Global temperature rise expected to reach 3.1 degrees this century

Sorry, I've got to ask this... You say 'we' are being lied to. Who do you perceive is lying to 'us' and more importantly... Why? What is the motive for 'them' lying to us?

Can I also ask, do you perceive that climate is changing? Do you perceive that wildlife habitats and numbers are declining because of man made activities and actions? Do you think weather (around the world) is getting more extreme and frequent? Do you believe the examples of ice cap retreat and increased ice water melt and if continued, the impact it would ultimately have at some future point on sea levels? Do you feel global population levels are sustainable?

 

There's no point. It's Casual Tyke and this is very much the thin end of his particular brand of crazy.

 

I'm just putting the original article up....not advocating it.

 

Who is Casual Tyke? I've never gone by that name on here. My current name is Mr BFC88, the only other name I've gone by is Sabre-Toothed Tyke - I had to create a new account due to being unable to access the other one, not sure if @Gally can confirm this?

I think we're being lied to. I think there's groups like Davos, Trilateral Commission and groups of that ilk, where powerful people get together to decide where the world needs to go (to make them richer, not necessarily for what's good for the world or the people in it.)

Climate change is a drum they've been banging for decades. They want to secure taxation streams into the future as some other streams fall by the wayside. Carbon taxes and tariffs are a good way of taking in money.

To be clear, I'm 100% in favour of reducing pollutants from the water and the atmosphere, I also think landfill is a huge ticking time bomb. But Carbon Dioxide is not.

People become so hyper-focused on such a small period of time, relatively speaking. We hearing constantly, "hottest/wettest/dryest (insert season) since records began etc" records began, comprehensively at least, in the mid 1850's. That seems like such a long time, to a human it is, to the Earth it's less than the blink of an eye. The Climate has always fluctuated, whether it's an ice age, or an inter-glacial period (which we're currently in) or a warm period...it's constantly changing.

How can CO2 be the driver of Climate change when the climate has changed, sometimes violently, when humans were very small in number and were certainly not industrialised?

I've said time and time again, we're having an impact, to suggest otherwise would be stupid. But our impact is supposed to be 3% of the 0.04% that is CO2 in our atmosphere. It's just not feasible that that's what is causing the weather we're experiencing globally in recent years. It requires more open-minded enquiry.

 

A lot of climate change science is informed by the ice cores they take from Antarctica which hold air trapped from the past. It concluded that man is driving current climate change and has been for Centuries.

https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ice-cores-and-climate-change/

 

It's an interesting take given fossil fuel subsidies in 2022 amounted to more than $7 trillion. And its been demonstrated multiple times that oil interests, companies and states have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into misinformation and lobbying governments.

You're right that the climate of this planet will have changed over its life to date without human intervention. There was a fascinating series with Chris Packham and tried to depict how unliveable and hostile the planet was at points. It showed 5 tipping points that led to radical change. Where climate shifted, it did so over hundreds of thousands of years or, a catastrophic event that set off a chain reaction.

We're now seeing that in 2023, carbon dioxide levels were 51% higher than pre industrial levels. Methane, which I'd argue has even greater impact than c02 is 265% higher than pre industrial levels.

The last time concentrations were so high was 3-5 million years ago. Temperatures were 2-3 degrees higher and sea levels 8-10 metres higher.

Science shows us many things in our natural world can and will change on very small variations. We're ultimately a ball of molten rock spinning at just the right speed, just the right distance from the sun, with just the right mix of oxygen in our atmosphere for us to evolve over a phenomenal period of time. At some point, the earth will be inhospitable for humans and our species will die out. Time will tell if that's completely down to our own making or more natural phenomena.

But there seems no doubt our planet and the natural world is being scarred, altered, damaged by human choices and human actions. That should be indisputable.

 

I agree with what you've said 100% we're damaging the planet on many, many fronts. It's essential that we clean up our act. No argument there whatsoever.

My issue with this is the CO2. That's the story in the mainstream. We're told time and time again that it's the CO2 that's driving Climate Change, and it's only through reducing our CO2 output, offsetting it, or taxing us for producing it are the only ways to "save the planet". My argument is that CO2 is being used as a Trojan horse to hoodwink people into believing that this new taxation stream is justifiable, which in my opinion, it isn't.

You said that methane production or the release of it is a much greater threat than CO2, there again, we agree.

At the end of the day, CO2 is plant food, together with sunlight it's the fuel for photosynthesis. Plants LOVE high ppm's of CO2, they lap it up.

Years ago, I knew a lad who grew "tomato plants" in his loft. He was well into it, all the science behind it. He used to tell me that atmospheric CO2 was around 350/400 ppm, but he used to pump CO2 into his "grow space" up to 1,500 ppm and the plants thrived, the tomatoes were massive. What I'm getting at is that the plants, trees and all things green on this planet regulate the CO2 through their respiration.

There's other much more serious issues than CO2. That's all I'm saying. And we appear to agree as far as I can see.

EDIT - thank you for the genuine response.

 

What I suspect is that its c02 that is being used as a way of getting across to the everyday person that we have a problem, in a way it covers the huge array of other issues that we're causing. I could be wrong, and it could straight up be media suppression of really important information, but a lot of people only take in snippets of information, and the potential impact on this world is seismic and probably hard for some to comprehend. If we talk of methane and where it's coming from, you're touching on a food source in part that then gets spun as a conspiracy theory. Sadly its an inescapable truth that livestock levels have soared, deforestation to let those animals exist has intensified and the associated increase in emissions from them.

