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Climate: Il fait VRAIMENT CHAUD (fka un petit)


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2 minutes ago, Ring3r said:

Yeah, you guys did have a period aof time where you were doing far less controlled burning.  One side blames it on the climate already being too dry, the other side says it was intentional.  When push comes to shove and a massive fire starts...magically now it's no longer too dangerous to use controlled burning again.  I don't buy it.

When the people whose job is preventing and fighting fires say that it was too dangerous to carry out the burning, and the people who are literally in government at the time and have been in government for the prior 6 years say that it was due to "Greens policies" when said Greens have never been in government to pass said policies and the conservatives in government certainly didn't pass them either, it's pretty fucking obvious which of the "both sides" is telling the truth.

Repeating it for emphasis - the conservative party had been in power for 8 years at the state level and 6 years at the federal level at that point. No one was passing "Greens policies".

It stops being too dangerous after the huge fire because the huge fire burnt the accumulated fuel that was a large part of making it too dangerous, and we've had a shitload of rain since then as well. We literally had areas hit by flooding less than a month after the fire had torn through.

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I know this issue is contentious and a lot of people are heavily emotionally invested in it.  And I know some people think we're literally going to have a gigantic humanitarian disaster as a result....so I'm glad we can still mostly have a normal conversation about it without it devolving into nastiness.  So thanks for that, I know most of you disagree with me, and that's fine.

There IS a massive humanitarian disaster coming, particularly in parts of Africa.  The biggest upcoming one that we know is going to happen is Somalia.  Much like California, they've depleted their water table almost entirely, primarily due to irrigation for crops over the course of decades.  The country is basically out of water at this point.  I'm sure somebody will try and blame that on climate change too, even though it's an issue that's been tracked for decades.  So....that's going to be really really awful and a lot of people are going to die and there will inevitably be a horrific war, much like what happened in the 90s, but probably much larger scale.

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1 minute ago, karaddin said:

When the people whose job is preventing and fighting fires say that it was too dangerous to carry out the burning, and the people who are literally in government at the time and have been in government for the prior 6 years say that it was due to "Greens policies" when said Greens have never been in government to pass said policies and the conservatives in government certainly didn't pass them either, it's pretty fucking obvious which of the "both sides" is telling the truth.

Repeating it for emphasis - the conservative party had been in power for 8 years at the state level and 6 years at the federal level at that point. No one was passing "Greens policies".

It stops being too dangerous after the huge fire because the huge fire burnt the accumulated fuel that was a large part of making it too dangerous, and we've had a shitload of rain since then as well. We literally had areas hit by flooding less than a month after the fire had torn through.

I'm still highly dubious, but lets say you're correct, and the fires were simply due to drought.  There have been massive droughts in Australia before....very frequently in fact.  There's been flooding too.  I'm not trying to minimize the human suffering, I do actually care about that...but it's a bit hand-wavey to say that every modern catastrophy is because of climate change...particularly when similar things have always been happening.  We simply do not understand things well enough.  We NEVER have, when it comes to weather.

Example: Every new hurricane that hits anywhere is blamed on climate change by the media now....when statistics indicate there does not seem to be any correlation, with some seasons being extra severe and others extra mild, in a pattern that goes back to when we first started measuring.  In fact, the number of named hurricanes closely tracks with the amount of weather detection technology, and severity has fluctuated wildly over the last 100 years.

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When your country has a history of very regular bushfires and then one happens that far surpasses the historical record in terms of scale and intensity, it's reasonable to look at what has changed. I became an adult during a period of intense drought that lasted almost a decade, with my city living under fairly significant water restrictions - we had none of that in the lead up to 2019. It wasn't an extended severe drought, it was the conditions immediately preceding the fires.

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5 minutes ago, karaddin said:

When your country has a history of very regular bushfires and then one happens that far surpasses the historical record in terms of scale and intensity, it's reasonable to look at what has changed. I became an adult during a period of intense drought that lasted almost a decade, with my city living under fairly significant water restrictions - we had none of that in the lead up to 2019. It wasn't an extended severe drought, it was the conditions immediately preceding the fires.

