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Climate change and hill walking

Climate change and hill walking


Postby Spade » Wed Nov 25, 2020 12:11 pm

I recently watched a video on paragliding as it's a common pastime in the UK hills and mountains. It set me thinking how much it will affect hill walking in the UK. My thoughts are that it will, but as individuals I wonder in which way?
In the past year airline traffic has substantially reduced (all be it temporarily ) , therefore will we see any improvement in air quality and will we learn form this window of opportunity in reduced air pollution??. Here's the link for the video



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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby Spade » Wed Nov 25, 2020 12:32 pm

Spade wrote:I recently watched a video on paragliding as it's a common pastime in the UK hills and mountains. It set me thinking how much it will affect hill walking in the UK. My thoughts are that it will, but as individuals I wonder in which way?
In the past year airline traffic has substantially reduced (all be it temporarily ) , therefore will we see any improvement in air quality and will we learn form this window of opportunity in reduced air pollution??. Here's the link for the video






Sorry, my poor explanation, I did mean I wonder how climate change will affect Hill walking !!
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby al78 » Wed Nov 25, 2020 12:40 pm

Probably won't have much effect in the UK. Reduction of winter snow cover, and an increase in rainfall over the year. If Arctic amplification impact the jet stream we may see more frequent locked in weather patterns, weeks of dry followed by weeks of wet, hard luck if you book your hiking trip at the wrong time, but that is not much different to now. If the sea level rises that may result in one or two marginal Munros being demoted to Corbetts.
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby al78 » Wed Nov 25, 2020 12:44 pm

Just found this paper published earlier this year which might provide some insight (I haven't read it yet).

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL086259
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby DomBoyd » Wed Nov 25, 2020 9:47 pm

I’d rather see changes in the hills to prevent climate change, rather than the effects of it. Typical examples in Scotland are the proliferation of wind turbines (not popular visually, but reducing emissions), and improvements to biodiversity in the hills - stop burning back the heather, reduce deer and sheep numbers and allow regenerating forestry to take hold. This will help hold back run off from extreme rainfall flooding downstream areas as well as providing greater capacity for carbon capture.

I sort of turned your question around! But if we take measures to address climate change we might mitigate some of the effects, surely preferable to the downhill slide to extinction?
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby al78 » Wed Nov 25, 2020 10:57 pm

DomBoyd wrote:I’d rather see changes in the hills to prevent climate change, rather than the effects of it. Typical examples in Scotland are the proliferation of wind turbines (not popular visually, but reducing emissions), and improvements to biodiversity in the hills - stop burning back the heather, reduce deer and sheep numbers and allow regenerating forestry to take hold. This will help hold back run off from extreme rainfall flooding downstream areas as well as providing greater capacity for carbon capture.

I sort of turned your question around! But if we take measures to address climate change we might mitigate some of the effects, surely preferable to the downhill slide to extinction?


The things you mention aside from winbd turbines are associated with land management. Land shouldn't need to be managed, it has existed for millions of year without human intervention. The only reason we have to manage the land is to try and combat the side efdects of over-exploiting it for money.

I'd rather see wind farms offshore than on the hilly parts of the UK. I support renewable energy and ultimately it has to be a part of the solution to address climate change, but we don't need to damage our areas of outstanding natural beauty in the process.

There needs to be some discussion about adaptation to more extremes that might accompany climate change, like extreme rainfall. If projections are correct, we will see a greater frequency of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQXKaL2iYQo&ab_channel=Channel4News in our picturesque towns and villages in the future.
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby pony23 » Thu Nov 26, 2020 10:04 am

Which climate change is that, are you talking about the warming parts of the natural warming and cooling cycles, or are you talking about the ridiculous theory that humans are catastrophically warming the planet via increasing CO2 levels from zero point zero three percent to zero point zero four percent by volume?
After all, the WMO (a global warming alarmist group, who admitted on 23 Sep that a record lowest ever temperature for the northern hemisphere had been recorded on Greenland of -69.6 C) did a press release 3 days ago that global CO2 levels have continued to rise at the same rate despite human CO2 emissions reducing by up to 17% due to the pandemic.

