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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted -  15/12/2007  :  07:03
I thought it might be a good thing to have a topic devoted to this important subject.


Stanley Challenger Graham




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stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk
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frankwilk
Senior Member


3975 Posts
Posted - 28/10/2009 : 07:56
Is that not really what the NHS is  ?????Laughing



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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 29/10/2009 : 06:08
Not really Frank, it's generally agreed that not enough resources are put into preventative medicine. Look at the money spent on Western Diseases and contrast with the amount put into researching why this is happening.

http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/climate_change_food_prices_report_28102009.html

Have a look at this. Friends of the Earth have commissioned a report by Ray Hammond on future food prices. He makes it clear that this is worst case scenario but says that this is the basis on which we should be acting. Sounds sensible to me.... His projections are that whilst income will double by 2030, the price of food will rise over 4 times. Not comfortable reading but fesible when you realise that world population will increase by a third in the same period.


Stanley Challenger Graham




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frankwilk
Senior Member


3975 Posts
Posted - 29/10/2009 : 10:55
when you realise that world population will increase by a third in the same period

Is that not something we can help to control. Do we need to hand out money in child benefit to encourage people to have more children ??
Then again we need children to support the ponzi scheme that we call our State Pensions it looks like a no win situation we have got ourselves into.
Not meaning to sound to political, but it is a political problem with no way out. Unless we really are going to bite the bullet.



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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 30/10/2009 : 05:30
So if we cut support for pensioners and kiddies it'll solve the problem of population increase?


Stanley Challenger Graham




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frankwilk
Senior Member


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Posted - 30/10/2009 : 08:52
Sorry Stanley you didn't read it right.. How do you stop population growth which in the end will kill the planet due to lack of food and water ?? That is a fact that can't be denied. So what is to be done about it,  was really the point of the question.
Medicine will have us living to be a 100 y.o. very soon, N1H1 seems to be under control so no pandemic to reduce population. The next war will kill us all.
 So what's to be done about population explosions ??. Change the mind set of Pensions for all which will be happening very soon, hence the increase in retirement age. ( the longer you work the sooner you die is part of this logic )  Stop the free money which increases as you populate more ??.
It was a serious point about climate change. 
I wonder when the Stop the Car Lobby, will turn to Stop the People Lobby. It needs to be soon I think.

Edited by - frankwilk on 30/10/2009 08:55:46 AM



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Tizer
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Posted - 30/10/2009 : 12:51
The really big population problem that Beddington was pointing to in his lecture is the growth in numbers in developing countries. Not only are the populations there increasing fast but they are becoming healthier, wealthier and more urban - and therefore bigger consumers of meat and western type diets (not to mention energy supplies too). The demand for more food is also a demand for more energy to power tractors, distribute food, chill it and freeze it. It also puts heavier demands on oil from which pesticides and herbicides are manufactured, and we will soon have to make new decisions on our attitudes to GM crops and foods. We are all living in one world together but, even now, we consume at a rate of about three worlds for the present global population.

In biological terms, populations (whether it's bacteria, plants or animals) grow until they've used up the available food then crash, and then cycle repeast again and again. Humans have become increasingly adept at putting off the crash by use of science and technology. But our race into `globalisation' means that this time we need to deal with another factor - geopolitics. There's going to be increased tensions between geographical regions based on sources of food and energy, and we can already see trouble brewing over the predicted opening up of the Arctic.

Application of technological solutions to climate change is only going to succeed if governments decide to work together and agree which paths to take. This is what worries me most because I don't yet see good evidence of our ability to this.


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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 30/10/2009 : 16:38
I agree with you about politics, sense will not prevail until the effects outweigh the percieved political damage. Just as important though is the ethos of the global companies who are driven solely by profit. Take the example of using India as the dumping ground for recycling toxic waste like old car batteries or the wholesale moving of iron foundries to China and India. I once had a conversation with a bloke clled Trevor Grice who was CEO of Renolds. They owned the foundry in Rochdale which is now gone and replaced by a Texas barn. He told me that if he saw a machine that would save two jobs he bought it and anyone who ran a foundry in the UK was daft, Health and Safety and higher standards for the workers in a very rough industry had made it too expensive. There are many other examples of this type of activity, I suppose one of the first was the clothing companies who saw the advantages of cheap labour. When Bancroft closed down thirty years ago it was making a profit but Doug Hoyle told me that there was a pattern of textile firms in the sub continent buying up English mills and scrapping them so that when their production costs eventually rose we would not be any competition for them, the mills and the skills would be gone.


Stanley Challenger Graham




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Tizer
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Posted - 31/10/2009 : 11:40
An item in the brief news headlines on BBC Radio 4 at 5.00pm on Wednesday was about scientists saying that global warming was not caused by human activity but was a natural effect caused by the sun. I pricked up my ears but wasn't able to wait for the full story after the headlines, so I listened to the full 6.00pm news. There was nothing about climate change. I searched the BBC news web site and found no new climate change stories. Then I searched on Google and got the same - no such story.

In the end I found out there had been a conference held in London by Piers Corbyn, the celebrity weather forecaster who runs his own commercial weather prediction company. He doesn't accept the idea that the present excess warming of the earth is caused by carbon emissions but believes it is driven by the sun. I suspect the Beeb got a press release from him and they used it without checking with other people about his standing in the debate (and also taking into account his commercial activity and wish for publicity). When the news headline went out they probably got immediate calls from scientists telling them how far out on a limb Corbyn is. The sun hypothesis has been raised at intervals but refuted by many scientists who have provided lots of evidence against it.

