2020 officially saw a record number of $1 billion weather and climate disasters.

Those spouting about the usefulness of trees (which I agree with) seem to have no problem with their destruction (along with the countless wildlife that is annihilated in the process) in order to create 'biomass energy'

And, as this article puts it:

• When burned, trees generate more CO2 emissions per unit of energy generated than fossil fuels. An oft overlooked fact is that burning wood emits more CO2 than fossil fuels per megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity generated or per unit of heat generated. For example, per data from Laganière et al. (2017), smokestack CO2 emissions from combusting wood for heat can be 2.5 times higher than those of natural gas and 30 percent higher than those of coal per unit of generated energy. In terms of electricity generation, smokestack emissions from combusting wood can be more than three times higher than those of natural gas, and 1.5 times those of coal per MWh.
• There is a carbon sequestration opportunity cost. Harvesting trees for energy releases carbon that would otherwise have remained stored in the forest. It also forgoes future carbon sequestration that otherwise would have occurred had the trees been allowed to continue growing.
• The re-sequestration of the released carbon back into biomass is not instantaneous. It takes a long time for the CO2 emissions from burning trees to be re-absorbed in new additional biomass.

How long are carbon payback periods?

Several studies indicate that the carbon payback periods can be on the order of decades to more than a century, varying by forest type and the fossil fuel being compared against. Payback periods in this range are summarized by the European Joint Research Centre (2014), which draws from a half-dozen studies covering temperate and boreal forests from Europe, Canada, and the United States. Another example is Laganière et al. (2017), which analyzed carbon payback periods for various bioenergy feedstocks sourced from Canadian forests relative to coal-, oil-, and natural gas-fired power and heat generation. Figure 1 summarizes their results, with each black bar indicating the number of years that bioenergy results in increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere relative to the fossil fuel alternative.

INSIDER: Why Burning Trees for Energy Harms the Climate | World Resources Institute (wri.org)

No, RTE don't mention climate change because they dont want to upset farmers and the motor industry, both of whom have RTE in their pocket.

They've been called out on it lately.

This thread is a train wreck but it's the aggression coming across that's most surprising, people thinking they're smarter than NASA and the UN, gobshites.

The message in 1984 is that totalitarianism thrives in reductionist discourse. Newspeak eliminated words, Animal Farm reduced good vs evil to ‘4 legs good 2 legs bad’

Donald Trumps entire political system is summarisable as ‘fake news’ “defined as anything that Isn’t fully aligned with Trumps incoherent statements or goals

but not just Trump, there is a venn diagram of people who support populist , reality denying conspiratorial leaders, and people who think climate change is ‘fake news’, and that diagram is a single circle

people who attack journalists for putting nuance (words like could and probably) into their reporting and then go off and spend years arguing that we cannot know that this event was historic because there were no satellites in 1837

I find it fascinating that people that can hold 2 contradictory thoughts in their heads at the same time (we need to clean up the environment + people who advocate cleaning up the environment are all extremists) (doublethink) and still call upon 1984 as if it is on their side of the argument

meanwhile the IPCC are releasing a report today and I guarantee the poster who referred to Orwell has already dismissed everything it says as ‘fake news’ (no need to read it)

IPCC AR6 WG1 SPM

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf

“It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s, while cold extremes (including cold waves) have become less frequent and less severe, with high confidence that human-induced climate change is the main driver14 of these changes. Some recent hot extremes observed over the past decade would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. Marine heatwaves have approximately doubled in frequency since the 1980s (high confidence), and human influence has very likely contributed to most of them since at least 2006.”

“2 The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have increased since the 1950s over most land area for which observational data are sufficient for trend analysis (high confidence), and human-induced climate change is likely the main driver. Human-induced climate change has contributed to increases in agricultural and ecological droughts15 in some regions due to increased land evapotranspiration16 (medium confidence).”

“A.4.4 The equilibrium climate sensitivity is an important quantity used to estimate how the climate responds to radiative forcing. Based on multiple lines of evidence21, the very likely range of equilibrium climate sensitivity is between 2°C (high confidence) and 5°C (medium confidence). The AR6 assessed best estimate is 3°C with a likely range of 2.5°C to 4°C (high confidence), compared to 1.5°C to 4.5°C in AR5, which did not provide a best estimate.”

I await Ray Bates’ rebuttal or defense of his estimate of 1c ECS. Or maybe Gaoth Laidir can tell us if he no longer supports the Lindzen/Bates estimate, and if Gaoth has reassessed his assessment of the likely magnitude of climate change we are facing, does he retract his accusations that people warning of 4c of warming were being alarmist?

"Ignorance is strength..."

Trump is gone Akrasia, it is time to let go ...

IPCC warning today that the Likely ECS is up to 4c

would you describe this as ‘fake news’?

I think most climate fear mongers (who seem to think that they own the actual science) are just outwardly projecting a deep rooted fear of their own mortality. For all our great knowledge and understanding of the world, we still have no idea what life actually is, and death itself shall we never conquer. Until they accept this basic fact, they will always be in the grip of fear.

I like you am trying to take an informed middle ground. Interesting podcast here about the heatwave in the US last week, he says it was not caused by warming at all.

This is his wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Mass

No lightweight by any means.

"Nothing changes with this report. The science is still no closer to being settled. -Su Campu

Science, by its very nature, can never be settled. I'm no scientist but I don't need to be to know this. Anyone who claims otherwise does not know science, only their own agenda which they dress up as science. Note Akrasia's totally subjective misinterpretation of that very innocuous post I put up yesterday in which he attempted to sell as fact.

Anyway, thunder is roaring away here. Must be climate change.

But the IPCC said it is. This settled science makes accurate forecasts of future climate scenarios based on different future GHG levels, despite not really having a clue how much said GHG levels actually affect the weather, but still, we should cut them some slack, it's hard.

It means there is almost zero uncertainty. The chance they are wrong is less than 1 in 3.5 million for example (5 sigma p value) Science considers a measurement as true and accurate when the uncertainty is less than 5 sigma, but it doesn’t mean there is absolutely zero chance that there was an error. There is a non zero chance that you and I are both living inside an AI computer simulation for example