Yes, I assume you grew up during the "millenium drought?"

So....if you weren't having water restrictions leading up to 2019....but you did during the millenium drought...why not?  I'm aware that the drought and fires are the worst on record in the last 5 years in Aus....but the records only go back 100 years and the severity of the drought is not hugely worse...if it was, wouldn't water restrictions have been even more severe than during the millenium drought?  The pieces don't add up.

Still stinks of government mismanagement to me...probably of multiple things.  Mismanagement combined with a bad drought.

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19 minutes ago, Ring3r said:

There's similar ice core samples from other parts of the world during the same time period.  Greenland was the highest because there was clearly some event that happened there but it did not remain a "local event."  There was a huge global shift.  See below:

https://www.realclimate.org/images/colose_yd2.png

It is certainly an interesting point. I was not familiar with the Younger Dryas and other abrupt climate shifts. There are leading hypothesises, but it is indeed an area of uncertainty. But unlike your postulation that it is an inconvenient period being ignored, it seems that there is a lot of research being done because it is a period of scientific interest.

And, by the way, apparently the global mean temperature changed very little, though there were dramatic shifts in local temperatures.

Very interesting!

I invite you to read this article:

https://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/arch/examples.shtml

Anyway, differing views are welcome as far as I'm concerned. While there's finite time and I won't debate exhaustively, it is fun to encounter opposing points of view instead of an echo chamber.

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27 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Why do you think any of this is not being looked at? People are looking at the processional effects on climate. People are looking at the sun's behaviour and how that affects climate.

Why do you think climate change research and action isn't also being taken on other GHGs like methane and nitrous oxide (which are also increasing because of human activity)? Because it most certainly is.

It appears you either have not read enough, or you are reading the wrong sources.

A mistake of phrasing on my part.  While it's absolutely true that research that does not go along with the narrative very often does not receive any government grants, which are a huge source of funding.....there are still privately funded research groups, and many of them DO look at the things I'm talking about.  Obviously, because I've read those things.

It's not that these things are not being looked at....it's that the media largely ignores them and thus the average person almost exclusively hears one side, and because of that, considers it more reputable.  And often, researchers who do look at these other aspects of the problem are labeled climate deniers to discredit them.

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7 minutes ago, IFR said:

It is certainly an interesting point. I was not familiar with the Younger Dryas and other abrupt climate shifts. There are leading hypothesises, but it is indeed an area of uncertainty. But unlike your postulation that it is an inconvenient period being ignored, it seems that there is a lot of research being done because it is a period of scientific interest.

And, by the way, apparently the global mean temperature changed very little, though there were dramatic shifts in local temperatures.

Very interesting!

I invite you to read this article:

https://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/arch/examples.shtml

Anyway, differing views are welcome as far as I'm concerned. While there's finite time and I won't debate exhaustively, it is fun to encounter opposing points of view instead of an echo chamber.

The period of the Younger Dryas is receiving a whole lot of attention right now, that's true.  I think most of it is because there's pretty good evidence that the abrupt changes were caused by a large impact event that directly hit the glacier and essentially flash-melted it, flooding the planet, changing all the sea currents, etc, and there's a big focus on near earth objects right now.  NASA recently tested their ability to alter the course of an asteroid, for example.  So.....most of the attention is because of that, I think.  I just happen to think that it has equally large implications for climate science....if our planet is still in process of recovering from a very geologically recent catastrophy, it seems like that should probably be heavily featured in our models.

I'll give it a read :) And yes, thank you, it's very refreshing and unfortunately rare to be able to have a conversation like this that doesn't just explode.  Very cool.

Edited by Ring3r
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45 minutes ago, Ring3r said:

Yes, I assume you grew up during the "millenium drought?"

