Modern trends

[Randi]

Just to show that even short term trends are worrying

https://www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/bl ... emperature

Not sure what we can do, cut down on car use, reduce waste etc but it's a drop in the ocean when one private jet trip across the Atlantic will undo more than a year's saving. :'(

I will confess to a flight to Austria this summer. The problem is this, I live in Scotland so going by other transport would be something like bus to train or coach station. Transfer across London to Eurostar or train to Dover followed by ferry, at best transfer between coaches. Cross channel and then cross continent to destination. Probably the biggest part of two days, transfer of luggage between legs and at hotel (I don't fancy sitting up on either coach or train overnight and not sure about sleeper availablity on train). Well, since many of the party are over 70 I'm afraid we opted to fly.

I'm afraid that one of the problems if you don't live around London is the time taken to cross the channel and the lack of help to transport luggage. The only other option is long distance coach and even that can involve changing coaches since the usual method is to use feeder coaches to a central coach park somewhere then a re-assignment of seats on final destination coaches. I try to limit my flyiing to 1 economy class per year and I haven't flown long haul for some years (economy class again) and in many years I didn't fly at all. It is the usual problem of balancing an 'experience' against climate. Like most Brits I have opted for a middle way which balances my possible regret on 'missing out' against my conscience on CO2.

It's the same visiting friends and family. Station to station is great. The problem is getting from station to final destination. Not helped by the fact that my local bus company, who used to run a bus to the coach station, has now decided to terminate the route a good 10 min walk away (without luggage). One train station has a good bus link from home, the other one doesn't, so going down to England on the West Coast is OK, East Coast and North of Scotland involves the less accessible station or changing trains. For me, using railcard, train can be cheaper than car (booked ahead and using inflexible tickets) but if more than 1 passenger or a last minute journey then the costs are prohibitive and the journey can be quite stressful if travelling with luggage. Taxi from station to home ?25 each way! Climate protection can be expensive.

If the government are serious about limiting CO2 from travel then the cost of public transport must be competitive for the single traveller and not too outrageous for a family and the legs of the journey must link up without excessive distances between legs or waits for the next transport. Ah well, we can all dream of Utopia

Well said. Some people here are pushing for free public transit. The City of Victoria started, this year, allowing free transit for Victoria children with school IDs. The trouble is that there are 13 municipalities which make up the Capital Regional District, so the neighbouring communities didn't sign on, so children on one side of a street would get free transit, whereas children on the other don't. :'(

I must confess as well - as my grandparents and other relatives live across the Atlantic, I have no choice but to fly when I want to visit them in the summer.
And that's two flights each way, because we have to go to Frankfurt Airport but the rules work like this:
- If you miss a flight because your train is late, it's your fault, and the airline doesn't have to do a thing to help you.
- If you miss a connecting flight because your first flight was late, it's the airline's fault, and they have to help you.

Also, Deutsche Bahn is not very reliable in general - there's a joke that if you take their mobile app logo and turn it upside down, you get the customer's face!



At least I don't need a car. That's something.

[krwood]

The 2020 Arctic Report Card was released this morning at our annual AGU press conference. NY Times is already out - https://nyti.ms/2Ism3zD
There is also a 3 min video summary here: https://youtu.be/TcfQiKUkgBY

[Randi]

Thanks, Kevin

[Michael]

Ditto!

[AvastMH]

Ran out of tissues... The zombie fires fill me with dread.

[Michael]

I saw a number of cases of those zombie fires when I worked as a meteorologist for the Yukon Wildland Fire Management. Also, when I was in the Peace River Country in northeast B.C., I saw fires burning in the ground under the grain fields. The farmers had been unable to get them out, even by digging up the soil with heavy equipment and dumping tons of water on them. They burned for years, albeit very slowly.

[AvastMH]

[krwood]

United Nations Warns of ‘Catastrophic Pathway’ With Current Climate Pledges
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/clim ... tions.html

[Randi]

I hope all our output is stored in a safe place/places!

[Hanibal94]

I feel the same way, Randi - and also quite worried about about how the rest of my life, most of which should still be ahead of me, will turn out.

[Randi]

I don't blame you. I'm glad I am old (even if I do creak a bit).

[krwood]

Don't look up.
https://youtu.be/_WbWjLUTvZM and https://arctic.noaa.gov/report-card/report-card-2021

[AvastMH]

Oh Kevin - it doesn't get better does it ? What are the chances of being able to lower the number of ships accessing the Arctic do you think please?

[Randi]

Errr....
Thanks for posting that, Kevin.

[Michael]

[Michael]

I was reading an article from the Yukon News, and they had this nice graphic from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The article was about forest fires in the Yukon, but I found the graph very interesting.

As the plant gets warmer, the weather gets more extreme and the temperature curve flattens and becomes wider. The result is less change for cold weather, but much more hot weather and record hot weather. If it were just a case of the previous curve keeping the same shape but moving to the right, the changes in hot weather would be less frequent than with the flatter curve.




From part of the article:

She summed up her Siberian findings like this: “The analysis shows that climate change increased the chances of the prolonged heat by a factor of at least 600. This is actually among the strongest results of any attribution study conducted so far.”

You might be wondering how temperature increases of a few degrees or less can result in an alarming 600-times increase in the chances of wildfire-inducing hot spells.

This requires a minor adventure in statistics (skip to the next paragraph to avoid it). As shown in the attached chart from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the probability of an extreme event like a wildfire is usually distributed in the classic bell curve. The “Previous Climate” curve has relatively little area in the extreme zone on the right. Then comes the “New Climate.” This curve is shifted to the right by higher temperatures, and also stretched out since hotter climates are more volatile. The result is that the area under the curve in the extreme zone is now much, much larger.

Six hundred times larger in the case of Kew’s Siberian study.

My take is we can be pretty confident climate change is contributing to more severe wildfire seasons. Given humanity’s struggles to get global carbon emissions under control, we should plan on getting used to lots of wildfires in the coming years.

[Michael]

I was looking for some weather data for Yokohama, Japan. USS Omaha spends a lot of time there.

I found this great website for getting climate stats for various cities in Japan. I copied the Mean Annual Temperature data for Yokohama, and this is what I found:



2.5 degrees of warming. Very alarming...

[pommystuart]

I feel the same way, Randi - and also quite worried about about how the rest of my life, most of which should still be ahead of me, will turn out.

Quote from an earlier entry in this post.

I hope the weather trends did not actually affect Chris.

[Randi]

[Michael]

Me, too.