CLIMATE WARMING

[Stanley]

CLIMATE WARMING

A fortnight ago I voiced my affection for the life styles of Aborigine and Stone Age people who managed to live in a landscape for thousands of years without radically altering or damaging it. I freely admit that it would be impossible for us to follow their example, we aren't tough enough, we haven't got their immune system and it is unthinkable to even imagine that living like that would be acceptable now that we have opened the Pandora’s Box of technology and change. We are hopelessly addicted to our cars, possessions and centrally heated houses.
I saw this report two days ago; "Concentrations of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere surged to a record high in 2016, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Last year's increase was 50% higher than the average of the past 10 years. Researchers say a combination of human activities and the El Niño weather phenomenon drove CO2 to a level not seen in 800,000 years. Scientists say this risks making global temperature targets largely unattainable." You may remember that my complaint against the more radical vegetarians is that they blame me for Global Warming because of the methane produced by farm animals. If you seek out the report and read it you'll find that the most likely cause for the rise in methane levels is the thawing of the permafrost in polar regions and ocean warming.
I recognise that a large (but diminishing) body of 'deniers' argue that Global Warming and Climate Change is a hoax. We have such luminaries as President Trump and the Noble Lord Lawson to guide us! My argument is that it may be time for us to make the sensible assumption that the majority of researchers might be on to something and it makes sense to cover our bets. We should be taking immediate and radical action to counter the possible threat. This is arguably the best way to tackle another problem, pollution of the air in our cities.
Unfortunately this isn't happening. Our main global preoccupations are power and money. Here in the UK we are fumbling our way to Brexit and at the same time agonising over allegations of inappropriate behaviour in Parliament. On the latter point I think we should be admitting that it is a problem through the whole of society but I'd better not get diverted into that one.
A popular phrase is the 'Cliff Edge' and it is associated with 'hard Brexit'. I fear that we may be missing an even bigger cliff edge, the tipping point at which climate change is irreversible. Some scientists argue that we have already passed it. It may be that by the end of this century we might have far bigger problems as the chaos that climate change brings engulfs us. My picture this week was taken in October by friends of mine in Churchill, a town in Canada on the Arctic Circle that lives with Polar Bears. We are not only condemning ourselves to a new Stone Age but magnificent creatures like these.



A Polar Bear in Churchill, Canada, in October.

[Tizer]

Thanks for posting your article, Stanley. It all helps to get the message across to the public and to disperse the smoke screen laid by the climate deniers.

[Stanley]

Thanks Tiz. The bears are rolling in what snow there is because they are trying to keep cool until the pack ice freezes and they can go hunting seals.

[Stanley]

Bumped and even more pertinent as we hear that the pressures of the inflation crisis caused by the war in Ukraine has made any targets agreed to extremely unlikely to happen. We are told we are in the Last Chance saloon and now we appear to have blown even the small chance we had. We aren't fit to have a planet!

[Tripps]

A gem from Margaret Ashworth's regular Sunday column. She and husband Alan live near Clitheroe. Ashworths.
I put them both in the category of "Those who knoweth, and knoweth that they knoweth"

LAST week I came across a small group paddling around in the Ribble with nets. I asked one of them, a girl in her early twenties at a guess, what they were up to. She told me they were from the Environment Agency and were sampling for eels, trout and salmon at a regular testing point. They had found only one eel, well down on earlier years. Oh yes, I replied, they are greatly endangered. (I wrote about them here a couple of years ago.) ‘It’s climate change,’ she explained. After a second to decide whether it was worth it, I said that over my long lifetime the climate had hardly changed at all, and certainly nothing like as much as the changes in climate in the millions of years that eels have been on earth. She looked surprised, as if she thought that Britain was under permafrost till 20 years ago. I went on: ‘And people are catching too many of them (my article reported a man from Surrey who got away with a slap on the wrist for smuggling millions of live juvenile eels to Hong Kong, where they were worth an estimated £53million, to be eaten as a delicacy or grown on) plus they have chosen just about the most complicated way to live, going to and forth from the Sargasso Sea . . .’ By this stage I might have been speaking in a foreign language, so little did it seem to mean to the listener. I can only assume that school pupils are being taught that everything can be blamed on climate change, the Empire or Brexit, and there is no need to inquire any further.

[Stanley]

You're right David, it is a gem. The lady is quite right and she could have added tectonic plate shifts as well. The lime industry in Clitheroe was based on quarrying the vast coral reefs in the area, the source of the limestone. A seismic investigation in the 1960s proved that there are oil deposits in the area as well that originated from the same period when of course it was much warmer.

[Stanley]

I was right seven years ago and after having a look on the web I find this, 'Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels reached record high in 2023'. So it would seem this message is still needed.

[Stanley]

Another reason for bumping an article about climate warming occurred to me this morning. We are having one of the kindest winters I can ever remember. Long may it continue.....