Crazy weather and armageddon

David,

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Has the day after tomorrow arrived?

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Not for another two days.

Joe

Depends when you are reading this.

If global climate change was getting really serious; would we be told?

Of course not - the value of Shell and BP shares would plummet.

Now that really would cause global problems.

John.

PS I do have an Armageddon - will it help if I get rid of it?

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Originally posted by J.N.:
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I do have an Armageddon - will it help if I get rid of it?

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I fear rotational instability if you do ..........

Signature - surely it's just a Naim ?

This is all too 'orribly dé jà vu.

I became fascinated by the threat of a New Ice Age and read all the books twenty years ago. Including survival in artic conditions. I have the down gear and the boots and the ice axe...

But now some bugger has whipped my cosy rug out from under me!

I don't need warmth... I need a bløødy anchor and flotation gear!

I'll settle for an underground shelter half way up a mountain. Just call me Osama.

Nime

When it all happens will I be able to run my HiFi powered by my wife riding my bike very quickly with the dynamo connected to the back wheel?

Bob

bob

No.

Cheshire will be under water. You will need a canal boat.

HTH

Signature - surely it's just a Naim ?

It's all a bit of milleniumism (or millenialism?) 5 years out of date.

Regards,

Steve.

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Originally posted by bob mccluckie:
When it all happens will I be able to run my HiFi powered by my wife riding my bike very quickly with the dynamo connected to the back wheel?

Bob

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Cruel sod. What's the matter with deep cycle batteries?

Nime

quote:

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Originally posted by bob mccluckie:
When it all happens will I be able to run my HiFi powered by my wife riding my bike very quickly with the dynamo connected to the back wheel?

Bob

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Bob, no need, the sea level changes will have completely destroyed all those precious estuaries and coastal areas so we will be able to use tidal power which will keep the world electrified for ages (who really cares about the lunar cycle anyway, could that be construed as anti religious???), only you might have to turn some of the lights off during neep tides and all that, and your system will only sound really powered up when those spring tides hit.

Matthew

We're on borrowed time, and I think we just have to accept it. People like to think of the climate as being in some perpetual state of equilibrium; it isn't. It's always been subject to change and it'll change again - and not necessarily in our favour.

We will become extinct at some point in the future - maybe quite soon. If normal climate change doesn't do away with us we still have asteroid impacts and super volcanoes to contend with. It isn't beyond the realms of possibility that some kind of virus mutation could polish off a good many of us, and then when you consider what might happen if certain religious types got their hands on the right kind of bugs...!

We're stuffed anyway, so relax!!

A serious wake-up call to the govenments of the world is what is required, and this will help. Effects of global warming will happen in hits like this while the background build-up continues constantly. If the effects were so gradual that they crept up on us, then there would be little to alarm and less would probably be done.
We have to keep pressing for change, and the oil companies have most to gain by finding alternative sources of power, but I am always dismayed at protests against wind turbines; we should be proud to have them.
I do believe that here in the UK we have a government that is genuinely concerned, and we need to kick the USA's ass on this. They need to seriously wake up.
I have never known a world without the threat of nuclear weapons. I grew up hearing about terrorism in Northern Ireland all throughout my youth. All new generations have new threats and challenges to deal with; we only just made it past 1963.
Look at the money raised for the victims of the tsunami by the public and tell me that we can't do anything ourselves. The public can make a difference.

Dunno about the Apocalypse.

I'll post a bit more in a mo - four blokes on horses have just rocked up and I'm going to yell at them to get orf moi laaand.

Regards

Mike

Spending money I don't have on things I don't need.

quote:

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Originally posted by Rasher:
A serious wake-up call to the govenments of the world is what is required, and this will help. Effects of global warming will happen in hits like this while the background build-up continues constantly. If the effects were so gradual that they crept up on us, then there would be little to alarm and less would probably be done.

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As I say, the climate changes ANYWAY; I'm not saying greenhouse gasses aren't a factor, just as free radicals are in ozone depletion and certain types of cancer. Don't flatter the human race that it can really make the difference though. Use the Asian Tsunami as an example - there's damn all we can do to stop things like that, and the best we can hope for is to see it coming and get out of the way!!

Just wait till a decent sized asteroid hits us - and don't forget it's an inevitable event - it'll make that wee Tsunami disaster look like something out of an Enid Blyton book. And as for those little storms we've been having...!!

Stopping Uncle Sam from setting fire to so much gasoline might help a bit, but I wouldn't get excited.

