As the world burns with devastating heat waves, out of control bush fires, massive floods, melting ice, rising seas and catastrophic weather, the Tories have looked at the aboration of the Uxbridge vote and decided that’s there’s votes to be had.
Imbeciles!! No morality!! We’re alright Jack – fuck everybody else!!
It’ll come back to bite them! The right-wing are nutcases!!
You may be right about catastrophic weather, Opher – this has been the coldest July I can remember! – but it’s only weather. Not climate, which is the long term average of weather.
The Uxbridge result sounded to me like a slap in the face with a wet fish for the Tory party. Whether it will wake them up is another matter.
You see Neil, weather is the result of climate. The jet stream has been affected. We’re on the cold side but look at climate and you see warming, unbearable heat, forest fires, melting ice, droughts and floods. The evidence is overwhelming. You’re stuck in a rut like the proverbial ostrich. You’ve nailed your flag to the mast and despite all evidence are not going to budge. Our cold weather is another manifestation of the changes we are creating. It the Gulf Stream becomes messed up like the Jet Stream has we are truly buggered.
But don’t think the UK is immune. Extreme temperatures, droughts, floods, cold winters and mass immigration from desperate people fleeing the unbearable/unliveable is just round the corner.
The evidence isn’t overwhelming, Opher. The Met Office crowed “hottest June ever,” but they’re keeping very quiet about the cold July. If you look for hard evidence of damage to the climate, on a global scale, caused by human activities of the last 50 years or so, you don’t find any. Something like globally increasing storm energy, or globally increasing droughts or floods, if you found it, might suggest something has changed. But we don’t see any of those things in reality. And even if we did, to prove scientifically that the culprit is carbon dioxide emissions would be very difficult indeed.
As to forest fires, the recent ones have been caused by arson, not climate change.
You can’t just look at the UK Neil. July we have been the wrong side of the Jet Stream (a peculiarity in itself) and it has been unusually cold and wet. You have to look at the heatwaves and record temperatures all over the globe and the recording of highest global temperatues ever. You have to look at the global trend. It is up.
There is ample evidence of global warming correlating to the CO2 in the atmosphere. Not that it matters. Whether the warming is manmade or not is irrelevant isn’t it? It is happening. That is what is important. The results are pretty disastrous for us and wildlife.
We cannot mitigate. We have to try to prevent it.
If it continues it will impact us enormously. Although in the UK a bit of extra heat would be nice in the rest of the world it’s a disaster and that impacts us:
heatwaves, floods, areas becoming deserts or unihabitable. It will hit global food prices, costs, repairs, mass migration, trade, and impact on crops, fish and livestock as well as the wildlife.
That future will not only affect costs for us and immigrants but the threat of wars and extreme damage due to changes in weather patterns.
Yes, the bush fires were largely caused by people (as usual) but the conditions for their spread is caused by global warming, lack of rain and tinder dry conditions. The prolonged heatwaves in Europe, the USA and Australia are going to be terrible for crops, people and are going to get worse.
The only tool we have to control this is to reduce CO2 output.