Earth on Fire: The Overheating Planet

Earth on Fire: The Overheating Planet

NOTE ON POPULAR POSTS

The reason some popular posts are tagged ‘no title’ is not because they have no title—they all do—but because the old Blogger embedded the title at the top of text, and the new software does not see that. You can see the titles in capitals at the start of each snippet. (It would be nice if Blogger introduced an upgrade program that could fix this little problem.)

Popular Posts

Monday 29 May 2006

GLOBAL-OVERHEATING DATA FAR WORSE

This blog has predicted at times that higher predictions for global-overheating would be coming at us, and that they would be much higher than the official nonsense coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and various 'scientific' head-in-the-sand optimists.

And come they have, this time not from computer models, but studies by different teams of different sets of historical data. The results, summarised in this BBC News page show that we can expect a rise of at very least 5.8 degrees Celsius by 2100, probably at least 7.7 degrees, or much more. That means the worst scenarios predicted by the distributed-computer modelling, which have also been referred to before in this blog, are most likely to hit us (see NewScientist, or here, copied from the Independent), which show temperature rises of up to 14 degrees in the Amazon, perhaps 20 degrees in the UK, and a global average rise of up to 11.5 degrees. The climate on this planet is going to go pear-shaped in the nastiest way, and still no one wants to DO ANYTHING.

In the same group of news pages the BBC also reports a study showing that the populations of migratory birds are plummeting, and have been for thirty years. But no one noticed till now. Are these more 'canaries' going down the world's coal-mines? Are these birds yet another vanguard suffering the consequences of the chronic insanity of burning black stuff?

Whatever the truth of that, and if it is just coincidence the odds against it must be high (and we can certainly blame human activity of some sort), the fact remains that global overheating predictions are inching towards the worst-case scenario predicted by the extreme computer modelling such as that cited above--which is no surprise because it fits the way the actual readings are tracking.

For New Zealand, which now has an annual mean temperature of 13.1 degrees Celsius, that would mean a virtual doubling of temperatures. A balmy 20-degrees in the shade would on simple arithmetic become a torrid 40 degrees. A hot 30 would become--who knows--60 degrees? It does not bear thinking about. If so, it would exceed the world record temperature of 57.8 in the shade set at Al Aziziyah, Libya in September 1922. An average in the mid twenties for New Zealand would not be nearly as bad as the world's present worst annual mean of 34.4 degrees in Dalol, Ethiopia, but it would be plenty hot enough. In some ways it would be worse, because it would be a more humid heat in a country surrounded by oceans.

There would be no snow on New Zealand mountains, so precipitation would fall as rain, causing horrendous floods in winter; and there would be no snow-melt in spring and summer, causing dire droughts.

Monday 22 May 2006

WHY CHOOSE POLITICIANS THIS WAY?

When selecting managers, well-run organisations sort the competent from the incompetent with the help of psychological tests. But members of parliament are chosen by political committees, who seem to care little for quality, so we end up with a steady stream of political lickeys, hubristic dimwits, bureaucratic thugs, sideshow clowns, borderline criminals, dysfunctional weirdoes, hyberbolic control-freaks and other sad samples of the internally mangled and decayed. When such people are just citizens amongst New Zealand‘s four million they can be tolerated as nothing but a few twisted threads in the great Kiwi tapestry. But when they are a hefty part of the gang of 120 that decides how the rest of us shall live it matters very, very much--especially if the Prime Minister is a prime example of the mangled and decayed, and thus promotes and perpetuates her own kind.

Selection committees should, by law, be let loose only after hopefuls have been filtered through deep-delving psychological tests. Then we would have some chance of getting quality managers for the country, instead of finding ourselves forced into moulds beamed down from the fringes of the universe, even to the extent of having our un-PC bits sawn off bloodily by orchestrated social-engineering.

In particular, people with low self-esteem should be blocked not only from becoming MPs but also from being their advisors and staff, because it is a well-established scientific fact that such people tend to act out in ways that are not in their best interests or the best interests of society. That is precisely the kind we should not allow in any corridors of power. Otherwise we drift into La La Land.

The problem, of course, that the present degraded New Zealand Parliament would never pass such a law, because it would create a bar that many or most or all of them could not clear.

But what point is there in living in the most scientific age there has ever been if we do not use good science to help select the best people for our rulers and their advisors?

No wonder all we have for governments, in New Zealand and elsewhere, are the creeping tentacles of The House of Circumlocution. All run-around and no good doings. Particularly on that small but important matter of the only planet that we can live on in the entire universe...

Tuesday 16 May 2006

CORAL COOKED TO DEATH BY GLOBAL-OVERHEATING

Over 90% of the coral round the Seychelles has been wiped out by global-overheating, leaving nothing but kilometres of slimy rubble a recent study reports. See the newspaper article, or the BBC News item on the same study. The latter ends with a chilling statistic: coral supports 25% of all the marine species known.

Friday 5 May 2006

CLIMATE-CHANGE DATA 'OVERWHELMING'

An article based on leaked copy of a draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report not meant to be published till next year (good grief!--why on earth wait?), says there is now overwhelming evidence that the earth's climate is undergoing dramatic transformation because of human activity.

It predicts an increase in the average global temperature of 2 to 4.5 degrees Celsius this century as a result of the doubling of carbon-dioxide level caused by man-made emissions. But it says those temperatures could increase by a further 1.5 degrees as a result of the positive feedback from the melting of sea-ice, the thawing of permafrost and the acidification of the oceans. So we could easily get 6 degrees. That is catastrophic.

In short the situation is far worse than has been officially admitted till now, because the real figures are higher than had been previously admitted. But watch that space. The figures will get worse and the official reports will get worse, because the ghastly real truth, the real increase, has yet to emerge. That is partly because in this, the biggest unplanned uncontrolled experiment ever done on earth no one knows exactly how bad the result will be, and partly because no one in power wants to admit just how much they have let things get fouled things up--just how much everyone addicted to black stuff has fouled things up. But remember, some computer models have predicted an increase of 10 to 14 degrees.

Why no one wants to do anything drastic about this drastic situation is a mystery. Some indication of why is in the newspaper linked to in the first paragraph above. Did it lead with this catastrophic story? No, it led with a story about some piffling Cabinet paper that was leaked to Telecom NZ informing it, before Cabinet had signed it off, that telecommunications were going to be restructured and it would lose its monopoly over the local loop. Big deal! Telecom NZ, better called Telecom Rex, or T Rex for short, has had it coming for years. Its fate does not matter a jot. The planet's matters terribly.