Dr Hermann Harde, who writes many science papers on atmospheric CO2, published a paper in 2019 (freely available on sciencepublishinggroup.com) and his highlights include:

1. average residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is found to be 4 years

2. human emissions only contribute 15% to the CO2 increase over the industrial era

3. temperature itself dominantly controls the CO2 increase

4. not more than 4.3% of atmospheric CO2 comes from human activity over the period 2007- 2016

Many other scientists agree with Harde, including Robert Essenhigh and Murry Salby,

http://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/journal/paperinfo?journalid=161&doi=10.11648/j.earth.20190803.13
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby al78 » Thu Nov 26, 2020 10:36 am

Oh dear, any thread on climate change anywhere, there is always one who thinks denying the truth, fundamental physics and direct observation can change the truth.

For those willing to learn, this gives a good background in the subject:

https://skepticalscience.com/
https://skepticalscience.com//argument.php
https://grist.org/series/skeptics/
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby pony23 » Thu Nov 26, 2020 10:56 am

Spade, here are some links to 2 websites which present good evidence that the AGW theory is doubtful at best and a hoax at worst-
http://notrickszone.com/

"No tricks zone" lists hundreds if not thousands of research papers which suggest that other things control the climate, not CO2


http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/p/climategate_05.html

Here is a site with 500+ Climategate emails. You can read what so-called climate scientists from all over the world were writing in private. Much of what they say is the opposite to what they say in public. You can see the skulduggery, dishonesty, bias, the insatiable appetite for lucrative research grants. You can see that the science is absolutely not "settled", that there is no "consensus", how they adjusted the temperature data, how they pressurized journal editors to not publish papers from the other side, how things were covered up, how the science was "fudged"- their word not mine.
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby Marty_JG » Thu Nov 26, 2020 11:17 am

The strong scientific consensus is human industrialisation has massively, massively out-accelerated any natural warming.

Here's the other thing though, the UK has massively reduced emissions, both absolute and per-person. The UK now emits fewer tonnes of CO2 per person than China. And China is still exponentially increasing CO2 use, as is the rest of the developing world.

World_fossil_carbon_dioxide_emissions_six_top_countries_and_confederations[1].png


The UK itself has dropped to almost pre-industrialisation levels. And whilst I support the condinued reduction we should not delude ourselves we will make an iota of difference to the future. Not even close. The fate of the world is in the hands of China, and they have pledged to become carbon neutral - but then again they promised one country two systems. :think:

hendry12decfig1a[1].png

hendry12decfig1c[1].png


https://voxeu.org/article/driving-uks-capita-carbon-dioxide-emissions-below-1860-levels

Those figures from VoxEU. For those wary of new sources of information, and I do not blame you, its a respected thinktank charity by an Oxford don.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Economic_Policy_Research
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby rgf101 » Thu Nov 26, 2020 11:21 am

"The UK now emits fewer tonnes of CO2 per person than China."
Because we're now basically post-industrial. Who makes all our products? Oh, China. Effectively, we've exported a lot of our emissions.

You're entirely right that the more populous nations are crucial, but the more developed ones have a vital role to play in leadership, technology, financing, and simply setting a good example.
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby Marty_JG » Thu Nov 26, 2020 12:16 pm

We have exported some CO2, but even with that our CO2 has reduced massively, the switch from coal to gas being the primary driver; and the bulk of China's CO2 emissions are due to their domestic consumption, they export only a faction of their emissions. China has every intention of having 1.4 billion people at the same level of affluence and infrastructure sophistication of Seoul or Tokyo. And that'll be good for those 1.4 billion and it would be openly hypocritical of me to say they should not have had the same industrialised advantages all of us have lifelong benefited from. But there is a cost to be had, and it will be had, and that cost is, at worst, the extinction of our species. And yes that's slightly worrying if you want to worry about such things as the future for your grandchildren and if you want to compost your eggshells rather than send them off to landfill that's fine don't let me deter you. But the fate of the world is not in our hands; not you, not me, not Scotland, not Britain, not the EU, not the UN. It's in Beijing and only in Beijing.

EDIT: one can set a good example and if you wish to do that, that's fine. We have set examples on democracy and not persecuting religious minorities. It is up to your own conclusions of the evidence if China is a country that follows or ignores such examples; but to me the examples of the treatment of Uyghurs and those in Hong Kong do not fill me with very much confidence.
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby pony23 » Thu Nov 26, 2020 2:18 pm

Marty, you claim that AGW has "massively out accelerated any natural warming". This is your opinion. Remember, there's no such thing as an exact science, it's opinion, it's a process. I will now present evidence that suggests that the AGW narrative is bogus, and the evidence is factual, not based on opinion.

