OneGuyFromBarlick

I've just been given another Craven Herald article to put on the EDLHS website about a terrible storm and Earby flood in May 1911. They don't seem to have been rare events around that time!

Wendy, have a look at this web page about the effects on the village of Bellingham in Northumberland. LINK

Wendy, one factor which affected Earby was the amount of water coming down County Brook through Salterforth Bottoms and from there to Lane Ends and on to Thornton. When the canal was busy a lot of water was drained from the summit level by lockage of boats and flow in the County Brook was curtailed but as commercial traffic lessened on the canal more water came down County Brook. There is very little fall form Hague through to Thornton and as late as the 1950s flooding in the bottoms and at Lane Ends was frequent. Two things helped, improvements in the water courses and an increase in pleasure traffic on the canal. The effect on Earby was that a comparatively small event could cause severe flooding because the watercourses from Earby to Thornton were always under pressure from the County Brook water.

The recent strange weather has triggered discussion about climate change. Whilst the recent aberrations in the weather can't be typified as unique, they are evidence of perturbations in the flow of the jet stream and an increase in more extreme weather patters. Go figure!

The Anderson group at Harvard University have been studying the ozone layer over the US and have concluded that it is being eroded but not by CFCs. They have found links between increased upper atmosphere winds and ozone depletion. The increase in these winds is regarded as due to climate change. So, we have a credible link between climate change and the depletion of ozone in the upper atmosphere. Not good news.... See this LINK.

We've heard surprisingly little in the news media about two major recent events in Greenland - the breaking up of the Petermann glacier to release a gigantic iceberg and the sudden melting of much of the ice sheet. The Petermann iceberg is big - said to be the size of Manhattan - but there's a much bigger one on its way when the Pine Island glacier breaks up. Such large icebergs are not rare but it's worrying if you take into account other factors, especially the sudden melting of the ice sheet. In the 4 days from 8th July the area of thawed ice jumped from 40% to 97%. Thawing of the ice sheet is normal in summer but the greatest thawing previously seen in the last 30 years was about 55%, which makes the current 97% look quite impressive. Th graphics on this BBC page show it all:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18978483

Funny how these things go on and all we concentrate on is money and bread and circuses. This trait could be the Achilles' Heel of the Human Race...... Discuss....

Costing the Earth on R4 is looking at climate change this afternoon. First of two parts.

What the greenies don't tell you :

When you're a terminally sad git, you monitor everything, and one thing I monitor is the national grid and their mix of power sources to feed our demand for electrical power. This week I've seen the lowest and one of the highest outputs of wind power I've seen according to the grids own figures.

Last Friday at 13:40 in the afternoon with total UK grid load of 37614 MW, Wind power's contribution was a measly 18 MW or 0.05 %. Less than 5 days later, Wednesday at 13:10 in the afternoon with a total grid load of 39444 MW, wind was 3299 MW, a healthy 8.3 % of the total.

So the next time you see the blurb for a proposed wind farm with 'powering X 000 homes', its only when the wind blows......

However, looking at the output of my PV panels at said times and dates, they were running close to flat out on the Friday and doing next to nothing on the Wednesday, so maybe its true about if the sun isn't shining the wind will be blowing. At the moment the grid puts solar under 'other' so you can't tell at a national level.

But the more the wind blows the more you turn your heating up / on, and switch to tumble drying , when its sunny you can peg the washing out ( hence the lower load demand ? ).

So change in demand + wind generated output = approx constant value

Of course solar has not really got in place in England , a doubling of the residential and commercial properties its on ( or tripling , just on adjoining properties in many cases ) , would really give some increase in generation. I think , in London and other suitable city centres any application for air conditioning should be manadated to fit solar to generate the power for it.

Pluggy wrote:What the greenies don't tell you ...Last Friday at 13:40 in the afternoon with total UK grid load of 37614 MW, Wind power's contribution was a measly 18 MW or 0.05 %. Less than 5 days later, Wednesday at 13:10 in the afternoon with a total grid load of 39444 MW, wind was 3299 MW, a healthy 8.3 % of the total.

From 0.05 to 8.3% of total, that's a mind-boggling range of 166 fold! You can't run a country's electricity supply effectively and reliably with variation of that order.
We need people like you Pluggy to give us some hard facts like these. Thanks, it's good to know what's really going on, we live in a world of misinformation.

