SnowBear

I've always seen carbon offsetting as a joke. The carbon needed to produce an item is the carbon needed and buying credits to offset it for projects which may reduce that footprint isn't the same as one that will. Recently there were 100 saplings planted locally on a play park to help "offset" the carbon used for the Queens Jubilee. This was the number calculated needed to help equal that carbon footprint. Out of that 100 I doubt 5 survived, not through kids breaking them or any malicious acts, they died because no one watered them. It's no good planting the saplings if you don't look after them. I've seen saplings planted elsewhere in completely the wrong locations, under other trees, in a hedge line. I've seen developers cut down oaks, ash, and other long living trees, and replace in the name of being eco and green short living trees such as birch, rowan. The saplings are barely 6' tall, and in no way equal what was cut down and won't for many decades, and by then they will be coming to the end of their life. Another one is in the name of elf and safety. Recently it was decided that mature yews had to be cut down in town because they had been "neglected" and the berries were a danger to children. Geez, how did we all survive before with the toxic plants around, our parents told us not to touch, will make us ill. And as for neglect, a tree grows as a tree wants, it can never be "neglected", it goes through its life as it wants and as the environment dictates. Many become scraggly and scruffy as they age but that's part of the cycle of life. Another thing that bugs me is so called natural forest "management", cutting down trees because they are a danger to those who walk there, or have disease. Leave them alone, when they fall they become part of the cycle of life in the forest. If you are worried about a dead branch falling, don't go in there when it's windy. Forest have self managed for long before we came onto this planet, they don't need us to meddle.

These are amounts normally associated with a hurricane once it's made landfall.

Nobody is saying that we have had no effect. This isn't about denying that we have either. The questions being asked are by just how much are we really effecting the climate and also making sure we are not missing something. With so many unknowns about our planet it is only right to keep asking questions, having sensible debates and seeking knowledge because we don't know it all.

The danger in saying we can probably not stop climate change has its own pit falls, humans being humans will then just say, "Oh well, we may as well just carry on then". Regardless of whether climate change, or at least what we are seeing this year, is down to us or not, we are filthy species and we need to start clearing up after our selves. Tbh, animals live in less trash than we do, and unfortunately we make them live in ours.

Lets not go quite so far back. In the time of the Egyptians the Nile was a fertile land much bigger than it is now. Great Britain looked very different to how it is today only a few thousand years go with a land bridge still connecting us to mainland Europe and people lived in a land called Doggerland, and the Inca abandoned and moved whole cities over time as a dry line advanced northwards. And the Inuit were being pushed out of the far Eastern parts of Russia and into the American mainland and moved down that continent over time. As time has gone on they have moved back to the north lands, but once again they are on the move as the climate changes again. I will agree that green house gasses that we have added is unprecedented but what we don't know is the longer term cycles which may or may not have even greater changes in store than just those gasses. We simply haven't been on this planet long enough to understand a tenth of it yet in my view and especially the long term climate and oceanic systems and cycles.

Air conditioning, they cool their buildings almost the same as we heat all of ours in winter and it's seen as a necessity.

08 JULY 2003 At 3 p.m. on 8 July 2003, the city of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia experienced a dewpoint temperature of 35°C (95°F) accompanied by a dry-bulb air temperature of 42°C (108°F). This resulted in a total heat index (aka apparent temperature, or the temperature “it feels like” to the human body) of 81.1°C (178°F). (Source: Guinness Book of Records)

And so we come to the question... What is "normal" for our planet. Are we living in a normal or abnormal period or is there no "normal".

Hence I said we are territorial. Most of the migration at the moment is due to political reasons and that's the territorial/tribal element. If we were to see a country become uninhabitable due to the climate, would those territorial behaviours be put aside?

That depends on whether we took the conscious decision to adapt, as the animal kingdom have before and also early humans, to migrate to more favourable areas etc or perhaps live more underground to escape heat. Right now, we don't have that option, too many of us, we are no longer nomadic, and we are territorial.