So....if you weren't having water restrictions leading up to 2019....but you did during the millenium drought...why not?  I'm aware that the drought and fires are the worst on record in the last 5 years in Aus....but the records only go back 100 years and the severity of the drought is not hugely worse...if it was, wouldn't water restrictions have been even more severe than during the millenium drought?  The pieces don't add up.

Still stinks of government mismanagement to me...probably of multiple things.  Mismanagement combined with a bad drought.

Parts of the country had been in drought for a few years, but Sydney's water reservoirs started the period pretty much at capacity so there was a lot of buffer. I think we also got used to a lot of habits that have stuck since the millennium drought such that enforcement isn't as necessary as it was before - almost no one hoses down their driveway, or leaves the tap running when not in use, we water plants at the right time of day etc. So water will last longer even in a sustained drought.

The issue in 2019 was more of an acute issue rather than a chronic one - it was both the warmest and driest year on record at the time

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/natural-disasters/bushfires/2019-20-bushfires-explainer

Again, this was a conservative government at both state and federal levels. If there was an issue of major mismanagement there is absolutely no reason that left leaning environmental orgs wouldn't have been shouting that from the roof tops. The only one on that front I can recall is that the emergency services should have more resources.

Part of the problem is also that historically we have shared heavy firefighting equipment, and manpower in emergencies, with the US as their summer is our winter and vice versa. As the fire season in the US has started lasting later into the year and our fire season is kicking off much earlier, this doesn't work as well as the water bomber aircraft are still in use in Cali etc when our fires are starting up.

The increased fire season is also a huge part of why our Rural Fire Service (RFS) had not been able to safely conduct enough back burning. When the fire season starts in late October and ends in April that gives you up to 6 months of back burning, and absolutely guaranteed 3 months through the winter. When the fire season starts late August and doesn't end until mid May you're lost half your possible back burning time and even the middle of winter isn't completely safe. Which I'm pretty sure is exactly what happened in 2019, it was an extremely dry and mild winter and it was already warming to spring temperatures by the end of July.

Want to take a guess as to why the fire seasons are getting longer? I'll give you a hint, it's in the thread title. There's no conspiracy here, it's just a country with a lot of vulnerability to extreme weather, so large scale climate changes that make extreme weather more likely are going to be reflected in an increase in said extreme weather here.

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5 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Parts of the country had been in drought for a few years, but Sydney's water reservoirs started the period pretty much at capacity so there was a lot of buffer. I think we also got used to a lot of habits that have stuck since the millennium drought such that enforcement isn't as necessary as it was before - almost no one hoses down their driveway, or leaves the tap running when not in use, we water plants at the right time of day etc. So water will last longer even in a sustained drought.

The issue in 2019 was more of an acute issue rather than a chronic one - it was both the warmest and driest year on record at the time

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/natural-disasters/bushfires/2019-20-bushfires-explainer

Again, this was a conservative government at both state and federal levels. If there was an issue of major mismanagement there is absolutely no reason that left leaning environmental orgs wouldn't have been shouting that from the roof tops. The only one on that front I can recall is that the emergency services should have more resources.

Part of the problem is also that historically we have shared heavy firefighting equipment, and manpower in emergencies, with the US as their summer is our winter and vice versa. As the fire season in the US has started lasting later into the year and our fire season is kicking off much earlier, this doesn't work as well as the water bomber aircraft are still in use in Cali etc when our fires are starting up.

The increased fire season is also a huge part of why our Rural Fire Service (RFS) had not been able to safely conduct enough back burning. When the fire season starts in late October and ends in April that gives you up to 6 months of back burning, and absolutely guaranteed 3 months through the winter. When the fire season starts late August and doesn't end until mid May you're lost half your possible back burning time and even the middle of winter isn't completely safe. Which I'm pretty sure is exactly what happened in 2019, it was an extremely dry and mild winter and it was already warming to spring temperatures by the end of July.