I do however think that carbon dioxide is causing problems and a contributing factor to climate shift. It may be beneficial in some areas and regulated by plants at ground level... And i'm mindful our population has significantly grown and we all exhale carbon, but its not beneficial in the upper reaches of our atmosphere and thats whats contributing to the blanketting effect of keeping heat in.

I also suspect that there are plenty of things we're not yet aware of, or don't fully understand one way or another. We are primitive creatures despite our hubris and there are so many things we only guess at. But... The planet is warming, weather is more random and intense and its occurring at such a speed that it can't be just a natural blip.

 

Not believing in climate change is not just a difference of opinion.

It's like if I came on here adamant the world is flat I would rightly get called out for being a moron and a nutter.

 

You do know that vast areas of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire near the tidal river Trent are already below mean sea level and are only kept dry by 10 foot high artificial river banks?

 

Carbon dioxide is a molecule which absorbs photons of light in the infra red and visible spectrum. When such a molecule absorbs a photon, the molecule jumps to a higher energy state. What happens then is that it either emits a photon and drops back to a lower energy state or, more likely, it begins to vibrate more which is what we call heat. This heat can then be spread by many mechanisms to the rest of the atmosphere. This is "A" level chemistry, I have a degree in Chemistry and I well remember being taught this at Wath Grammer School back between 1972 and1974 (hardly new science then). In view of this, it is both common sense and scientific fact that a higher concentration of CO2 will and does increase thermal energy in the atmosphere. It is easy to calculate pretty accurately exactly how much extra thermal energy is added to the atmosphere by a set increase in carbon dioxide. As you mention, other gases behave like this as well, methane, as farted and belched by cows is one such molecule. Indeed it is a worse offender than carbon dioxide.
Whether you "think that carbon dioxide is causing problems" or not, it effing well is. The only people disputing it are those with money in the fossil fuels industry and it is these people who are lying to you.

 

I don't have a degree in chemistry. But I suspect the amount of bull s h i t in this thread isn't doing the planet much good either.

 

My post didn't contribute in any way to an increase in the bull sht concentration of this thread.

 

If I recall, methane is also emitted during the mining of oil... Though its supposed to be burnt off. I remember a piece probably some years back now that showed oil fields in the US failing to burn off the methane.

My point around carbon dioxide and its reporting was more around the media side and dumbing down the array of topics to maybe make it more palatable to digest in non scientific realms.

But aside from all that, as a species, we're massively failing in every respect of managing our impact on the planet. But hey.... Lets fly to Mars and burn more rocket fuel! It's thoroughly depressing.

 

So that's;

1. Thick as pig ****
2. Moron
3. Nutter

I'm sure there's more in this thread that I haven't caught. Is this really what this board is about?

 

As I grew up in Bolton on Dearne, if you were out in the dark, for miles round you'd see a flame on top of a tower at Manvers coking plant. It was a very big flame. Although this one was burning carbon monoxide, a toxic gas (lethal at 1% and the usual cause of deaths in houses where a gas appliance has gone wrong). Of course the final product would be carbon dioxide.

Correction - oxygen and nitrogen gases are don't absorb infrared because they don't have the ability to bend (impossible to bend when there are only two atoms) whereas carbon dioxide is a linear 3-atom molecule and can bend (vibrate) about the central carbon atom. Methane being a 3-dimensional molecule (central carbon with 4 equally spaced hydrogen atoms - tetrahedral) can bend in many ways and is thus a worse greenhouse gas.

My first job after graduating was as the Infrared Spectrophotometer specialist at Pye Unicam in Cambridge. The spectrophotometer being an instrument used for analysing the absorption spectrum of a sample. For the reasons outlined above, we used to pump nitrogen gas into the instrument to displace any molecules of carbon dioxide etc which could spoil the results. Water is also an absorber of infrared and could be classed as a greenhouse gas except that it doesn't exist as a gas in the atmosphere but as a vapour (tiny droplets suspended in the atmosphere) and is constantly switching states between liquid, solid and vapour.

 

I wasn't moaning I was stating the fact that 35% of Carbon emissions come from China.
You have summed up the point of was making. Reducing Carbon emissions is not the number 1 priority for any nation of Earth. So I would speculate they will continue to increase.

 

I love threads like this (without the name calling). There are some superb detailed informative posts - thanks @Brush and @DannyWilsonLovechild.

I also found your post above @Mr BFC88 genuinely interesting. I happen to disagree on the central point you make as my view aligns more with the responses above, albeit they are written with much more authority and eloquence than my knowledge of the subject would allow. But you laid out your reasoning clearly and I can't knock anyone for having a considered viewpoint. So thanks too.

 

Thick skin required mate, stand by your convictions.

 

Is that the right attitude though? Stand by your convictions when every expert o the planet is telling you you're wrong? There's no honour in wrongly professing that you are correct when you aren't.

If I tell Rachel Riley, Carol vorderman and and Brian Cox that they're all liars and the square root of 25 isnt 5 should I accept I'm wrong or stand by my convictions?