UKBouldering.com

Climate Change (Read 59748 times)

SA Chris

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 29221
  • Karma: +630/-11
    • http://groups.msn.com/ChrisClix
#225 Re: Climate Change
October 18, 2019, 04:43:17 pm
I know it sounds lazy (and perhaps it is, but I'd argue it was more to do with having many other things competing for my time) and is a terribly uncool thing to admit to on such a middle class forum, but I don't currently have the culinary creativity required to do as you describe, and the amount of work I think it would take to get to that point is quite daunting.

I have friends who get a season vegetable box from a local farmer, and say they spend a lot of the year finding creative ways to cook turnips.

dunnyg

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 1521
  • Karma: +91/-7
#226 Re: Climate Change
October 18, 2019, 05:00:41 pm
I can teach you Will, no worries. Do you like vegetable eggs?

petejh

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 5778
  • Karma: +622/-36
#227 Re: Climate Change
October 18, 2019, 05:37:23 pm
Gregs do a vegan sausage roll Will.

nai

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 4008
  • Karma: +206/-1
  • In my dreams
#228 Re: Climate Change
October 18, 2019, 05:56:08 pm
haven't looked at this thread for a couple of days so this might have been posted already but on the subject of food production, imports, exports and all that this is amazing and shocking:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0008zkc/what-britain-buys-and-sells-in-a-day-series-1-1-fruit-and-veg

tc

Offline
  • ****
  • junky
  • Posts: 860
  • Karma: +73/-1
#229 Re: Climate Change
October 18, 2019, 06:06:10 pm
I ditched British Gas a while ago and changed my energy supplier to Bulb. They provide 100% renewable electricity from solar, wind and hydro, and the gas is 100% carbon neutral. According to their blurb, "10% is green gas produced from renewable sources like food or farm waste and we offset the rest of the gas we supply by supporting carbon reduction projects around the world."

They also reckon that "the average Bulb member lowers their carbon impact by 3.5 tonnes of CO2 a year." This made me feel bettter, and it was also cheaper. What made me feel even better was their referral system that pays £50 to me for anyone I refer who switches to them. The deal-clincher for several of my friends was the £50 they they also received for switching. Money talks.

If you all sign up via my referral link I'll have enough money to go to Rocklands AND Castle Hill for Christmas.

Falling Down

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 4880
  • Karma: +333/-4
    • bensblogredux
#230 Re: Climate Change
October 24, 2019, 08:01:16 pm
New edition of the fabulous Emergence Magazine online https://emergencemagazine.org/issues/ - have a browse through previous editions. It's really something..

tomtom

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 20282
  • Karma: +641/-11
#231 Re: Climate Change
October 29, 2019, 09:08:44 am
Everyone has a level of climate hypocrisy... we all consume things (down to the carbon that is used to maintain this forum and send the data to our devices) and make internal choices about what we are comfortable with doing. 

That includes having children, owning a dog, taking flights, eating meat and so on and so on...

I read a good phrase to describe this earlier in the week:

"No one is climate teetotal"

Oldmanmatt

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • At this rate, I probably won’t last the week.
  • Posts: 7097
  • Karma: +368/-17
  • Largely broken. Obsolete spares and scrap only.
    • The Boulder Bunker climbing centre

SA Chris

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 29221
  • Karma: +630/-11
    • http://groups.msn.com/ChrisClix

Oldmanmatt

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • At this rate, I probably won’t last the week.
  • Posts: 7097
  • Karma: +368/-17
  • Largely broken. Obsolete spares and scrap only.
    • The Boulder Bunker climbing centre
#234 Re: Climate Change
November 08, 2019, 02:49:46 pm
Next summer, it will be 20 years since I last ventured under the Arctic ice. It was already retreating rapidly then and we had a feeling of being there at the end of things, or at least, being there and doing something our grandchildren would never see or do.
We were wrong, of course.

I don’t think my own children will even have the chance, let alone my grandchildren.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-10-06/diving-arctic-climate-change-iceberg

Edit:

20 years!
WTF!
Feels like every time I blink, another decade fucks me over.

