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Global Warming (Geophysics)
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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During and after the Somerset floods, I criticised The Environment Agency for their lack of action, especially to do with preventative maintenance and dredging of waterways.

As M. Harper once remarked "I hate it when the truth gets in the way."; it turns out I was misinformed about the role of the EA. I am doubly-embarrassed, because I am pro-EU, and it's the EU wot dunnit.

A farming acquaintance now informs me :

It turns out that the almost-complete cessation of dredging of our rivers started when we accepted the European Water Framework Directive (EWF) into UK law in 2000.

For all of recorded history, flood plains have been called flood plains because that's what they were. Plains in river valleys that could and would be flooded occasionally when rivers burst their normal banks and overflowed. These flood plains were normally useful and productive farmland, so civil authorities and, before them, manors and towns and villages, organised themselves to make sure their watercourses were cleansed, deepened and sometimes embanked to hold whatever water they had to carry away.

In nineteenth century Cockermouth they came up with an ingenious way of doing this. Any able-bodied man seeking bed and board for the night in the workhouse was required to take a shovel and wheelbarrow down to the River Derwent and fetch back two barrow-loads of gravel for mending the roads. This had the triple benefit of dredging the river, maintaining the roads and making indigent men useful.

In Cumbria they knew they had to keep the river clear of the huge quantities of gravel that were washed down from the fells, especially in times of flood. Cumbrian rivers are notoriously quick to rise as the heavy rain that falls copiously on the High Fells rapidly runs off the thin soils and large surface area over which it falls.

So preparing the waterways by deepening and embanking their channels used to be taken very seriously. There are numerous records over many centuries of the Cockermouth Court Leet (Manor Court) imposing fines on occupiers for neglecting to cleanse the watercourses that ran through their land. So important was it to prevent flooding that the court often issued detailed and explicit instructions to parishes how to cleanse their various watercourses. For example in 1718 (and again in 1772) certain owners, whose land bordered the river, were fined for allowing it to become ‘beaten out of its course by sand and gravel’ and given two months to dredge it out.

Last century the obligation to dredge out the rivers was transferred to local river boards, consisting of farmers and landowners who knew the area and its characteristics, and who had statutory responsibilities to prevent or minimise flooding.

But all this changed with the creation of the Environment Agency in 1997 and when we adopted the European Water Framework Directive in 2000. No longer were the authorities charged with a duty to prevent flooding. Instead, the emphasis shifted, in a reversal of policy, to a primary obligation to achieve ‘good ecological status’ for our national rivers. This is defined as being as close as possible to ‘undisturbed natural conditions’.

So, in order to comply with the obligations imposed on us by the EU we had to stop dredging and embanking and allow rivers to ‘re-connect with their floodplains’. Also, the obligation to dredge has been shifted from the relevant statutory authority (now the Environment Agency) onto each individual landowner, at the same time making sure there are no funds for dredging. To compound this, any sand and gravel that might be removed is now classed as ‘hazardous waste’ and cannot be deposited to raise the river banks, as it used to be, but has to be carted away.


In a total confusion over cause and effect, which might be amusing in an AEL sort of way, there is EU money available for capital projects for flood ‘defences’, but none for routine maintenance of the existing thousands of miles of waterways that are now being neglected and allowed to silt-up.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Climate change affecting the North Pole is in the news again.

The President of the Royal Society, who one would expect to be well-educated about these sort of things has said.

"It will without doubt have come to your Lordship's knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.

(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations."


That was Sir Joseph Banks, speaking in, err, 1817.

Some mistake surely? We're repeatedly told the North Pole melting is only a very recent phenomenon. Here's a picture of the USS Skate on the surface in the Arctic in 1958.



Another fluke? How about three subs then?



http://mentalfloss.com/uk/weather/37284/the-north-pole-isn-t-always-covered-with-ice

My special note: the one thing I've not seen mentioned anywhere else is the dates.
1958 to 1987 is 29 years.
1987 to 2016 is 29 years.
Are we going to see any subs at the pole this year?
What else do we know of with a 29-year cycle?
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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What? Do tell.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Saturn?
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Chad wins the prize.

Trouble is, will we all be burnt at the stake for promoting Astrology as the cause of North Pole Melting?
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Just to prove it wasn't a one-off fluke, HMS Superb was back at the North Pole in 1988, on that occasion with HMS Turbulent.

Here's a home-made video of the event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yAsEhmBnyE

Sorry, don't know why Jean Michel Jarre was on board.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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As an aside, it's surprising how many submarines have surfaced at the North Pole, and how often.

See here:
A List of the Underwater Transits of the Canadian Northwest Passage 1958 to 2009
http://www.nauticapedia.ca/Articles/NWP_Transits_Underwater.php



HMS Tireless and USS Pargo rendezvous at the North Pole in 1991. The submarines remained on the surface for 24 hours during which the crews played a cricket match.