Want to take a guess as to why the fire seasons are getting longer? I'll give you a hint, it's in the thread title. There's no conspiracy here, it's just a country with a lot of vulnerability to extreme weather, so large scale climate changes that make extreme weather more likely are going to be reflected in an increase in said extreme weather here.

I think a significant portion of what is blamed on global warming is actually administrative incompetence, and it makes an excellent scapegoat because it simultaneously excuses failure while supporting a narrative that gives those people yet more power.  But I don't think there's some grand conspiracy - I think it's simple human nature.  I think there's a number of factors at play.  People wanting to avoid blame.  People suffering from groupthink and not looking outside the blinders and missing solutions.  Greed that drives people to push for whatever industry they're part of.

As I've said since I entered the thread....climate change is real and humans contribute to it.  It's the degree to which that is the case and the so-called solutions that I question.  Particularly the motivations of people in power.  Like I said before...if they really believed everything they were saying, we'd have seen a massive resurgence of nuclear power, as it's the only thing that could replace fossil fuels in a viable way in the near-term future.  We've seen the opposite.  I call BS.

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Not sure why you've been arguing with me then Ringer, the only thing I've said is that it's happening and the economic impact Australia is already feeling is greater than the cost of investing in renewables would have been.

Companies make a lot of money flogging off coal that was dug up in our country, but at this point they're paying fuck all tax relative to the size of the profits and they employ far less people than our politicians like to pretend, so my claim isn't even saying that much. There was a time when the country got more out of it, but the conservative government squandered that by giving massive tax cuts at the same time they sold off a huge amount of public assets at criminally low prices.

Obviously Australia having switched to renewables on our own wouldn't have prevented climate change and I'm not pretending it would have, just saying that from our perspective the economic argument against action is bogus.

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The Younger Dryas is only now getting attention? Why did I hear about it several years ago then? I I don't mean just 2 or three years ago, I mean long enough ago that it took a hot minute before remembering that I had read and heard of it in the past. Perhaps there's some renewed interest because it deserves a deeper dive, but this is not its first rodeo among climate scientists. If I heard of it several years ago, it's because it got some level of play at least in science media if not MSM.

Honestly, the nuclear thing pisses me off. Too many effing greenies being anti-nuke at the same time as demanding climate action. And tragedies like Fukishima pouring cold water on nuclear ambitions just as they were starting to come back to the surface. IMO a wasted decade or two where nuclear energy development was shelved because of ideology and fear. And lobbying by fossil fuel interests to cut govt investment in the sector, with natural gas generation being much cheaper and quicker to bring online.

Hopefully modular reactors that are quicker and easier to build can come online faster, because the cost and time to commission traditional nuclear plants is so long and so expensive if they were going to be a climate change solution it should have started 10 years ago. They can still be built for energy security purposes, but their time for substantially helping with climate change has just about passed.

 

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Yeah the time lag is my biggest concern over nuclear as the solution. If the recommendation is coming from the appropriate subject matter experts that say it's our best move to reduce carbon emissions asap while retaining base load and we'll stand up renewables alongside that over it's lifetime, I'm happy to go with that. As long as it's the SMEs making the recommendations, not lobbyists driving corrupt decision making.

In terms of concrete actions I personally take, I wouldn't view a commitment to nuclear power as a negative that would swayb my vote against any of our parties if they came out with that plan.

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4 hours ago, karaddin said:

Yeah the time lag is my biggest concern over nuclear as the solution.

I see the time lag for nuclear, the same way as the famous quote on planting trees.

"The best time to build nuclear infrastructure is 20 years ago, the second best time is now"

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7 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

The Younger Dryas is only now getting attention? Why did I hear about it several years ago then? I I don't mean just 2 or three years ago, I mean long enough ago that it took a hot minute before remembering that I had read and heard of it in the past. Perhaps there's some renewed interest because it deserves a deeper dive, but this is not its first rodeo among climate scientists. If I heard of it several years ago, it's because it got some level of play at least in science media if not MSM.

