Al Gore, call your office:
Forecasters are predicting a cold and windy Easter weekend, with snow, gales and heavy downpours in some regions. With snow expected to blanket the north, temperatures will drop as low as -8C in some areas, with particularly treacherous conditions possible over the Scottish mountains.
From the Independent newspaper, ironically one of the most vociferous advocates of the idea that the Earth is doomed from global warming, killer bees or whatever.
Of course, as Dale Amon said the other day, it makes sense to think how free marketeers should address the question of “what if man-made global warming really is a problem?” rather than just poke fun at it, as I am doing here. Dale is right, of course, just in the same way that advocates of civil liberties need to recognise that we face a terrorist threat and not, as one or two libertarians of my acquaintance can do, deny it. Changing ocean currents, caused by movements in the Arctic ice shelf, might, for example, explain why the Gulf Stream is not working its balmy magic on the British climate this time of year. But you can see how perplexing all this must be to people constantly harangued about the need to drastically cut down on carbon usage. The earth does not seem to be getting hotter, at least not around here. It is bloody cold, in fact. But then, my parents and grandparents will point out to me that Easters have often been terrible in the past; they can even remember it snowing in late April.
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/olden_warming/
I’m not that old and I can remember many cold freezing Easters. It’s the traditional bank holiday weather that we’ve had all along. I wonder how the beeboids will spin it?
Climate is too complex to be evaluated in chicken little terms. Leif Erikson colonised parts of Nova Scotia a millenium ago and called it Vinland the good. The climate in that part of Canada had to be milder and more agreeable and the winters less severe than they are today. The same holds true for Greenland which is definitely not green today. There were early colonies in Newfoundland which ended because the colonisers died off when climate changes made life there unsustainable. A slight variation in the Gulf Stream might have been the cause but no one knows. Certainly the Gulf Stream has a lot to do with vagaries of climate and no one can attribute that to the machinations of man.
Well, remove el Nino events from 21stC temperature data series and the trend since 2000 has been down.
For eight years.
The southern hemisphere data series over the last thirty years shows no significant trend(Link) in any direction. What sort of global climate change ignores half the globe?
The Earth stubbornly refuses to comply with the Gore-Monbiot playstation forecasts.
As much as I enjoy this kind of story, this could equally be a story about an unusually hot weekend and we would rightly scoff at that. I think we need to be careful that we aren’t having our cake both ways and eating it. It’s true that weather is only vaguely to do with climate. We know this because weather can easily change the temperature by ten degrees from one day to the next and climate scientists talk about fractions of a degree per year.
All this talk of melting ice is humbug.
It’s an Easter weekend in March; we have had snow at Easter before; bank holidays are usually disappointing.
So, I am meant to panic at this now, even though it may actaully turn out reasonably pleasant after all?
Perhaps “Climate Change” is a better thing to call it.
The funny thing is, I know a climate guy, isn’t convinced that it’s anthropomorphic, but he is convinced it’s happening.
It probably is. I don’t know if reducing carbon output will help, but moving us off an oil economy strikes me as an excellent plan. More Nuclear Power, more new technologies, more solar, even in places like Britain. It should be a good future.
That way we can save the oil for things where it is uniquely suited like air travel.
More and better nuclear power – for example the new reactor designs that Tosheba (spelling alert) has produced.
In the long run fussion is the way – but we need fission now (regardless of whether CO2 emissions are a problem or not – we can not go on being dependent on 100 Dollar plus oil bought from various death-to-the-West regimes).
And, yes, that includes fast breeder fission reactors if the men and women of science can not work out the practical problems of fusion soon.
Nuclear power can make money – if the crazy regulations (which do NOT improve safety) are got rid of.
Daveon.
I watched some film of Bill Gates “testifying” (i.e. talking) to Congress the other day.
Mr Gates said that Congress and the President should get together to improve schools.
Thus ignoring “No-Child-Left-Behind” and all the other farcical Federal government interventions that have already taken place.
Every child (Mr Gates went on) should graduate High School with X, Y, Z.
Thus ignoring that the only way to make “every child” graduate High School would be to make graduating High School so easy it would be pointless.
And then Mr Gates said the latest (of the long line) of Federal government subsidy programs for universities must be “fully funded” (i.e. yet more taxpayers money down the rathole).
I am told that Mr Gates went on to say other things – but I could not stand watching any more.
What was that you said about Bill Gates not being a leftist?
Millie,
The Romans had vineyards as far north as Yorkshire. Now there’s an extremely well-stocked off-license in my village but I don’t see Tadcaster Shiraz anywhere…
Paul,
Sigh… I know (roughly) how a reactor works. I fear Joe Q Public has been fed so much crap by the media (who don’t know) that it’s going to be a fight. Let’s look at a scenario… UKGov says lets build nuke plants… but this ain’t popular because a sizeable chunk of the populous thinks they are evil and a veritable Hiroshima beckons so to mollify the populace Government says, “only with real strict regs”…
Imagine what that’ll do to the price of juice?
I’m guessing here but we hear all this stuff from Gov about how Britain is online to hit it’s Kyoto targets. Now is it me or is a very big part of that our spectacularly rapid de-industrialization?
