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Climate Change

43K views 155 replies 12 participants last post by  Richard230 
#1 ·
A friend from Queensland sent me this. I'm not at this moment a climate change supporter but am willing to listen, however this makes an interesting read if you've the time.

"Les Crowe
November 19, 2019
I am writing this because I am appalled at the amount of near hysterical reaction to
the recent NSW and Qld bush-fires. My reasoning is not so much about the fires or
the people effected, but about whether “man made” climate change is the
underlying cause. Before I go further, my stance is not so much a personal but
rather a professional reaction.

I begin by telling those of you who don’t know, for a period of some 40 years, my
work as a loss adjuster was involved with natural disasters, ranging from Cyclone
Tracey through to a lesser involvement in 2009. I was appointed as National Chief
Loss Adjuster, an advisory role, to the Insurance Council of Australia on all natural
disasters but particularly bush-fires. This role was interactive with all agencies and
spanned more than 10 years. It was both proactive in planning stages and reactive
after the event. I was heavily involved in the 1983 Victorian fires.

I acknowledge the advice of The Bureau of Meteorology and the Climate Council, is a reality to the effect the projected changes to climate, was derived from modelling, which strongly suggested change would occur unless man made contribution was reduced,.

Somehow or other, sections of our communities, have taken control of the scientific argument about the future and have interpreted it to mean the change has already occurred. Not so. Records I have seen, actually show that the slight upward trend in temperatures on a global scale seem to be in direct line with the earth’s ever occurring”natural” climatic change patterns. History shows numerous ice ages, when the planet cooled, to corresponding heating up periods, over billions of years. This has always occurred. It is the nature of our planet and cannot be influenced by what man can or cannot do. On the other hand, the impact of humans is a future projection, well founded on scientific modelling.

The true position, despite all the comments about what the current fires mean in a
climate change scenario, is nobody can tell if there is any connection.

What I can tell you with absolute certainty is that these fires , as bad as they were,
are no more intense, widespread, dangerous or unexpected in outcome, to many
previous and historic events . There is no accurate method to measure such
outcomes. However, it is possible to look at prevailing conditions and contributing factors to seek patterns or influential factors.

Take a look at the following comparative data, much of which has been ignored by
the frantic argument to directly link man made climate change to the outbreak and
effects of these latest fires. I detail some of the arguments I have heard go
unchallenged or are simply ignored and unreported, particularly by the ABC who
are the appointed official national disaster communications service.

This the first time such fires have been rated as catastrophic.. True, but not
because they were rated any worse than many previous fires. In 2009, following the bush-fire inquiry, the defined categories of fire were renamed. Catastrophic
was introduced as the most severe warning. So this description was never
intended to make people think they were the worst fires ever. I have heard many
media reports entrench this mistake

The fires are occurring earlier because of climate extending the summer risk.
Can only be applicable in the North. However, NSW has a long history of
November and December bush-fires. In 1944, the Blue Mountains lost 27 homes
and other property in November. Since then, I can recall at least 3 other similarly
timed events in NSW. So this year was not unique, as has been strongly inferred by
many reporters. In southern areas, January and February have historically been
prone to outbreaks.

These fires are the most widespread and worst ever. They certainly were
disastrous. However, it is impossible to compare unless it can be based on raw
data…. Have more lives been lost than ever before. No, although 1 is far too many,
in 2009, 173 people died. In 1983, 75 people died. In 1962, 62 people died. In
that decade one of the victims in Eltham North was George Crowe, my Grandfather
and Grandma’s father in law. In 1967, it was reported that 2,600 square
kms of land was devastated in just 5 hours (Just try to imagine that ferocity).
In 2009 there were 2030 homes destroyed and in 1983 there were 6,000 homes
and other buildings destroyed.. Does this define which fire was the worst. NO.
All fires are bad but to try and claim the current fires are the worst ever is a blatant
disregard for historical fact. Worse still, it is a deliberate attempt to scare people
into accepting the fanatical side of the global warming argument, by accepting
radical changes to our economy, power generation and mining {let alone agriculture
and transport} must occur right now and in a premature manner. The so called re-definition of the predicted changes into an emergency, is a way to virtually destroy our entire way of life.

The fires were started as a result of climate changed conditions. Clearly wrong.
80% of fires were started by people either deliberately or accidentally lighting them.
Dry lightning strikes have been long recorded and are nothing new.