Climate scientists know about it. But I'm not a climate scientist and I didn't know about it and find it pretty interesting (not in the same way Ring3r does, I don't think it substantiates their point, but I suppose that is something that may be debated in this thread).:lol:

7 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Honestly, the nuclear thing pisses me off. Too many effing greenies being anti-nuke at the same time as demanding climate action. And tragedies like Fukishima pouring cold water on nuclear ambitions just as they were starting to come back to the surface. IMO a wasted decade or two where nuclear energy development was shelved because of ideology and fear. And lobbying by fossil fuel interests to cut govt investment in the sector, with natural gas generation being much cheaper and quicker to bring online.

Hopefully modular reactors that are quicker and easier to build can come online faster, because the cost and time to commission traditional nuclear plants is so long and so expensive if they were going to be a climate change solution it should have started 10 years ago. They can still be built for energy security purposes, but their time for substantially helping with climate change has just about passed.

As someone who is also a passionate advocate of nuclear, it's wonderful to see support for it here. The commonly viewed problems with nuclear (waste disposal, timeframe of development, expense, etc) have existing technological solutions. Political unpopularity is the single biggest problem for nuclear.

An interesting aspect of nuclear - the concern of radiation and its effect on humans - may in the future significantly affect the public view of nuclear power. Currently regulatory bodies operate on the linear no-threshold model. There's a link to the wikipedia article below, but a short summary is as follows. The effects of low dose ionizing radiation is stochastic in nature - that is, a statistical model over a sample population is performed to determine the lifetime cancer mortality when that population is dosed with a given amount of ionizing radiation. For example, a population that is dosed with 1 sievert of radation is estimated to have a corresponding increase in 5.5% lifetime cancer mortality (a sievert is huge: that's about 160 times the yearly background radiation dose of the average American).

The linear no threshold posits that any dose carries a risk that is proportional to the dose. This is a very conservative model, as there is still a lot of uncertainty regarding low dose ionizing radiation and its effects. Because such emphasis in the public has been placed on radiation protection, statistical uncertainties are significant.

To give insight on the difficulties of developing real data for a model, consider this scenario. The typical mortality average for a sample population of 100,000 is 182.8 deaths. This is an average, though. Sometimes it's 170, sometimes it's 190. It averages out to 182.8. Regulatory limits for radiation workers allow for an annual dose of 0.05 sieverts, but it almost never gets that high and usually indicates something is wrong if a worker is dosed that amount.

With these references in mind, let's explore Three Mile Island. A population of 2 million is estimated to have been dosed with one ten thousandth of a sievert above background. The expected cancer mortality without this dose would be estimated as 3656 deaths. The estimated increase of mortality with the dose would be 110 deaths, so 3766 deaths total. 

As you can see from this example, it is very difficult to discriminate between statistical variance and actual contribution.

Anyway, the linear no-threshold model is a highly controversial point in health physics. It's entirely possible that there is a threshold, below which no health effects in the sample population will manifest. If enough supporting data emerges for this it will have a considerable impact on the industry of radiation protection, and ensure that nuclear power plants have a significantly reduced cost in their design and construction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

Edited by IFR
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But what does expensive mean? It mostly means the cost-profit doesn't add up for a private enterprise required to turn a profit. This can be mitigated in various ways by the state, which does not need to think about "expense" in the same way that private business and individuals do.

Energy policy needs to look at three outcomes, at least: energy efficiency (decreasing energy demand by improving efficiency of use or changing behaviour (turn your lights off, open a window instead of turning on your AC in summer, use public transport instead of private - even in an EV world public transport is preferable to private EV use); increasing electricity product in line with increased demands (if it is accepted that energy efficiency measures will just slow the rate of growth in demand, not reverse it); eliminating fossil fuel use in electricity generation. And doing these things as fast as possible.

Just because nuclear is expensive does not mean it's not needed to fulfil these outcomes if it is accepted that there is urgency for eliminating fossil fuel generation without compromising energy supply. 

 

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