Barbuda

Took the brunt of Irma last night. Nobody has been able to contact anybody on the island since then. Antigua & Barbuda prime minister has just reported from the island that 90% of buildings and roads destroyed. Possibly 1000+ deaths
Devastating

 

Horrible tragedy. I have friends in Florida & these storms are becoming an annual thing now. They are better set up to cope with them there though.

 

Prime minister of antigua and Barbuda:
The preliminary report we had earlier in the morning they were totally inaccurate. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news but Barbuda is totally devastated. 90% of the properties have either lost their roof or been totally demolished.
90% of the property were damaged. They had either lost their roof or were totally demolished.
This is the worst devastation I have ever seen.

When asked about fatalities he replies with what sounds like '1000 homes'

 

Apparently pm has clarified that there is one confirmed fatality

 

And Trump still denies climate change.....

 

Totally agree, but we are living though one of the fastest warming periods that we know about at a time when our prime source of heat the sun is in the middle of a dip in output. Note that the last similar solar dip (called the Maunder Minimum) resulted in the Thames freezing over in the winter....

Every year we experience new extremes of weather, globally and here in the UK and those extremes are getting more common and more extreme.

Overwhelming I'd say. Or is it just a coincidence that over the last 100 years we've been pumping out huge quantities of heat-retaining gases?

I too feel for the poor souls whose lives and homes (at best) have been left wrecked in the wake of this event.

 

No one denies warming and cooling is a natural phenomenon but what some the human effect of speeding this up.

 

If you drew a graph of average annual temperature since the planet was formed using a 100 years to a cm scale, it would stretch from London to somewhere around Newcastle (450km). The accurate information on that graph would cover the first few cms and anecdotally maybe 20cms, although we can get impressions from ice cores and other sources for older periods.

We know that climate change happens - evidence of glaciers in the Peak District for example - and we know that the solar output varies (from observation). We know that natural disasters such as the Mt Pinatubo eruption can effect the global temperature (0.5C over 1991-93). Plenty of stuff they don't know yet though, such as the effect of cosmic rays, etc . None of the models for anthropomorphic climate change are anywhere near good enough yet though.

The solar activity is currently on a dip, which could be the end of the "Modern Maximum" - a period of increased solar output that started around 1900 and was thought to be ending around now - the current cycle has the lowest number of sun spots since accurate recording began - but it is still higher than the historic minima, such as the Maunder Minimum.

 

Hope our government make full use of our foreign aid budget to help these people who have had their lives devastated. My heart goes out to anyone caught up in these weather conditions.

As for global warming, I think we are having such a minimal effect on our planets natural heating / cooling cycle. People say look at the records, the planet it heating up faster than any other time we have known. Well considering we didn't start monitoring temperatures to any extent prior to around 1880, it's hardly a long period in the lifetime of this planet. Look at how warm scientists believe most of the planet was during the jurassic period, far warmer than now. Any greenhouse gases do leave the atmosphere, it's bizarre to think otherwise. Once they leave the earths atmosphere, there is more than enough room in ever expanding space.. So I take global warming with a touch of salt and think a lot of the hype is down to big corporates pushing the idea that we all need to buy their new products and technologies etc..

 

I see where you're coming from and you might well be right and climate change is nothing to do with human activity.

But wait a minute, in virtually every walk of life we apply caution. We don't overtake on blind bends because there is a reasonable chance there will be a car coming the other way. Those idiots that don't apply this principle usually end up in early graves. Yet in the case of climate change we blindly plough on producing more and more emissions. It would be a great pity if that car came round that blind bend......

 

Even for the short amount of time we do have records (or impressions from geological data), the change in the last 100 years has been drastic compared to previous trends. If it's a coincidence it's a hell of a coincidence.

See https://xkcd.com/1732/

Plus there's not really anything to be lost by reducing dependence on fossil fuels and reducing CO2 emissions even if climate change does turn out to be a massive myth.

 

Don't get me wrong. I do everything I can to recycle, walk to Morrisons instead of driving, am in favour of nuclear power (especially fusion, but that is way off) instead of fossil fuels, support renewables, etc. I was just pointing out that the climate models we use are not very good and miss out large parts of the picture. Even if we had a good model, the accurate data is insufficient to test the accuracy of it.

I recycle not because of my opinions on climate change, but because we only have a finite amount of resources on the planet and once destroyed, they are destroyed. Far better to keep using it wherever possible until we can readily access the relatively infinite resources available on other planets.

 

So the chart stops at the last real ice age....before that the earth was far far hotter than present day and I'm sure if it could be put onto a grpahic like the one just posted it would fluctuate all over the place..

 

It might have been, but it will have taken a hell of a long time to change to/from that temperature. The thing that is scary isn't the current temperature, it's how quickly it's changed to get there.

 

Monk Bretton priory had vineyards in medieval times and the North of England was almost mediterranean in climate and that was before Henry VIII deforested most of England to build his fleet of ships warships. Sherwood forest stretched from the South up into Northumbria and beyond before that. The big cycle of warming and cooling is over many millennia but there are many mini ice ages and warming periods in that time.
True, we are not helping but man has negligible effect on what is inevitable i.e. the Earth is going through a warming period. There is no such thing as 'normal' just because we have experienced a relatively stable climate since theremnants of the last mini ice-age (early Victorian era when the Thames used to freeze every winter.) Polar ice caps melt sea levels rise, more moisture in atmosphere, more clouds cooling the surface Polar Ice caps freeze again wind patterns change. Sea levels fall, less moisture less clouds, more sun Earth warms....wind patterns change again. All very simplistic I know and many other complex factors but I just feel nature controls us not us nature. Man is arrogant to think otherwise and that he can change nature for better or worse.

 

The medieval warm period is noted on that chart above. It was a localised event and didn't affect the global average much at all. Look at the rate of change since industrialisation. I don't see how that can be dismissed so casually. "Ignore the evidence, because I have a gut feeling we can't affect nature" probably isn't sufficient.

 

That chart just can't be that accurate though. It's a known fact that temperatures were not recorded until the late 1800's so unless someone has invented a time machine on whose saying were temps like that chart suggests in whatever date BC.. A chart can be made to look like whatever the author wants it to be portrayed as. We play a tiny, tiny part in climate change.. The universe around us is far too expansive to suggest otherwise.

 

Also to back up what I have just said about a chart portraying a picture.... That scale is a joke.. jumps from 500 year points to a 16 year point and the next point is only another 84 yrs advanced with 'Projected' figures.... Apply the same 500 year scale and remove the unknown future prediction points and voila the line starts to flatten out somewhat..