One great advantage of Pluggy's solar panels is the fact that the electricity he produces and uses in the home is not saddled with transmission losses or the gross thermal inefficiency of conventional power stations. We hear much about carbon footprint but not losses and lack of thermal efficiency. If you are using process steam in a manufacturing plant there is still a good ecological argument for installing a steam engine and making your own juice. Far more efficient than mains. At Bancroft our leccy was half price compared to mains in 1978, I suspect it would be an even better comparison now.

I've been put right on Solar, it can't be quantisized by the grid since it is almost all done by micro-generation and the figures have no way of getting to the grid in real time. It just reduces the load as far as they are concerned.

The figures for wind are officially 27% average of installed capacity, but recent scrutiny suggests its closer to 25% or even lower allowing for downtime of turbines. Total Installed (running) wind capacity in the UK at the moment is just short of 5000 MW (5 Gigawatt).

My hats off to the grid, managing to keep the lights on, renewables do what they want and don't follow the load so they have to be allowed for. They have pumped storage, several international interconnectors and a large number of very flexible CCGT stations they can massage to balance the load. Nukes run all the time, and coal runs most of the time, but some are throttled back overnight.

You're right Pluggy. It's a good example of a public function that works efficiently. So much so that most people don't even know it exists.

News coming in as I write of a hurricane in the Azores, only 8 recorded in the last 130 years so it's a rare event.

Did you hear about the enormous pumice raft found by HMNZS Canterbury floating in the ocean off New Zealand? A NASA web site gas the following:

"Midway on its 800-kilometer (500-mile) voyage from Auckland to Raoul Island, New Zealand, the HMNZS Canterbury received an intriguing report: a maritime patrol aircraft had spotted a vast area of open ocean covered with floating pumice. Soon after, the ship was sailing through a mass of buoyant volcanic rocks. Up to two feet thick, the pumice raft was about half a nautical mile (1 kilometer) wide, and “extended sideways as far as the eye could see,” wrote Rebecca Priestley, a science writer aboard the ship. Although the lightweight, gas-filled pumice posed no threat to the Canterbury, enough got stuck in the water filters to provide samples for analysis.

"Though the pumice was spread over a vast area of the South Pacific, the origin was a mystery to the crew of the ship. An undersea volcano several hundred kilometers to the north of the pumice—Monowai—had erupted on August 3, but an airline pilot reported seeing pumice as early as August 1. Two data sources provided clues to pinpoint the volcano: earthquake records and satellite imagery. After reports of the pumice rafts surfaced, scientists from Tahiti and New Zealand’s GNS Science connected the eruption with a cluster of earthquakes in the Kermadec Islands on July 17 and 18."

Latest reports on the thawing of the pack ice in the Arctic are not good. (LINK)
This has serious implications for the Gulf Stream and there is a suspicion that the shrinking of the ice sheet is a factor in the increased perturbation of the course of the jet stream which is what has caused our unseasonal weather this summer. The net result could be that in a time of 'global warming', the British Isles could actually become colder with more wind and rain and an increase in 'exceptional weather events'. Of course the sceptics will deny all this but time will tell!

The use of the term `global warming' by the media has led to much confusion over the years. It was first used in a scientific paper in 1975 to refer to a rise in the average surface temperature of Earth. It had an exact meaning for the scientists but the media picked up the term and used it loosely and often incorrectly. The word `average' is important - it means the average temperature over the whole surface of Earth, and takes in the lower atmosphere and the oceans. There can be parts of Earth getting hotter and parts getting cooler, while the average surface temperature (`global warming') increases. Unfortunately the media gave the impression that global warming means everywhere gets hotter, which isn't necessarily so; we could end up with some places hotter and others cooler than now. The rise in the average surface temperature is also independent of the daily and seasonal fluctuations - my back garden is presently seeing temperatures of 10C at night and 20C during the day but this rise and fall is averaged out in the measurement of `global warming'.

Global warming and climate change should not be confused. Global warming is the rise in the average surface temperature of Earth, regardless of the cause. The greenhouse effect is a mechanism by which global warming can occur. Climate change is something we believe will result from the effects of global warming. There is now no doubt that global warming is happening and it is generally agreed to be due to a rise in atmospheric CO2 via the greenhouse effect. The great majority of scientists believe that the rise in CO2 is man-made and that the resulting global warming will cause significant climate change if we take no action. The way in which the climate will change globally is predictable to some extent but the changes in specific regions are not easily predicted - I would say they are `anybody's guess'. The biggest joker in the pack is the unpredictable behaviour of most human beings, and the predictable lack of action from political leaders. To quote someone on Radio 4 recently, "I'm cautiously pessimistic!".

