Things didn't really get accurate until the 1990s with satellites etc

I took readings for various organisations in the 70s and 80s at sea and up to 2 degrees of error is realistic

The gear just wasn't that good and you worked with whatever you had

Claims going back to the 1850s are just plain daft, a few select observatories based in capital cities would have good equipment, the rest of it was rough and ready practical kit in a ruff tuff period of human history

Sometimes you just made it up because you couldn't be bothered going outside and peering at the tiny graduations in the rain and wind, just stick a number into the log that looked ok

Remote machine gathered data like from satellites is far more reliable than people gathered data

histor

Edited By Ady1 on 07/07/2021 09:48:17

Attribution science graphs.

"Attribution science" meaning any climate variation that the maker of the graph could not explain must be due to carbon dioxide and human activity.

A novel approach to science that will probably last at least 20 seconds beyond the point where the funding runs out

To be fairit's the warming index that is shown to 9 places, not an actual measurement. There are a lot of "estimates" in there though. It's also silly to chow CO2 in trillion tonnes to digits, just drop the decimal point and say tonnes.

Robert G8RPI.

The problem is how to make the issue clear. The silly display catches the eye because it's continually rising: it's advertising rather than science.

The graph is more meaningful. The black line zigzags due to weather and measurement issues, and only becomes meaningful when the average is extracted and the trend identified. Average temperature has increased by 1.2°C since 1861, which isn't much in human terms and therefore difficult to comprehend. The problem is the amount of heat rather than temperature, and the effect heat has on weather, which is also difficult to grasp.

An enormous amount of energy is required to lift the average surface temperature of the whole planet by 1°C. It's more energy than human activity could provide, and it's building up because of the insulating effect of invisible green-house gases. Insulation is also difficult for Joe Public to grasp.

What happens to the extra heat being bottled up on the surface? We know that IC and steam engines convert heat into motion, and that's exactly what Global Warming is doing. Heat is a form of energy, and energy does work – things move. Global warming translates into extreme weather events, and – even if you don't understand numbers and concepts – it's very obvious that something unusual is happening around the world. Flash floods, droughts, receding glaciers, shrinking icecaps, record breaking temperatures and record breaking storms. Severe events that previously occurred once per century are now happening every few years. Everywhere. Another hard to grasp concept, it's not what happened in my garden over the last 5 years, it's what will happen to the whole planet over 50.

Might be imagined that an extra 1.2°C simply means it will be nice out. If only! Actually it means significant amounts of land becoming agriculturally unproductive while rising sea-levels flood low lying areas. Food, water and land shortages will cause large-scale population movements. The average Brit might have to let the population of Bangladesh get on with it, because he's top busy re-homing Londoners in the midst of food-shortages.

It's too late to avoid the consequences now. Our grandchildren will have to cope with whatever comes because Climate change can't be undone. Let's hope the future doesn't get too rough, but as all previous civilisations have collapsed, there's no reason to think ours is permanent.

Human activity has allowed the sun to pump energy into the planet faster than it can escape. There will be consequences, and it's not looking good. Maybe it's a Lizard-people conspiracy and Climate Breakdown is the ultimate weapon. More likely we are all guilty…

Dave

The whole matter has been so poisoned by ignorance, politics and commerce it's hard to know actually what is happening, but poor reporting standards and possible bias make things worse.

I wonder how many "Londoners" really would be affected by even a 1m rise in sea-level: how high are the Embankment and Canary Wharf walls above the maximum tides they see now, including storm surges which the Thames Barrier protects against? How many homes are genuinely in danger? Food shortages would be the bigger problem by affecting everyone in this country, even up on the lofty heights of Muswell Hill.

I understand there was a recent "report" from a supposedly scientific-journalism organisation that highlighted the above but was found to have used no more than a few estimates from American sites!

When I made the final payment of my mortgage I asked the building society to continue the house insurance through them but was told that I couldn’t carry on the insurance because my house was in a flood risk area and they couldnt therefore provide insurance. I asked the question how up until the mortgage had been repaid could they insure the house but now it was suddenly in a flood risk area, their reply was well we didn’t use your post code we put in a post code for another area which had no flood risk problems but as it would now be a new insurance policy they had to use the correct post code for the house. I was left speechless, in order to get the commission on the insurance sale for a mortgaged property they had committed fraud. Anyways I shopped around for insurance and found plenty of other insurers who deemed that my house was not in a flood risk area. I also consulted the environment agency flood risk maps and found that the risk line for flooding actually runs about three feet the other side of my front fence which is at the top of a six foot high bank above the road, we are within about 2 miles of the sea and are at 4 metres above sea level, I think the last time there was any water encroaching on my property was during the great flood that occurred during the late 1600’s, so I feel reasonably secure perhaps until the sea level rises a couple of metres, and I probably will be long gone by then. Dave W