What has our Media and ABC generally ignored. One of the most clear data
based facts, reported out of the 2009 Inquiry, was the finding that fire intensity is
proportional to and severely aggravated by fire loads created by undergrowth and
forest floor debris accumulation. We can’t control wind and heat but we can
control fuel load. Ask any active Rural or Country serving fireman what they think of this hazard. Then ask your Green Party representative, why they have influenced
the management of National Park maintenance, as well as local government reserves, to leave far too much of the forest floor intact at any cost. Winter back burning,
firewood removal and general debris clearance has been widely restricted by stupid
laws. They argue it preserves natural ecosystems that rely on such decaying
material. Well, systematic removal of this fuel load may well disrupt some
Eco-systems, consider this;. A bush-fire positively destroys them all.

The only identifiable and recently introduced risk factor, is the environmental law
changes that have impacted a fire’s intensity potential and capacity to burn faster and hotter.

Find this hard to believe, Go into a forest and try setting fire to a living gum tree
with a match. Now stoop down and see if you get any better results from the dead
and therefore dry undergrowth at your feet. This is the effect ember spread has
on adjoining bush-land.

There is much more to say about bringing sanity back into discussions and I have my own opinion that if you believe the science of global warming, stick to the science and ignore the fanatical self professed experts, like some of the current crop of Green Party politicians and shrieking media, self appointed, experts. No, before it can be said. I was not self appointed in my former career positions.

I can only reflect that the handful of ex-firemen who were paraded before the media, may have had other agendas. The spokesman listed his current occupation as a “Climate Change Consultant”. Another said outright, on camera, that fires have always been linked to climate change. I prefer to listen to our Indigenous community who talk of bush-fire management over thousands of years. - oops before any hint of an industrial age, meat production or mining."
Interesting or crap?
 
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#43 ·
But, you can change it. That is why you have brain. Sucking up to the petrol-chemical industry and being addicted to it is not protecting the future for those that follow. It is doing business with the money changers.

Being concerned about death is not our purpose but, to be concerned about the living and the future is. Otherwise, it is nothing more than a death cult. Making excuses to be self comforting while destroying the future by using religion is the ultimate hypocrisy.
 
#45 ·
ig· no· rance | \ is(ə-)rən(t)s

\


Definition of ignorance



: the state or fact of being ignorant : lack of knowledge, education, or awareness

If I were full of pride I wouldn't care about world after I was gone, nor what happened to the young people that followed me.


Ignorance
is bliss......

Straw man Fallacy -


  • A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent.







 
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#46 ·
Ahh...excuse me while I plot out the route I'm taking from Seattle to Death Valley in April. I need to be intelligent about this and pick the route that will be scenic, but ice free so I won't be spraying myself and my GT about the road by hitting a patch of ice that was skipped in the Global Warming.

That, I can change and have an influence on. ;)

Chris
 
#47 ·
Now, now lads, decorum! I posted this thread out of my interest in the hysteria that I percieve is being wound up. I'm a peaks and troughs man, warm, cold, its been proved to happen over the eons. I'm not saying that man hasn't made an impact but in the relative short time scale we're looking at I think we need to just keep an eye on it. Yes by all means reduce carbon emissions and whatever but the hysteria being whipped up is turning our kids into eco-warriors, they all want us meat eaters to turn veggie as there's too many farting cows!! My arse!!
A discussion is fine - an arguement means both sides have fixed ideas which are unlikely to be moved.
 
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#48 ·
The city that I live in is very concerned about sea level rise. According the newspaper the prediction by bureaucrats is that it will rise 3 feet within 10 years. But right now all they can think of is to pass a homeowner's bond issue to fund building walls to keep the ocean out of shore or bay front properties. I might add that we are already paying a special tax to accomplish the same thing, but the people with this plan seem to have forgotten about that and I have never seen any documentation regarding what the tax has been used to actually fund so far. It just seems to have disappeared into the government coffers.
 