To be honest I'm not interested in what is out there in the mass media, much like the pandemic it's not easy to discern between those with bias, those with vested interests, and also political and commercial interests. I want to know what is really going on, how much do we really know and understand, how much is pure guesswork, how much is down to our perspective from a species with a very short life span. The planet is and has always been changing and the most successful species don't look to change the planet to suit them, they adapt. If we look at the age of the Earth on a clock face where the age of the earth is one hour we see that Modern Man appears about a tenth of a second before midnight. (Image courtesy of The University of Kentucky) Our recorded history is even shorter and in reality our reliable data log is almost not worth bothering with. To understand where we are, how the climate can change, we have to properly understand every variable part of the system. We understand CO² reasonably well, but do we fully understand water, particulates, aerosols etc, not from a human health point of view but from the point of view of the atmosphere and how it works and has evolved over time. We don't fully understand ocean current cycles, high altitude chemistry, how topographical changes effect the system, extremely long term cycles and a whole heap more. In my view we know very little. The biggest thing we can do is reduce our carbon footprint as we know pumping out CO² isn't good, and we can all do that if we stop being wasteful, travelling unnecessarily, making things to last and do away with much of the plastic we have in the today's world especially packaging (however did we get on before we had plastic ). But it doesn't mean to say that all we are seeing today is down to that CO², and the more I see this year pan out the more I'm convinced we are seeing the world going thorough a change after a fairly lengthy period of being benign (a split second in the age of the Earth). For once humans need to just stop being know alls, and watch, listen and learn. It wont happen though, politics, money and greed will overrule any need to look at the long term survival of the species.

It's the lack of historical data that gets me. We just don't know what very long term cycles the planet has, each one interacting and perhaps at times canceling out or amplifying depending how the cycles play out. Have you thought about having a section here for say like a climate think tank? There are some very knowledgeable people here, bounce ideas about, look into possibilities etc

Just goes to show just how uncertain all this is, and to be honest, we are along for the ride if we like it or not.

Thanks Mike, have had a read up and I stand corrected

This is interesting too. So we have had an extended La Niña, and instead of a lull between we have had a quick switch to El Niño. Having take a quick look at the research on the ENSO cycle there are still many things we do not understand about that cycle and the reliable historical data is quite short. If we had this year's anomalies occurring with no other natural events I would perhaps except that global warming has caused those anomalies, but we do have an unprecedented natural event in the time frame of the latest ENSO switch, the Tonga volcano. It appears we should have had a neutral phase, but did that eruption delay the El Niño onset, so much that it flips with no neutral phase at all. What we now have to figure out is how much, if at all, has that eruption upset the cycles of both the atmosphere and the oceans and for how long will it continue. We are very much in a learning phase at the moment on many aspects of our planet and climate.

We have gradually increased wildfire suppression for the past 100 years or more, it's actually part of the Forest Firefighters job. In clearing forest floors of debris to reduce the risk of a fire and other fire and forest management practises such as fire breaks we are reducing wildfires. Some forest fires in the past were absolutely huge, millions of acres in one go and they just burnt out or stopped when the rains returned. Before the US was populated wildfires were never fought, and I suspect the Native Americans never did either, they just got out of the way, or knew where not to build their homes due to being able to read the land. This isn't about stubble burning, this is about massive forest fires which are a part of the cycle of life in nature. We have cut down so much of the world's forests and now even try and stop or prevent wildfires in what is left and overall this has reduced that natural quota of aerosols which was once part of that natural cycle. Because we now have property and business near these large forests we see the fires as disastrous, but for nature they are part of the cycle of life which has gone on for millions of years and even beneficial in that it clears away the weak and old and allows space for renewal.

I'm not too sure how much we can take note of any model at the moment at long range with so many anomalies across the world. I would say most models take into account somewhat what has happened in the past to see what is possible in any forecast now and this year is so different to others. In my view, 5-7 days, OK.. . Longer, I wouldn't even bother looking at it at the moment.

In some ways, but we also now actively suppress natural aerosols as well by stopping wildfires. This clears the air more than would perhaps be of they were left to burn out in their own course, meaning less particulates for water vapour to condense on, less clouds etc. Soot, smoke and ash can seed clouds if enough water vapour is there. We also seem to be in a period where there is less large ash and dust producing volcanoes such as Pinatubo and Mount St Helens, and it's been a lot longer since we had one like Tamboro or Krakatoa which effected the weather for some years afterwards and where the following year had no summer. There are so many things going on this year, so many variables, it's hard to see what is really going on. The one big thing though in the last two years which has injected vast amounts of water vapour into the stratosphere and above is the Tonga volcano, and we are now seeing huge rainfall records being broken in various places, odd weather patterns, low temperature records being broken as well as heat. It's going to take a couple of years now to get the effects of Tonga out of the way to really see what is what I think.

Aerosols can be from natural causes too.

