do anything about it or are we just pissing in the (slightly warmer) wind?
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Afraid your son's not got this one right. If being closer to the sun now was responsible for warming, you'd see an increase in solar energy which correlates to the rapid increase in warming - but there isn't any such increase. Also, temperatures on earth are warming at the surface but are cooling in the stratosphere which is the opposite of what you'd see if the sun was contributing more heat.

What your son's describing - the Milankovitch cycles (which also include tilt) - are real and do influence climate, but happens over tens of thousands of years or more. Not hundreds and tens of years.
Teed said:
And when that happens, they stop producing oxygen, so, Carbon dioxide is the gas of life, for carbon based creatures.
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Water is also essential for life but you might not want to sit at the bottom of a swimming pool for twenty minutes.
 
The King of Um said:
Afraid your son's not got this one right. If being closer to the sun now was responsible for warming, you'd see an increase in solar energy which correlates to the rapid increase in warming - but there isn't any such increase. Also, temperatures on earth are warming at the surface but are cooling in the stratosphere which is the opposite of what you'd see if the sun was contributing more heat.

What your son's describing - the Milankovitch cycles (which also include tilt) - are real and do influence climate, but happens over tens of thousands of years or more. Not hundreds and tens of years.
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Is that why the Arctic Circle is moving north by about 50ft each year?
 
I just read that over 1000 private jets attended the superbowl. We've all been doing the recycling things for years, but I can't help but think it's all a bit of a waste of time whilst everyone isn't on board this journey.

Capitalism has been amazing for world development, but it's going to end up destroying us all.
 
Church said:
I just read that over 1000 private jets attended the superbowl. We've all been doing the recycling things for years, but I can't help but think it's all a bit of a waste of time whilst everyone isn't on board this journey.

Capitalism has been amazing for world development, but it's going to end up destroying us all.
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Bill Gates will emit more Co2 in one of his private jets during a single flight than any of us emit from our cars over a lifetime.

So the chances of me taking any notice of people like him when it comes to climate change is zero.
 
Church said:
I just read that over 1000 private jets attended the superbowl. We've all been doing the recycling things for years, but I can't help but think it's all a bit of a waste of time whilst everyone isn't on board this journey.

Capitalism has been amazing for world development, but it's going to end up destroying us all.
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Off subject slightly but due to the amount of private jets Las Vegas couldn't host them all so majority had to fly to ohio or some either small airports where they could park them and didn't charge mental fees.
 
The King of Um said:
That would be bad if it were at all relevant to what net zero is. No one's planning on taking out all the CO2 from the atmosphere, you know. We managed fine a couple of hundred years ago when there was a lot less.
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And 0.04 percent carbon in the atmosphere isn't really the equivalent to drowning in a swimming pool full of water, is it? When you say, a lot less, how much, exactly?
 
RedandWhiteRebel said:
I'm all for nature, conservation and looking after the environment in terms of not polluting our rivers, seas and protecting our wild places.
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The emissions from burning fossil fuels are the biggest source of pollution bar none. 37 billion tonnes which has led to a global surface temperature rise of 1.5 degrees.
 
Teed said:
And 0.04 percent carbon in the atmosphere isn't really the equivalent to drowning in a swimming pool full of water, is it? When you say, a lot less, how much, exactly?
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Why are you typing in bold? Is it like large print books for the elderly?

Carbon's at 0.04% now which is 420 parts per million, for 10,000 years pre-industrialisation the atmospheric CO2 was constant at about 280 parts per million. But we can't return to that now, all we can do is reduce the rate of increase until we get to a point where the net increase is zero. Even with that, we're stuck with what we have now, it's baked in.

The 'well it's only a tiny percentage so it can't have an effect' argument is facile, when most people cheerfully take medications that are a tiny, tiny proportion of their body weight but which nonetheless have big effects.
 

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