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#53 ·
I'm all for expressing our points of view as we're exercising our true rights to free speech which to us is sacrosanct. It would be a bloody sad world if we all thought the same so I welcome different points of view, it gives me a chance to reappraise my position. :argue::blabla::lalala::grouphug:
 
#54 ·
In California, if you don't agree with everyone, then they yell at you "shame, shame, shame" and drown out any dissenting opinions that don't conform to the liberal views of the moment. [:(]
 
#59 ·
Back in the last century, we'd be up on top of one of the peaks in the Cascades looking towards Seattle or Tacoma and lament at how bad the pollution was getting to be. There was a brown cloud over the top of them, and we'd think back to when it wasn't that way. Well, it's been awhile since I was mountain climbing, but I suspect the air looks better now. I never noticed back in the 60's, 70's and 80's at how foul the exhaust was on the new cars back then...but I do now. I try to stop where I'm not in the exhaust fumes of cars at traffic lights, but the exhaust from one of the old classic cars is really bad now, it seems.

Chris
 
#60 ·
The article is interesting, but the writer is naive. I like the idea of how we'll decentralize our electrical production in theory. The move to electricity only sounds great, but there's holes in that idea. The picture below is one of those. Wow! I could put solar panels on my roof and generate my own electricity. Sounds great...



...till you look out my front door and see 200+ foot high trees that are upwind from my roof. Some of the branches that have come down are 15-20 feet in length. I suspect that even with the smaller branches that just simply land on my roof, they would damage the solar panels and cost a lot of money to replace. And I could probably count on doing this several times a year, not just once every 10 years or so. I've been watching those trees for years now, waiting till one of them comes down on my house. Take them down, you say. Hah! They aren't mine. They are on the neighbours property.

The solar panels in the desert seem like the answer to anyone who doesn't live there. I don't either, but the memory is seared into my brain. I rode through on I-15 two summers ago and found the Ivanpah Solar Power facility. It was like looking at a welder's arc. When you live there, do you just keep your eyes focused anywhere but there? Gosh, that's got to be stressful.

Even a solar power facility like Ivanpah uses fossil fuels though. From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
Fossil fuel consumption[edit]The plant burns natural gas each morning to commence the operation. The Wall Street Journal reported, "Instead of ramping up the plant each day before sunrise by burning one hour's worth of natural gas to generate steam, Ivanpah needs more than four times that much."[SUP][29][/SUP] On August 27, 2014, the State of California approved Ivanpah to increase its annual natural gas consumption from 328,000,000 cubic feet (9,300,000 m[SUP]3[/SUP]) of natural gas, as previously approved, to 525,000,000 cubic feet (14,900,000 m[SUP]3[/SUP]).[SUP][30][/SUP] In 2014, the plant burned 868×10[SUP]9[/SUP] British thermal units (254 GWh) of natural gas emitting 46,084 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is nearly twice the pollution threshold at which power plants and factories in California are required to participate in the state's cap and trade program to reduce carbon emissions.
But!...we can say that we use solar power!!! Even if the only way to do so, is to use the bad stuff like natural gas.

And we haven't even gotten to the dead birds yet that burn alive when they fly over it. Of course that problem will take care of itself eventually. Kill enough of the birds, they won't make new birds and the annual number of birds killed will drop.

Wind power is another non-polluting energy resource. But is it really? I think I posted an article I stumbled up of how there's a problem with what to do with these blades. (Why they can't be used forever, I don't know.) But the blades are the size of 747 wings and can't be recycled. So they go into landfills. What about the energy and pollutants created in making the wind towers? This researcher's article is a little dated, but it is still an eye opener. http://www.aweo.org/problemwithwind.html

Hydro power is wonderful. Or so it seems. At one time, hydro-electric dams were being built all over the Pacific Northwest. It seemed perfect. Steep mountain sides with rivers running through them. We'll build a dam and create clean energy. Well, the dams prevent the salmon from making it upstream to spawn, which cuts down the number of salmon and then affects the population of the sea lions and killer whales. So the dams are being destroyed.

Geothermal power is about the only one that really makes sense...if you live in the right area. When we traveled to Iceland, we found that everyone apparently gets free heat and maybe electricity too. It's all a benefit of living on top of an place where the earth's crust is splitting and you live on the cooled crust.

In the article Roadpizza linked to, it has an interesting paragraph.
We also share cars without thinking twice. In fact, regulating and ensuring the safety of driverless ride sharing were the biggest transportation hurdles for cities to overcome. The goal has been to eliminate private ownership of vehicles by 2050 in major metropolitan areas. We're not quite there yet, but we're making progress.
What do they mean, we share cars without thinking twice? I don't like dog nose prints on my windows. Or fingerprints. I want to look out my windows and not feel like I'm looking through dirty eyeglasses. And you don't get to eat in my car and leave crumbs and sticky left overs for me to touch everywhere. When you parked the car, did you plug it in? Or will I find the battery totally drained when it is my time to use it?