The bald truth is that more people die in Chinese coal mines in the average month than have ever been killed by nuclear ‘tricity. Try telling that to the Greens. Try telling them that (by a sizeable margin) the worst ever nuclear cock-up wasn’t the result of private enterprise but of state-control (and made worse because of the systems of the Soviet Union).
Try telling them that that’s as bad as it can get and that it really wasn’t that bad afterall…
Now guess what job exposes you to the most ionizing radiation? Airline cabin crew, probably.
I have yet to hear an objection to nuclear power from anyone who had even the vaguest idea what a neutron was or how a moderator worked. They remind me of the lumpen peasants who burn down Christopher Lee’s castle at the end of Hammer Horror films.
The long-term is clearly fusion, short term it’s fission and medium term solar will be a biggy. Solar is cool because it generates electricity in daylight hours and that’s when it is most needed.
OK, then we could damn the Severn Estuary. That would be ‘tricity beaucoup and another much needed crossing. We could damn the Thames Estuary too. Not quite as good but the crossing between North Kent and South Essex would be handy and you could stick an airport in the middle connected into Eurostar and there’s no need then to expand Heathrow. It would also provide flood defences for millions.
Apparently Bill Oddie is against such plans because they would interfere with the habitats of wading birds. I think we have our first 80kg of foundation right there. Wading birds be buggered.
Where in these isles is the spirit of Brunel or Stephenson?
Christ all fucking Mighty the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has a bloody windmill on his roof.
We have become so gay.
Nick M, haven’t you noticed, engineers don’t go into politics – ppe grads and lawyers do. Brunel and Stephenson were too busy pursuing their interests to engage in political farce and trust me engineers today are still doing their worthy things just as politicians are chasing their worthless ego-enhancing goals.
Not exactly an engineer, but I bet he understands nuclear energy pretty good.
I am old enough to remember some pretty cold Easters. I can even remember snow stopping play at a county cricket match in early June.
Yes, it’s easy enough to say it’s only weather, but the best guesses are that it’s the result of a combination of a prolonged La Nina, a cold phase PDO, some pretty wierd behaviour from the Arctic vortex and quite possibly the fact that the sunspot count has been very low for more than a year. Unfortunately, all the Climate Change funding has gone into modeling and international gabfests so we don’t really know how these things relate.
Of course we might have had a better idea if research into climate change causes other than CO2 hadn’t been deemed heretical, and anyway, it’s fun to tweak the noses of the Gorists with this sort of thing.
Incidentally, I read an account of a paper that suggests the much touted Gulf Stream get’s entirely to much credit for Britain’s temperate climate. The researchers posit that the large body of water to our west, where our weather comes from, will automatically cause our climate to be warmer in winter and cooler in summer than somewhere like New York where the weather comes at them across a large landmass over which temperatures flucuate far more than over water. Add to that the Rockie mountains which divert the jetstream south so that as it swings back north again it brings our weather from the south west, and they account for the differences in weather without recourse the the Gulf stream.
Millie: Greenland is green again – just saw a report about it on FOX, I think.
But not yet as green as it has been before. They discovered some wood and rests of vegetation in a place recently uncovered by retreating glaciers. The rests were carbon dated to about a thousand years ago.
Off topic, but I don’t think anyone will complain –
Arthur C Clarke is dead.
-8c? How nice, you Brits must be getting a visit from the Goreical and his traveling Chicken Little Circus
Global climate change. It’s been happening for about 4.5 Billion years, get used to it.
The US Navy had a working fusion reactor running in late 2005. then the money ran out.
Ha! Meanwhile I am down south in Spain basking in the…
Drat! Forget it what I said. Weather is still shit!
Sorry, scare people with another one; that dog is already dead:
Kerr, R. A., 2006. False Alarm: Atlantic Conveyor Belt Hasn’t Slowed Down After All, Science, 314, 1064, doi: 10.1126/science.314.5802.1064a
I remember a long-awaited trip to Longleat as a kid being ruined by an overnight blizzard…in May. I’ve seen snowflakes on Midsummer’s Day in Yorkshire (miserable bloody place that it was – thank god I moved to Central America).
I’m agnostic-tending-towards-atheist on whether global warming is happening, but even if it is, the science on which policy prescriptions are being made seems shoddy in the extreme. The GCMs that are being used to predict future climatic behaviour have a big problem: never mind the future, they can’t even model the past. If you plug in data for thirty years ago and then run them forward to the present day, they are wildly at variance with what we actually measure. Add in the fact that they are extremely sensitive to parameterisation changes, and I think basing anything at all on them is dangerous. With a few parameter tweaks within sensible ranges, a lot of these models can’t even predict the sign of the temperature alteration, never mind its magnitude.
Dale Amon is right to say we should consider what a free market approach to mitigating climate change would look like were it to happen, but that does not mean the question of whether it is happening is moot. I’ve seen the ludicrous suggestion that we should take measures to combat global warming regardless, as if it is happening, all to the good, and if it is not then no harm done. Anyone who thinks like that needs to be repeatedly clubbed by a Clue-bat with ‘OPPORTUNITY COST’ written on it in fancy pokerwork.