neville

High tide was predicted for about a quarter to one, so we went to Littlestone lifeboat station to see how close it was, and it was about as high as the water could go without setting the alarm bells ringing. The occasional larger wave was just about splashing over the top of the shingle bank that keeps this part of Romney Marsh dry, but fortunately for us Hythe bay is like a millpond tonight. Looks like we're probably ok this tide, but bearing in mind that the sea wall here is some 3 or 4 metres above the floor level of our house it's as close as I want to see it. Apart from that it was a lovely calm clear night to be out and about.

EA are forcasting a surge of 0.97m on top of the spring tide for us here on Romney Marsh

Was hoping to find a better source than Yahoo news, but this showed up when I logged on to my email account this evening. http://uk.news.yahoo...-232054453.html Obviously comes from the NASA info knocker posted, but they claim only half a mile to go before the berg is free.

Surely, it's not sarcasm if it's correct?

Lots of no from last night, so the other half's a bit miffed. On the other hand today I've driven from work near Guildford via Petworth, Haywards Heath, Heathfield and Rye and it's been snow all the way apart from the last half dozen miles :lol: However there's been the odd flurry on Romney Marsh this afternoon so it might be white in the morning for SWMBO.

C-Bob, Devonian and Gray Wolf have precisely clarified the point I was trying to make, can't add anything to what they have written. Mans activities have lead to a sudden rush of CO2 into the active carbon cycle, and at a faster rate than the natural processes can bind it back into the crust, at least in the short term, hence the steady rise in CO2 over recent history. Unfortunately I have no depth of knowledge to comment on the warming effect of this increase, but find eavesdropping on knowledgeable discussions like this fascinating and useful in the wealth of information that is brought to the surface. At least here they don't usually degenerate into flame wars. On the motorcycle forum where I normally reside, someone started a general climate change thread and within a page the American contingent had split along party lines, and were practically making death threats against each other.

I always understood there to be a big difference between returning CO2 to the atmosphere from recent or currently growing plants, and releasing it by burning fossil fuels. The majority of the CO2 which comes from a forest or other wildfire burning today will have been extracted from the atmosphere by plants in the last year or so, or at most during the last few decades, so its release would have no overall effect on background CO2 levels and is part of the 'natural' carbon cycle. On the other hand, the CO2 that humanity is responsible for releasing via the burning of fossil fuels has been accumulating in the earths crust over tens if not hundreds of millions of years, so it's release is significant in atmospheric terms. Now although this material would have been released at some point anyway, via natural geological processes, this would have been over a much longer timescale than humankind has done it in. It would also have been largely balanced by the continuing processes that bound the carbon into the earths crust in the first place ie limestone deposition, peat formation etc etc. Anyway, its cold, so I'm off to throw another log on the woodburner :unsure:

Absolutely, Devonian. When I was at university in the late seventies it had been more or less accepted as scientific fact because the theory tied together so many bits of evidence available at the time, but there were still a few die hards who hung on in the hope that previous theories would prove to be correct after all, and that was without any commercial interests poking their fingers in where they weren't wanted. Actually, on this occasion industry was more interested in working with the scientific community to objectively test whether it was correct or not, as it can help them to predict where to find raw materials. I was in my final year when the Falklands kicked off, and one of our Professors was unequivocal that the root cause of that conflict was oil. Continental drift predicts that you had the same conditions that lead to the production of the West African oil fields off the coast of South America. Having control over a few thousand square miles of seabed could be handy, especially with the North Sea deposits only having a limited lifespan, and the UK and Norwegians at the time being world leaders in oil exploitation in hostile marine environments. Maybe we were young and impressionable, but on previous occasions he had been called to present evidence to some government committee, so it had a ring of truth to it.

Ooops! Second post and it's in the wrong place Story of my life... Thanks for the welcome

Apologies for a newbie interrupting an interesting discussion, but a few pages ago someone stated that the theory of Plate Tectonics wasn't proven. Sorry to bear bad tidings, but the advent of our friend GPS means that continental drift has been accurately measured. The details of the driving mechanism may still to remain be resolved, but the basic premise that the crustal plates are moving around is now proven to be a fact (as much as anything can be). This JPL vector map neatly summarises the relative motions.

For about two minutes around 10:50 there were a few isolated snow flakes/grains making it down to ground level out of a dark grey cloud over here in Leyton, East London. Not enough to do anything with, but definitely snow!