Oldmanmatt

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • At this rate, I probably won’t last the week.
  • Posts: 7097
  • Karma: +368/-17
  • Largely broken. Obsolete spares and scrap only.
    • The Boulder Bunker climbing centre
#235 Re: Climate Change
November 20, 2019, 12:49:34 pm
So, more “good” news, this month.
Oh shit!
« Last Edit: November 20, 2019, 12:55:43 pm by Oldmanmatt »

andy popp

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 5525
  • Karma: +347/-5
#236 Re: Climate Change
January 02, 2020, 09:24:12 am
Will Australia become the first place where it is no longer tenable to host a major, advanced society (no doubt some much smaller island communities will be lost sooner)? And, if so, how long will it take?

tomtom

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 20282
  • Karma: +641/-11
#237 Re: Climate Change
January 02, 2020, 09:50:46 am
Will Australia become the first place where it is no longer tenable to host a major, advanced society (no doubt some much smaller island communities will be lost sooner)? And, if so, how long will it take?

Australia: First it a huuuuuge country... with different climate zones/biomes.. some will be affected in different ways to others.

In terms of heat - no. Certainly plenty of places in the Middle East that get hotter (for longer periods of time) than AU. It can all be air conditioned away..

Water - harder, Groundwater for large parts has gone/going - and with prolonged drought that will get worse. However, water can again be engineered around - less so for agriculture but certainly could be for towns/people. As long as there is some rain some time - natural water will persevere in some format. (looks at the oasis in Lybia/N.Sudan/Algeria that survives despite rainfall once a decade etc...

What Australia has in its positives are - energy and minerals. Its got to have one of the largest capabilities for Solar in the world (land area of low value with ‘proximity’ to market (people)... Consistent sun days etc.. It also has huge resources of copper, other rare metals (inc some uranium) that are all going to be needed for all the technology we require to live in a changing climate (I appreciate the irony...). It also has huge coal and gas reserves... but lets assume they drop out of favour in the next couple of decades.

To answer your second point - its more likely poorer coastal/estuary communities that will go first. Sea level rise is (now) inexorable and relatively predictable. We (the UK) have an example too - Fairbourne that is the first town in the UK to be abandoned to rising seas... Large tracts of Bangladesh, Myanmar, along the Mekong etc... Richer areas and towns will be engineered again - think huge concrete sea walls...

All IMHO etc..

Australia right now is a really interesting study in what level of disruption is required to tip a population over into accepting/doing something about CC... I (amongst many) thought Katrina in 2007 (I think?) was going to do that - but nope...

andy popp

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 5525
  • Karma: +347/-5
#238 Re: Climate Change
January 02, 2020, 10:23:31 am
Thanks Tom, very interesting. I raised the question in an almost speculative or rhetorical fashion (and as a complete lay person, of course). At some point - assuming a. that the predictions are correct and b. we are unable as a global society to do enough to make a correction - a major city/society will have to be abandoned. It's interesting, if depressing, to think about where that might be. Of course, poorer coastal/island societies are already being impacted.

Katrina was 2005. I think general levels of awareness and debate among the public were much lower then. Katrina was a deeply politicised and controversial event but around race (quite rightly, a predominantly black city was effectively abandoned to its fate by the government) so that probably drew attention away from climate.

dunnyg

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 1521
  • Karma: +91/-7
#239 Re: Climate Change
January 02, 2020, 10:27:35 am
The link is also not quite as immediate. Climate change producing a raging fire is an obvious mental step to make. Climate change causing increased sea temps producing bigger storms, it could have happened anyway etc. etc.. The link is incredibly obvious, particularly to those who don't know the ins and outs of climate controls on weather processes. 

tomtom

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 20282
  • Karma: +641/-11
#240 Re: Climate Change
January 02, 2020, 10:32:39 am
Quick reply (toddler warfare here) but the comparison with how we fixed (more or less) the ozone hole with global action are interesting here.

andy popp

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 5525
  • Karma: +347/-5
#241 Re: Climate Change
January 02, 2020, 10:39:32 am
it could have happened anyway etc. etc..