It all goes to show how easily information can be fed into the media, especially by people seeking publicity.


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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 01/11/2009 : 08:02
See my post on the video that Bodge found on culture change. Same syndrome, lazy people who can't be bothered to think for themselves grab the headline that best suits their mind set. Problem is that he is right in that the sun is what raises our temerature. This is such an obvious truth that people will grab it and assume that the conclusions drawn are true. The problem of course is not that the amaoung of energy coming in from the sun has increased but that our pollution of the atmosphere has reduced its effectiveness as a shield and at the same time made it a better insulator. Hence the rise in temperature which triggers off other effects like the reduction in the reflective capacity of the ice caps etc. We are desperately searching for a way of alleviating this effect or reversing it. I think it's too late, we have triggered off a process and all we can do is learn to live with it. Problem is that it is going to be very rough justice. Mother Earth is making her own adjustments which will take a long time and result in a drasic reduction of the world's population. It remains to be seen who will bear the brunt of this. The Gaia Theory may be right....

I remember talking to an old hill farmer once about stocking rates on the fells. He said that it was easy to work out what these were, if you had too many on they 'die back to their number'. Have a ponder on that!


Stanley Challenger Graham




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tripps
Senior Member


1404 Posts
Posted - 01/11/2009 : 09:54
Tizer, it;s not uncommon for a news item to be on the early bulletins, and then vanish. I used to listen to the wireless for a living and the habit dies hard. I guess there are many  reasons, but a conspiracy theory is always attractive.

Piers Corbyn ( brother of Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn), has been in the weather game a long time, and I believe at one time made a living from betting on the weather. You say he has a commercial interest , and so he has; but I don't think he gets any government financing, and if he was no good at forcasting, presumably he would lose his clients, and go out of business. That's capitalism.

In total contrast is the amount of (mainly public) money dependent on the climate change theory being accepted.  As I have mentione before - far too much for the theory to be conttadicted now.

You mention the present warming of the earth. I have read that in fact the earth has been cooling for the last 8 or 9 years, despite incread greenhouse gases. Some people think incresed CO2 levels follow warming, rather than precede it.

I am no expert, and just take a passing interest in the subject. but I tend towards the sceptical position on nearly all issues, and it wouldn't be the first time that "experts" have all been  wrong.







Edited by - tripps on 01/11/2009 09:55:51 AM


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Tizer
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5150 Posts
Posted - 01/11/2009 : 11:43
Tripps, like you I'm a born sceptic and I therefore don't support everything scientists tell us even though I trained and worked as one. But there are some issues where the evidence is just so strong, and the data and interpretations done by the best scientists worldwide, that I have to give my support.

The climate change sceptics have used the argument about the earth cooling since 1998 but it is their interpretation of the data, not the majority of scientists' interpretation. 1998 was the hottest year on record and, judging from tree rings, ice cores etc, probably the hottest in the last 1000 years globally. The years since 1998 have not been that hot. Have a look at this graph from the Climate Research Unit at Uni. of East Anglia which is being updated regularly:

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

The smoothing that they have applied to give the black line gives the impression of cooling but you could apply other levels of smoothing that would not show cooling. The important thing to note is the roller coaster ride of the actual annual data points. There are ups and downs but the ride has been overall upwards for a long time and there is no reason to assume that it is going to go the other way now. The climate change sceptics want to use small variations like this as proof that we are cooling again, but if the climate scientists were to try to use variations of this size to support warming they woulk be laughed out of court.

On the topic of increased CO2 following warming, yes, that has happened often in geological history but we are talking ice ages and periods of 5000 years with lag times of 800 years, which is totally different from the time scale of events happening now.

I share your concerns about the effects of the amount of money influencing the debate on climate change. I was close to the biofuels debate at its inception and saw the biofuels concept hijacked by commercial moneymakers who then promoted the sue for biofuel regardless of whether it was sensible or not - and thus we got into shortages of food (e.g. maize in Mexico). I hope money won't spoil the debate on climate change, as I also hope the daft protesters won't spoil it by making a mockery of the whole issue.


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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 01/11/2009 : 16:56
If things aren't warming up where are the ice caps and glaciers going? Or is this too simplistic.


Stanley Challenger Graham




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tripps
Senior Member


1404 Posts
Posted - 01/11/2009 : 17:24
I believe they have melted before, a long time ago? Well before 'anthropogenic global warming' was invented. Don't you just love that phrase?

Now - about that so called moon landing.......


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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 02/11/2009 : 06:33
David, your comment about early morning news reminds me one instance in particular. Being up early in the morning I used to listen to the World Service news a lot (I still do, far better than the domestic service) and I remember at the time of the outbreak of the Six Day war in 1967 there was a news item on the WS where the manager of an oil storage installation in Rotterdam was interviewed about the coming shortage of oil. His response was "What shortage? The tanks in our farm are full for the first time since the plant was built and there are six tankers anchored nearby waiting to discharge their oil" In other words the oil comanies had seen what was coming and ordered stocks to compensate. Not a word of this later and I never heard it mentioned again. Very strange.......


Stanley Challenger Graham




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Tizer
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5150 Posts
Posted - 02/11/2009 : 20:25
"I believe they have melted before, a long time ago?" - I think you'd be talking more than 100,000 years ago in terms of Antarctic ice. In more recent times (Ice Ages) the ice advanced to lower latitudes and retreated again in several cycles but I don't know of there having been significantly less than now in those warmer `interglacial' periods.


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