In 1998 Michael Mann, an American climate "scientist" was lead author in the so-called Hockey Stick study. The hockey stick-shaped graph produced by this study purported to show northern hemisphere temperatures changing little up to 1900, then from 1900 temperatures increased significantly over the next 100 years. This graph became the poster child of the climate lobby, indeed in the IPCC's 409 page Assessment Report 3 of 2001 the graph is shown half a dozen times (strangely it appears to have been dropped in Assessment Report 4 of 2007), and I've seen people hold it up to the cameras on TV as "evidence".

But when the learned person looks at this graph he notices that the Little Ice Age (when the Thames froze over in winter enough to hold fairs) has been eliminated. Also the Medieval Warm Period (when Norsemen lived in Greenland and grew barley, impossible today) is also eliminated.

In 2002 Steve McIntyre, a mining statistician, looked at the study and smelt a rat. It reminded him of previous bogus mining prospecting reports, which were designed to fool investment into mining proposals which weren't really viable. Under a FOI request he asked Mann for the computer programme and climate data that had been used, but Mann resisted for a long time. Eventually McIntyre received what he wanted. He examined the study in detail, but couldn't work out how the data could give rise to a hockey stick-shaped graph. Eventually in exasperation he put in random data instead of the climate data and it still resulted in a hockey stick-shaped graph!!

This is ironically confirmed in a Climategate email. In an email dated Mar 7 2006 climate "scientist" Rob Wilson of Edinburgh Uni wrote "The whole Macintyre issue got me thinking about over-fitting and the potential bias of
screening against the target climate parameter. Therefore, I thought I'd play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I could 'reconstruct' northern hemisphere temperatures..........................The reconstructions clearly show a 'hockey-stick' trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.It is certainly worrying............................."
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby Gareth Harper » Thu Nov 26, 2020 6:41 pm

"The UK now emits fewer tonnes of CO2 per person than China."
Because we're now basically post-industrial. Who makes all our products? Oh, China. Effectively, we've exported a lot of our emissions.

You're entirely right that the more populous nations are crucial, but the more developed ones have a vital role to play in leadership, technology, financing, and simply setting a good example.

Yup totally agree. It is not just that, but having made the products we no longer manufacture for ourselves; it is then shipped round the globe to us – yet more CO2 emissions.

You know it was a Swedish Scientist that figured out and predicted what we now call the greenhouse effect all the way back in 1859, and here we are today still arguing over it, whilst all the time our climate continues to warm.

There is of course another inconvenient fact, and that is that fossil fuels are a valuable and finite resource. At the end of the day the vast bulk of our energy needs to become fully renewable irrespective of the impact of CO2 emissions and the facts of the greenhouse effect.

Then whilst some complain that countries like China and India are today the big emitters, well I wonder who is responsible for the bulk of the CO2 added to the atmosphere over the last 150 years. Hmmm.

As for China, I think they are really starting to wake up to the fact, that they like everybody else, if not on average - more so, will be affected by climate change.

Meanwhile, the next industrial and financial revolution is in green energy solutions. Scotland might not figure that much when it comes to current day by day emissions when compared to massive countries like China, but then the big winners in all this are going to be those who develop the technology and solutions to the global problems we face.
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Re: Climate change and hill walking

Postby Marty_JG » Thu Nov 26, 2020 7:08 pm

pony23 wrote:Marty, you claim that AGW has "massively out accelerated any natural warming". This is your opinion.


Emphasis mine. And I'm stopping you right here. You literally cut the first part of my quote away. By removing the initial "The strong scientific consensus is..." you can switch from it me doing nothing other than accurately reporting on the scientific consensus to you asserting "I" am "making a claim" of personal "opinion". :roll: Whether you would do that deliberately with the apparent intention to mislead, or if your tunnel vision is so acute you do not even recognise how you calibrate and react to statements, either way the why is less important that the does.

I suggest our discourse has reached and perhaps exceeded the bounds of utility. I wish you well.
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