In the 1970's scientist were predicting that mankind was heading for an ice-age....
How can CO2 which is less than 0.04% (400mmp) of the atmosphere affect the global average temperature?...never mind other 'greenhouse gasses', (some of which act at parts per billion levels)
CO2 levels have increased by about 20% but are still less than 0.04% of the atmosphere by volume
Mankind affects the very small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by less than 1%, it would therefore be reasonable to say the remaining 19% of increase in CO2 must from natural sources..?
There is no doubt that there is a pretty good correlation of both CO2 and methane levels and average global temperatures, but and its a huge but, the whole mechanism works the other way....as temperatures increase the levels of CO2 and methane increase as natural consequence of increased bacterial, microbial, plant and animal activity....if this is not the case, how has the non man-made 19% increase in CO2 come about ?
We are still learning about the output and cycles of the sun, which is the only thing to heat the planet, and everyone forgets, ultimately we are on a ball of cooling molten rock in an extremely cold vacuum...the only constant is change...

The ice ages are long-term cycles of glacial (cold) and interglacial (warm) climate and we are in an interglacial now, so by definition Earth is heading for a glacial period along a long shallow, sloping temperature curve. But that's on a scale of thousands of years, quite different to the extremely sharp rise in average surface temperature since the industrial revolution.

As Bruff has pointed out on here before, just because something is present in parts per million or billion doesn't mean it can't be important - 1ppm of botulinum toxin in your blood would confirm that. It's not whether the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is at ppm or ppb levels that's important, it's the change in concentration that's significant. The conditions on Earth and the evolution of life have resulted in a fine balance of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that gives an ambient temperature suitable for life. Even a small shift from that level will have a dramatic effect on life, especially human life.

The CO2 level in the atmosphere is a dynamic system with the gas being produced naturally all the time e.g. by living organisms, volcanoes, wildfires, but also absorbed in vast amounts by the ocean and laid down over time as limestone. The system can balance out rises and falls in CO2 over long time periods but not on the short time scale of the current rise. Therefore it is correct to say most of the CO2 is naturally produced but it is also naturally absorbed. What is putting it out of balance now is the extra, man-made CO2.

I agree Tiz. Particularly with the example given of Botulism. I don't know what the proportion in PPM was of the toxin in my blood in 1955 in Berlin but I can assure everyone it was bloody serious! The docs couldn't understand why I hadn't died..... Never trust NAAFI meat pies.....

Weather expert Paul Simons writes in The Times each week. On 22 September 2012 he wrote about the melting Arctic ice. The sea ice the previous week sank to a new low of 18%, breaking the record set in 2007. Records made by whalers and explorers going back over 100 years show this extent has not occurred during that time. A recent study suggests it hasn't happened in 1,450 years and possibly not since the Stone Age 6,000 years ago (when the melting was caused by a change in Earth's orbit, which is not the cause now). The melting this year happened in normal weather conditions without any help from storms that break up the ice and encourage melting. The ice has been getting thinner over recent decades and now much of it is first-year ice that only froze last winter and which easily breaks up and melts. Less ice means more dark Arctic water exposed to the Sun which in turn means more absorption of solar radiation and further warming of the sea and the air above it, and this may well be the reason for the disturbed jet stream and all the consequences we are experiencing from that. Expect more of the same. Meanwhile, political leaders around the world worry about how to solve the credit crunch without upsetting the bankers, and tyrants continue subjugating their oppressed peoples. Unfortunately, it's going to take a big disaster on a colossal scale to make people sit up and pay attention.

A big disaster on a colossal scale, means there is probably not a lot we can do about it , or its effects other than to make the best of it , reversal of the situation , if possible , wont be achievable in any time frame of I would guess anyone living at the present time.

We're all doomed.....

Reports that the Great Barrier Reef has lost half its coral since 1987. Causes put down mainly to bleaching caused by rising sea temperature.

Were not doomed , our children , probably unless they get inventive ( they might , just ) .

Coral also been damaged by predatory starfish and increase in storms , the rising sea temp only a further contributory factor. ( looks like excess of starfish should be picked off my man , the only creature that could do that to rescue the coral , and some artificial harbour type zones created to reduce the impact of the storms , the warming we would have to hope the coral ( which is temperature sensative ) might adapt )).