Anyone know what the four horses of the apocalypse will be? Presumably flood & fire....any ideas anyone?

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Originally posted by Rasher:
Anyone know what the four horses of the apocalypse will be? Presumably flood & fire....any ideas anyone?

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Yes, see the above.

Oh and don't forget the Yellowstone Park super volcano; that'll stuff us, and that could blow any time. And there's bugger all we can do about it.

Yellowstone Park Super Volcano

Rasher,

If my memory serves me correctly, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.

Personally, I think we should call for a steward's inquiry ...

No need. The going would be so heavy they'd need pontoons.

Nime

The thing about global warming is that it is happening now. If we don't act we might be too late (so some scientists say). We can do something about it by using renewables such as wind turbines, etc. It might not be economical but do we have a choice?

Other catastrophies such as impacts from space and super-volcanoes might not happen for many thousands of years, by which time we might have the technology to do something about them.

Steve B

The real thing about global warming is that there's nothing we can do about it. If we cease all emissions it's still going to happen. We cannot cease all emissions, and at present we have no way to suppress the developing world's accelerating energy consumption.

So practically we should be working on ways to deal with the consequences. It used to be said that the entire population of the world would fit on the Isle of Wight, I believe it would now require the Isle of Man, but the point remains that there's loads of space, we (that's us, the human race) just have to find a better way to use it.

Paul

Paul,

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It used to be said that the entire population of the world would fit on the Isle of Wight, I believe it would now require the Isle of Man, but the point remains that there's loads of space, we (that's us, the human race) just have to find a better way to use it.

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Log-stacked, you could fit the entire human race into the Grand Canyon with room to spare, but that hardly the issue -- the space we take up.

Joe

________________________________________


From The Future of Life -- A feature interview with E.O. Wilson

Bob McDonald [interviewer]
Now what about, especially here in North America, consumption. The fact that North Americans are consuming more resources of the earth then anyone else on the planet, and that doesn't seem
to be stopping. How do you turn that around and say we've got to give up some of the luxuries we have and start to turn this juggernaut around.

Dr. Wilson
This is certainly a serious problem and I don't think most people realize how serious it is. We still occasionally hear naive arguments about how, oh, there's a lot of space left on the planet and you could take all 6 billion people and put them in Texas and they still have have enough room for a ranch house and a yard.

But I can do better than that, you can just figure that yourself on the back of an envelope. You can take 6 billion people and log-stack them, they'd fill a cube volume of about 3 cubic miles. You can take all of them and lower them into the Grand Canyon out of sight. But that's not the point. How many humans there are, how much physical space we take standing and sitting and lying down.

The point is how much of the productive earth's surface each one of us uses. That's known as ecological footprint and in the U.S., Canada is a little less than the U.S., so we'll take the U.S., that's the maximum, the average person about 24 acres, according to latest estimates, of productive land. That is, land, little bits of which were taken from all around the world,
you know, a little bit of Saudi Arabia for each one of our consumption of oil, a little bit of Ghana for our cocoa, and so on.

The average U.S. citizen takes 24 acres and the average person in the developing world takes about 1/10 as much as what the U.S. does. Another misconception you constantly hear, kind of a philosophical misdirection, is that, well, U.S. policy anyway, ought to be to bring the rest of the world, the developing world, as 80 percent of the people living in those countries up to U.S. standards, automobiles, computers, the whole bit. But that's impossible, because it's not too difficult to calculate that in order to bring everybody up to current U.S. standard at present technology would require four more planet Earths.

So what we going to do about this? That's the problem, and that's what the environmentalists have been urging on us that we don't need to lower our standard of living, we just need to lower our patterns of consumption and change our energy
sources and the materials we use and so on to live a more prudent lifestyle.

Did anyone watch Horizon last night?

Horizon and Global dimming

why is there no discussion on techniques to convert CO2 to carbon and oxygen - it would take a lot of energy no doubt - but building nuclear power stations to provide the power would be a very worthwhile survival option.

Derek

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Atmospheric pollution is the least of our worries. Plants convert CO2 to biomass and molecular oxygen so provided Johnny Foreigner stops de-foresting the damn place we'll all be safe...!

Anyway, as I say, we're doomed so we should resign ourselves to seizing the moment. It'll take more than a few wind turbines to save the world, if you'll forgive me for sounding crude and simplistic.

What the hell. I'm going on the piss later, bugger the planet!! I've had a bad day!!!!

Earwicker