About 50 % of New Orleans is effectively below sea level; I think a lot of people adopted a "what can you expect" attitude. The city would be a very interesting study in resilience (I'm sure its been done). It lost around 50% of its population in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane but after a very slow recovery I think population is c.90% of pre-Katrina levels. Some neighbourhoods have never recovered but in other ways the city has undergone significant revitalisation, some of which may not have occurred without Katrina.

Of course, the exemplar of great modern city suffering catastrophic population loss is Detroit, but that has not been for climactic reasons - not yet anyway.
« Last Edit: January 02, 2020, 10:48:52 am by andy popp »

T_B

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 3078
  • Karma: +149/-5
#242 Re: Climate Change
January 02, 2020, 11:16:17 am
I have friends who've already sold up in Melbourne "to get away from our house in the fire-prone trees" and moved further down the coast to Port Elliot "where the air is heavy with smoke from a fire on Kangaroo Island". Grim.

Oldmanmatt

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • At this rate, I probably won’t last the week.
  • Posts: 7097
  • Karma: +368/-17
  • Largely broken. Obsolete spares and scrap only.
    • The Boulder Bunker climbing centre
#243 Re: Climate Change
January 02, 2020, 11:20:48 am
We’re always talking about awareness, as if it’s a recent insertion into the mainstream media consciousness. It’s not, we wilfully ignore it.
I know I did a major module on it in “A” level Geology in the 87/88 academic year (started with a blind field trip to classify the rocks in Mounts bay. Stumped most of us, because they’re actually a petrified forest).
But, here, oneof the most watched BBC programs of it’s day, Tomorrow’s World, mentions the impending crisis and need to end fossil fuel consumption, as a matter of fact, in their 1989 New Year special:


tomtom

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 20282
  • Karma: +641/-11
#244 Re: Climate Change
January 02, 2020, 12:00:01 pm
Quick toddler affected reply again :)

@andyp Miami is the city where Sea level rise will fuck it over (that’s a science term 😃) first. it’s all built on karst (carbonate - limestone - chalk etc..) so defending against sea level rise there is like putting a high lip around a sieve then plunging it into a bath. Useless. Already king tides flood large parts of downtown regularly. And that’s without any hurricane / storm surge scenarios.

There is a whole branch of climate science looking at this angle of what the social tipping point is for action (or not).

Omm - yes Global heating has been known about since 80’s by ironically research from oil co’s as recent Exxon (or another oil company) lawsuits have shown recently.

galpinos

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 2114
  • Karma: +85/-1
#245 Re: Climate Change
January 02, 2020, 12:00:47 pm
It also has huge coal and gas reserves... but lets assume they drop out of favour in the next couple of decades.

Murdoch was trumpeting the increase in coal exports to Asia whilst Australia was recording it's hottest day ever. They don't seemed have abandoned the fossil fuel bandwagon just yet.

Oldmanmatt

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • At this rate, I probably won’t last the week.
  • Posts: 7097
  • Karma: +368/-17
  • Largely broken. Obsolete spares and scrap only.
    • The Boulder Bunker climbing centre
#246 Re: Climate Change
January 03, 2020, 09:50:58 am
I’m having a bit of an internal crisis.

I’ll be 50, very soon.
I thought I was reasonably well informed about “the World”.

And, I genuinely thought of Australia as being the “nice” western nation. Mentally I had glossed over the whole wiping out, abuse and repression of the indigenous population as an artefact of a different age that was slowly being rectified.

I suppose, around five years back, it started to penetrate my thick skull, that actually the jolly Jackos are quite the bunch of racist, misogynistic twunts. In fact, they seem to have produced the closest thing to a James Bond supervillain, this side of WW2 and more than one (Murdoch et al).
But to finally realise, that Australia produces more CO2 than any other nation but two (not directly, but via their exports of fossil fuels) is a little heartbreaking.
I thought I was too old for that sort of disillusionment.
Hey ho.

Fosters is not the only pile of crap they export

DAVETHOMAS90

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Dave Thomas is an annual climber to 1.7m, with strongly fragrant flowers
  • Posts: 1726
  • Karma: +166/-6
  • Don't die with your music still inside you ;)
#247 Re: Climate Change
July 28, 2021, 04:57:23 am
Explore where you are.