And what cars will be available to drive? Porsches? Or mini-vans? Who makes that choice for me?

I see some issues in all this. :) I want the Porsche, by the way.

Chris
 
#61 ·
Lest it be lost in my long boring response above, I thought I'd point this out...

AOC's Chief of Staff Admits the Green New Deal Is Not about Climate Change

https://www.nationalreview.com/news...e-green-new-deal-is-not-about-climate-change/

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti admitted recently that the true motivation behind introducing the Green New Deal is to overhaul the "entire economy."

Chakrabarti said that addressing climate change was not Ocasio-Cortez's top priority in proposing the Green New Deal during a meeting with Washington governor Jay Inslee.

"The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn't originally a climate thing at all," Chakrabarti said to Inslee's climate director, Sam Ricketts, according to a Washington Post reporter who attended the meeting for a profile published Wednesday.

"Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?" Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing," he added.
And that's the scary thing I think in all the talk of Climate Change and Global Warming. The elites at the top of the food chain making the decisions are telling us one thing...but their intentions are something different. And in their minds it is okay to turn the country into a socialist experiment like Venezuela...while they make sure they keep their own lifestyles. Because after all, they are the elites, and you are not.

There's an interesting verse in the Book of Revelation. I'm not trying to be "preachy" or anything. But I think it has an interesting observation to it that may apply today.

Revelation 6:5-6
[SUP]5[/SUP] When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. [SUP]6[/SUP] Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, "Two pounds of wheat for a day's wages, and six pounds of barley for a day's wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!"
An interpretation of this is that in the end times, famine will be prevalent. It'll cost you a day's wages to buy enough wheat of barley for one meal. But...the elite will have the luxuries of life, like the oil and wine. Hmmm...

Chris
 
#64 ·
I figure it is all about raising taxes and creating government bureaucracies. Nothing like a good scare tactic to do both. :rolleyes:

While I do believe that the climate is warming (it has been about 10 degrees F warmer this winter at my home than in previous years), I am irritated that the city and county bureaucrats are more interested in raising taxes and creating new government programs to address the issue, rather than to first come up with ideas for combating the problem before asking for more money. They have lots of ideas how to raise taxes, but would leave the spending of that money to a new bureaucracy who would then determine how that money would be spent - after they have their hands on it. Right now all they can think of is to build walls along the sea coast and the bay front to protect property. The comment is if the Dutch and do it, so can we. All we need is enough money to build thousands of miles of walls. [:(!]
 
#65 ·
I was a bit long-winded. :D

I took a personality test a few years ago that compared your answers and chose a personality that matched a dog breed. I wanted to be a Irish Setter. Or a Collie. Or a German Shepherd. A real dog.

Instead, my results came back that I was a Pug. A Pug? You've got to be kidding! I told the others at work what breed I came back with, and they all said it fit perfectly. Why? Because when I grab hold of something, I won't let go.

You know...a Pit Bull Terrier is like that too. Maybe I could be one of those? It's a least a real dog. Not something that looks like someone slammed the door in its face.


Sigh...

Chris
 
#74 ·
I'm intrigued Philip - The Grudian? Not a paper I'd associate with a Western American citizen, years ago it was famed for it's spelling mistakes, highlighted by Private Eye Magazine! Great stuff!!
 
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#76 ·
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#78 ·
Yellow Journalism - not a term I was familiar with so I looked it up with our Wiki- friend!

"Yellow journalism and the yellow press are American terms for journalism and associated newspapers that present little or no legitimate well-researched news while instead using eye-catching headlines for increased sales. ... In English, the term is chiefly used in the US.
‎Origins: Pulitzer vs. Hearst · ‎Hearst in San Francisco ... "
We'd call them 'the tabloids' - the likes of the Mirror, Sun etc.
See "lost in translation"

Thank you for widening my knowledge Philip! Thirty years ago or more, The Guardian when I did buy a paper was a little too left wing for my liking. I've no idea where they stand now

I had to look up Jeffery Dahmer as well, --- table manners! [lol2][lol2]
 
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