h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

swl, you cannot be serious.

You say she thinks that "People who don't share Green Party beliefs should be sacked."

She does not say that. She says "This is an emergency situation ... we need to take action, we need everyone signed up behind that."

I'm 100% with her. What do you think?

This is not a matter of opinions or even beliefs. Nothing has been more rigorously researched and overwhelmingly backed up by evidence than the facts of climate change. People who close their eyes and ears should not be government advisers.

It only matters if it's relevant. An advisor on poverty/health/defence may be as interested in climate change theory as they are string theory.

She says "This is an emergency situation ... we need to take action, we need everyone signed up behind that". And if someone doesn't sign up to her hysterical manifesto...?

"And if someone doesn't sign up to her hysterical manifesto...?"
Well, that person can die along with the rest of us...

http://h2g2.com/entry/A87785743

"And if someone doesn't sign up to her hysterical manifesto...?"

That's just trolling, swf, and you know it.

Climate change is a fact of life.

Its a slow process, rarely producing noticeable effects in much less than a generation.




The revolutionary era was touched off by climate changes producing catastrophic crop failures all atound the north atlantic rim, due to weather problems like the famous "year without a summer".

The revolutionary era climate disaster was caused by volcanic activity places like Indonesia and Iceland.

There are evidences that the fall of the Roman empire was caused by those same volcanic systems, the Goths having first appealed to Rome for support found the Romans every bit as much in trouble as themselves.




During the Viking era, dairy farming was possible in Greenland.

Its being resumed now on account of warming in the region.

That has to do with an ~1800 year tidal cycle which also strong!y effects weather in central America and southeast Asia.




In Geoffrey Chaucer's time, England was a wine growing country.

That is becoming possible again even now.




Its an unfortunate thing that human beings do not live long enough to really grasp the cyclical nature of climate change.

Yes, that is cyclical climate change. What we have now is happening much faster.

There used to be a very active Researcher here when I joined first in the early noughties, who was (I think) a schoolteacher. I referred him to the NASA website when he started voicing climate change denial. I had been overwhelmed by the amount of research they had already done and published in the nineties; of course weather is critical to rocket science.

Unfortunately I never heard whether he was convinced; he dropped out of the site altogether. I felt bad about that, in case he may have felt bullied. But this is too important to let people concoct their own facts, or adopt the views of scientists who have neither major studies nor publications in scientific journals to their name.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It is the rate of change that is changing.

The amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere affects global climate, since the Industrial Revolution humans have been adding Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere beyond the capacity of the natural Carbon Cycles to maintain a stable climate - this can also happen as a result of volcanic activity and there can be changes as a result of solar cycles, cyclical changes in the earth's orbit and cyclical changes in ocean currents - scientist have taken these into acount and they do not account for the current changes.
Natural cycles can reduce man made trends as seems to be happening at present with the North Atlantic fluctuation, but by the same token they can incease change. There is also a huge amount of inertia in natural systems (for example the oceans capacity to store heat) which means change will not occur at a steady pace but will occur after periods of instabilty and could be sudden (in geological time rather than in the Hollywood versions) and catostrophic. Most worryingly of all man made change can effect natural cycles and current rates of melting in the Greenland Icecap could profoundly effet the Thermal-Haline Conveyor (which regulates global climate) over the next century.

On the original point senior civil servants should be able to advance a clear evidence based argument as I hope I have done above (I can back it with peer reviewed papers if necessary), which is something that climate change deniers seem incapable of - of course if a civil servant could advance a reasoned evidence based argument discrediting climate change science or evoltion or proving creationism or the flood story they should keep their job.
Why isn't there a flying pig smiley

My point is, why should people who are acknowledged experts in entirely unrelated fields, advising in areas where climate change has zero relevance be forced to sign up to climate change?

"Why isn't there a flying pig smiley?"

Like this you mean?

The role of civil servants is not to represent the views of the public - that is the role of politicians and irrational people have proved they are more than capable of electing irrational representatives. Senior civil servants are there to review available evidence in a critical rational manner and brief politicians in a clear understandable way (and then implement the illogical prejudice based policies the politians set out).
Someone who activly denies climate change does not fit the job profile. On your point it would be prefectly acceptable for a civil servant who is not involved in any way with matters that relate to climate change (ie science, educuation, transport, agriculture, housing, energy, policy, the economy etc.) to state they lack the expertise and data to comment on the matter and therefore can not comment.

Thanks BMT that could come in handy

Stipulated, man-made CO2 emissions can bring the climate a little closer to the tipping point.

As to sudden and catastrophic changes, I vividly remember the "Big Monday" sea level increase event, two Mondays, two weeks,half a tidal cycle, apart, during which the southern California beaches had to be closed on account of 30 foot waves striking in conditions in which waves more 6 feet in height are rare.

When everything had leveled off, the sea level had moved inland an intertidal, the new low tide mark was where the old high tide mark had been.

Probably the answer to what happened to the MacKenzie Ice Sheet in Canada's Northwest Territories, once, in terms of horizontal expanse, the third largest permanent glaciation on Earth, still marked on the maps as such as late as the middle 20th century.

It was comparatively shallow, though, and its not there anymore.

For all of that, in turn, it may have been a temporary artifact of the "Little Ice Age" of the late 18th century.

Meanwhile, there's a question as to how to compensate for climate change.

If the nature of the problem had been understood at the time, the famine tbat touched off the French Revolution, could probably have been averted by shifting to Russian rye and Russian winter wheat until the reduced solar constant produced by Indonesian and Icelandic volcanic sulfur dioxide emissions got back to normal.

No one knew what had gone wrong with the climate at the time.

A currently promising development is development of liquified CO2 gas industries and impoundment in oil wells, which not only takes the CO2 out of circulation but extends the working life of the well.

There's a prospect that old natural gas wells in Gobi desert that were exhausted centuries ago might be brought back into production for petrochemicals.

Also a possibility of developing cleaner burning coal by means of liquified CO2 gas leaching as an alternative or supplement to coking.

I qualified "suden and catostrophic" by stating sudden in geological terms - ie over decadeds rather than weeks

Do you have any references to "liquified" CO2, all I have heard of is gaseous CO2 being pumped into old wells which if fine until they flood and the CO2 is pushed to the surface by water.

This may clarify things UK Government advisors are polical appointees and subject to a code of conduct.....

"...the employment of special advisers adds a political dimension to the advice and assistance available to Ministers while reinforcing the political impartiality of the permanent Civil Service by distinguishing the source of political advice and support. Special advisers are employed to help Ministers on matters where the work of Government and the work of the Government Party overlap and where it would be inappropriate for permanent civil servants to become involved. They are an additional resource for the Minister providing assistance from a standpoint that is more politically committed and politically aware than would be available to a Minister from the permanent Civil Service"

So the issue was the "greenest government ever" (according to Cam-moron) appointing climate change deniers to political roles and having a Secretary of State for the Environment who denies climate change.

Liquified CO2 can only exist at high pressure a bit like liquified natural gas and has not been suggested as a form of carbon capture and storage,

A55110566 http://www.h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/brunel/F14321350?thread=6800993

posted too soon

the second convo attached to that entry on climate change is quite interesting.

Net migration into the UK increased by more than 38% to 243,000 in 2013-14, government statisticians have said.


I seem to remember, not so long ago, loads of reports featuring Eastern Europeans telling us they had no intention of coming to Britain, despite the borders being opened. Why were there no repots from the hundreds of thousands who did want to come?



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-28964323

eastern Europeans dont make up the entire of that increase
nor probably even the greatest part of it. So I fail to see what open borders from those countries really has to do with the story