I don't agree with everything George B says, but I've long seen a lot of travel as escape, as opposed to understanding where we are.

I have an Amazon account, and enjoyed an insightful lift, hitching to the Lakes with a guy in charge of developing the electric fleet of Amazon vans. Sure Bezos might behave like the phallus he straps himself inside, but a lot of employees see their job as an opportunity to make a positive real world difference.

That's where the focus needs to be.

TobyD

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 3827
  • Karma: +88/-3
  • Job offers gratefully accepted
#248 Re: Climate Change
August 06, 2021, 10:04:41 am
This is from the morning call email by Stephen Bush of the New Statesman, I thought it was an excellent analysis:

Good morning. Boris Johnson is under fire after saying that Margaret Thatcher gave the United Kingdom a "big early start" in the battle against climate change by closing so many of the country's coal mines.

Joining the chorus of criticism are Keir Starmer ("shameful praising of Margaret Thatcher’s closure of the coal mines, brushing off the devastating impact on those communities with a laugh, shows just how out of touch he is with working people"), Lisa Nandy (the remarks "reveal the Conservative Party's utter disregard for the communities still scarred by Thatcher's closure of mines") and Nicola Sturgeon ("Lives & communities in Scotland were utterly devastated by Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry, which had zero to do with any concern she had for the planet.").

Even one of his own MPs has had a go, albeit anonymously, telling the Times that: “It’s not really the smartest thing to say is it? It’s also not right.”

Except, hang on a moment: while you can make any number of reasonable points about the Thatcher government's indifference about what would replace mining, you can't get away from the basic point that one reason the United Kingdom is better placed as far as energy policy is concerned is that we have closed most of our coal mines.

Another reason we're better off, as far as the politics of net zero are concerned, is that unlike most of the English-speaking world, our main centre-right party isn't hand in glove with the mining industry, loudly insisting that there are 'clean' ways to use our fossil fuels.

The biggest problem with Boris Johnson's efforts (such as they are) to meet the challenge of net zero is that he is falling far short of the level of disruption and radicalism required. He's ruled out new taxes on meat, his government drags its feet on measures to adapt to our changing climate, let alone the big changes required to get to net zero.

All too often, Johnson's climate change strategy is essentially 'everyone should have their own electric car': a solution that is neither possible (there aren't enough rare earth materials in the world to replace every car currently in use in the UK) nor adequate (cars don't just produce emissions when they are driven, but also when they are constructed).

If you want to actually tackle the climate crisis, you have to be willing to do big and radical things that upset people, and that do, in the short term at least, create some losers: in most of the world that does mean closing mines. Here in the United Kingdom it has big implications for motorists, what we eat and how and where we take our holidays.

Our Prime Minister is very far from being willing to level with the public about that (to 'tell the truth', as Extinction Rebellion puts it) and further still from being willing to tell the public that this might involve some difficult or radical changes to how we live. Again, that is very far from how Margaret Thatcher approached any issue, including climate change.

But the biggest problem we face, and the one our politicians should be angriest about, isn't that Boris Johnson makes jokes about British mining. It's that it is frankly impossible to imagine him doing something as big or as significant in the fight to tackle the climate crisis today.

teestub

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 2574
  • Karma: +166/-4
  • Cyber Wanker
#249 Re: Climate Change
August 06, 2021, 10:55:35 am

Except, hang on a moment: while you can make any number of reasonable points about the Thatcher government's indifference about what would replace mining, you can't get away from the basic point that one reason the United Kingdom is better placed as far as energy policy is concerned is that we have closed most of our coal mines.

Another reason we're better off, as far as the politics of net zero are concerned, is that unlike most of the English-speaking world, our main centre-right party isn't hand in glove with the mining industry, loudly insisting that there are 'clean' ways to use our fossil fuels.


Which bit did you think was excellent?

Didn’t we just import more coal when the UK mines closed, rather than reducing use?

I don’t think for one minute that if there was economically viable reserves left Johnson wouldn’t be on some green coal bullshit.

In terms of the second para, just look at the relationships with the oil producers and the fracking companies.

 

SimplePortal 2.3.7 © 2008-2024, SimplePortal