OT: CC/GW - Met Office and the recent extreme weather

[Terry Fields]

A 4m44s clip from yesterday. A woman from the Met Office gives the latest picture on current weather events.

One notable absentee is any mention of the current thermopause.

[Brian_Gaff]

Spoken like a true scientist. Basically, it matters not why its happening, but anything we can do to mitigate it, or slow it down, should be done. Whether its cheaper to just barricade and pump, or whether the whole world can change the general trend in some way, seems to be debatable. I suspect you can never get international agreement on mitigation, and it will be years before anything actually changes, so in the mean time, just as we have in the past, we have to pay to protect what we want to protect, and leave to the elements, what we do not think important. We are probably far better placed these dys to do something in stopping the worst effects, than previous generations were, but we have unfortunately lost old knowledge about how to handle water properly when building and using land generally, and that is a shame.

Brian

[Jethro_uk]

Did none of these "scientists" stop to think that CO2, and whatever else they could dream up on earth are mere bagatelles compared to what the sodding big nuclear reactor *only* 98,000,000 miles from us might be capable of doing ?

It's a little like asking us to accept that the Severn Bore is caused by eskimoes pissing into the sea.

It can be quite depressing how quickly knowledge can be lost, although in many ways it's inevitable. Map skills are dying out as people rely on GPS.

I suspect that in the 1400s, people were complaining about young folks not being able to remember hour long speeches verbatim because of this new fangled "printing".

[tony sayer]

Google Maunder minimum....

Problematic even then;-)...

[Brian_Gaff]

The star we call home is still not well understood, I mean its relatively recently they figured out that the radiation from deep within takes maybe thousands of years to find its way out. Who knows, it could all go bang tomorrow.

Likewise, we have no idea if a nearby star has gone bang and we are just days away from a massive dose of gamma rays.

In mny ways this is why, I suspect we do not see loads of intergalactic traveling civilisations, as they probably all got destroyed before they figured out how to get anywhere far enough away from thier stars. Brian

[Martin Brown]

If by "relatively recently" you mean last century and "maybe thousands" you mean about a couple of hundred thousand then yes.

There was a refinement a couple of decades ago but the ballpark number of 100+ky for photon diffusion in the sun has been known for ages.

Only in clueless fantasy dittohead anti-science land.

Stellar evolution is very well understood. The sun is good for about another 4bn years or so although it will become uncomfortably warm on the Earth long before the sun actually becomes a red giant.

We would see the neutrinos shortly before gamma rays and eta-Carina is the mostly likely candidate high mass nearby star for going pop. It might be unpleasant to get a full supernova too close to the Earth.

You can't shield from neutrinos and the flux could be lethal but no star is sufficiently close at present.

More likely they had far too many right whingers obsessed with trashing the planet for fun and profit to maintain a sustainable environment.

Pretty much like the Easter islanders destroyed their last tree.

[harryagain]

That theory has been debunked. Smallpox. TB, slaving, land theft and overgrazing with sheep is the current one.

All actually well recorded.

[Mark]

And the speed limit.

[MattyF]

I saw a documentary that asserted that rats ate the seeds for the trees, and that's why new trees didn't grow.