Thing is, there has always been a certain level of "pollution" in the atmosphere, particles from wildfires, aerosols from volcanoes etc. We now actively suppress wildfires, whereas many areas where this happens the plants and animals have evolved with it with some plants won't even germinate until the seeds are charred. Some trees can cope with fire, the bark chars and then protects the inner core from burning out, but equally if a tree has a weakness it can burn the core out. The best and strongest survive. When areas get temporarily dry, or more dry than usual, a wildfire clears the way for renewal. We only have to see this where there have been wildfires and six months afterwards it absolutely explodes with life. Now, we have encroached so far into natural wildernesses, forests and deserts that we see these events as disasters. The same with earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes and cyclones, none are disasters they are part of the cycle of life of this planet, the only "disaster" is that humans get in the way and also think that if they put their cities, property etc in harms way it won't happen. So now I think we have seen an over-reaction, we think we have the a ability and right to try and alter nature, in doing so we have cleaned the air too much, as we see with the shipping aerosols. In trying to make sure every single human survives in reducing pollution, soot particles etc we are perhaps lessing the likelihood that humans as a whole will survive. In my view it was an experiment that started with the clean air acts in the 50s, coupled with the advent of the jet engine, and later a continued obsession to remove every last aerosol from the atmosphere. There is also the rather blinkered view that we must only concentrate on CO² as if it's the solution to all the problems, the atmosphere is a massively complex and chaotic system and I don't think we have come close to understanding even half of it, the same with the oceans. It would do well we took notice of the Native Americans for once, take what you "need" from the Earth, and always try to give something back. As a species we are wasteful, materialistic, self righteous and arrogant and it's all down to greed. Mother Nature won't be harmed by anything we do, in the long term she will recycle everything, there will be ice ages again, the lands will move, but we won't be here because humans cannot adapt or give up their addictions to that greed.

If, there is a tipping point? It isn't certain until we see one. To me it seems Mother Nature is showing her hand this year and just how powerful she is. What does need to happen is humans need to just shut up and maybe not be so know it all, to watch, listen and learn. As with the pandemic, she is possibly teaching us a lesson, will anyone take any notice?

I don't know Mike, but I don't think what we are seeing this year is down to us, at least if we are it's a smaller part than its currently thought. The climate has been relatively benign for a very long time now, most of recorded history anyway but in the more distant past the climate has changed and quite quickly. I don't think the biggest driver is CO², I think it's water. We only have to see the difference in winter between a clear sky and temperatures plummet and when we have cloud and it keeps the temperatures mild, the deeper that cloud layer the more insulating it is. Now although main stream media is focusing on heat, they are almost completely ignoring the huge rainfall levels elsewhere, in China, Japan, the US and to certain extent us here in the UK. On Kirkcaldy's other thread the latest is talking about the extreme depth of the cloud layer and saturation of almost tropical proportions outside the tropic regions. The only thing in the last two years to have been able to inject that amount of water into the atmosphere is the Tonga volcano. It doesn't totally explain the sea surface temperatures, because I think that's another area, which is although somewhat effected by us, I think is also going though a natural change on a cycle probay longer than what we have yet to record or even understand. We are into fluid mechanics and chaos theories here and they can be for long periods stable, but over time become unstable and stabilise again. We in no way fully understand the chemistry of the stratosphere and mesosphere either. Humans being humans try to put things in boxes and say we understand, even to the point of ruling out other possibilities, I think that's naive and we have a huge amount to learn still.

Yet none of this makes the news even though they are just as noteworthy and important as temperatures.

Interesting to note, after looking up the details of Krakatoa it was actually more akin to a land based volcano. The island itself was above sea level when it erupted, and the island was in effect a cap over the steam explosion that occurred once the sea water could access the magma chamber. Tonga was below water, so whereas Krakatoa ejected a large amount of rock, dust and ash as it shattered the island, it was mainly water above the Tonga volcano at just the right depth, so that ejecta was predominantly water. The Tonga volcano really was a rather special event although I dare say over time not unique.

To try and illustrate the differences here is a VEI chart courtesy of coolgeography.co.uk If we look at the chart and find where the estimated VEI is (around 5.7 I think), a strong 5, not quite 6 we see that for ejecta we are above Mount St Helens, but not as much as Pinatubo. Remember that each VEI increases tenfold. So the cooling effect is not that significant, we need a Tamboro event of VEI 7+ to be effective. But for height of plume for the Tonga volcano we have to look to VEI 8 to see the 50km level. It achieves this with an ejecta rating of sub VEI 6 but the effects could be equivalent to up to VEI 8 warming wise due to the height it reaches and the type of material reaching that height, ie Water. What I do note is that Krakatoa is around the same mark, but after seeing what the Tonga volcano has achieved I think the plume height may possibly need to be revised being as it was a steam explosion and will have had a plume I believe able to gain much higher altitudes. There needs to be a new and separate ratings chart for sea based volcanoes.