In 1991 several intrepid souls emerged from their submarines - the British Tireless and the Pargo from the United States - after breaking through the ice near the North Pole. They had spent the previous month studying the ice for research on global warming. They staged an impromptu cricket match, but the result of the game was classified information, according to the US Department of Defense. A source close to the British team, however, leaked the news that they had won.


http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/551487.html
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Boreades


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Of course, I'm no expert. Perhaps we should bow to authority figures on the subject. Someone like Prof. Peter Wadhams, "one of the world’s leading Arctic experts" (according to the Guardian)

The Times did not misrepresent one of the world’s leading Arctic experts in a report on his claim that three British scientists investigating ice thickness may have been assassinated two years ago, the UK’s press regulator has ruled.

Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the university of Cambridge, complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) that he had been inaccurately quoted in an article by the paper’s environment editor, Ben Webster. He said the piece had damaged his scientific reputation.

The Times report, headlined “climate scientist fears murder by hitman”, was based on an interview with Wadhams in which he said that there are only four people in Britain, himself included, who were “really leaders” on Arctic ice thickness. The other three died in succession in the early part of 2013.


http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/02/the-times-did-not-misrepresent-arctic-expert-in-assassination-story-ipso-rules

Back in 2013 Peter Wadhams told the FT that Arctic sea ice would disappear in the summer of 2016. Wadhams, who is head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge, claimed that we would see “the Arctic death spital”, going on to state:

““It could even be this year or next year but not later than 2015 there won’t be any ice in the Arctic in the summer”.

Unfortunately for Peter, who describes himself as the leading authority on the Arctic sea ice, it didn’t disappear last summer, and is in fact in significantly better shape than when he made the prediction back in 2012. Last year the minimum Arctic sea ice extent was 4.41 million square kilometres, compared to 3.39 million square kilometres in 2012.

Of course, one should not confuse paranoid delusions about assassinations with delusions about the state of the Arctic.
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Boreades


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For those with a casual or perverse interest on whether the talks in Paris achieved anything, I have good news to report.

All the countries of the world agreed to make commitments to curb the growth (my emphasis) of their CO2 emissions sometime in the future. The only exceptions were the countries of Europe, who put in a total figure for the whole of Europe and are now allocating that figure among the member states. Sounds good so far? What could possibly go wrong?

But, because we are already committed to doing more than the average in Europe, what that actually does is to reduce the amount by which the other countries in Europe will have to reduce their emissions. Don't make a fuss, this is good news, as it proves what a good EU-partner Britain is, shouldering more than its fair share of the burden, despite all the "Brexit" talk.

Unfortunately, we have also increased the burden of costs on British households and business, reduced the burden of costs incurred by our partners in Europe, and not reduced the emissions of CO2 by a single molecule.

This is an extraordinary achievement.

It puzzled me that the political class is committed to such perverse policies. Then I found a possible hint of an explanation, when I stumbled over a book M'Lady Boreades had left in the potting shed after the new young gardening apprentice had left for the day, looking rather tired and emotional. A book that I am sure, like me, you have not read but have heard about called “Fifty Shades of Grey”. The popularity of that book demonstrates that sadomasochism, or the infliction of pain and the submission to pain, are far more widespread tastes than we had previously thought, even in areas like Notting Hill.

Perhaps in the political sphere there is a similar belief that it would be popular and efficacious to inflict pain or submit to pain by green policies. You might say that what we now have in the UK is “Fifty Shades Of Green”.

There is still an up-side to this. Because of the disproportionately high cost of electricity and fuel in the UK, we are successfully getting heavy industry to leave the UK, and we are getting rid of those dark satanic mills that have been a blot on the landscape for so long. Tata Steel is waving ta-ta to Port Talbot as we speak.

Best not to ask where all the metals for our electric car batteries come from either.
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Mick Harper
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This is called The Hairshirt Principle and is widely, even wildly, popular on the left. At present. It has been popular on the right in past centuries.
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Boreades


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An excellent observation!

Would it be valid to conclude that ye olde acts of humble penitence by devout Christians have been overtaken by acts of self-denial and martyrdom by Fundamental Gaiaists?
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Ishmael


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Mick Harper wrote:
This is called The Hairshirt Principle and is widely, even wildly, popular on the left. At present. It has been popular on the right in past centuries.


But it's not a hairshirt principle when the shirt is worn by someone else. Leftist politics is all about some white people needing desperately to feel superior to other white people and, in pursuit of this goal, they are willing to ruin the lives of those other white people where necessary.

DiCaprio flies his jet planes around the world while preaching to governments to raise taxes on the middle class in the name of Global Warming. He will never suffer any discomfort.
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Ishmael


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Boreades wrote:
Would it be valid to conclude that ye olde acts of humble penitence by devout Christians have been overtaken by acts of self-denial and martyrdom by Fundamental Gaiaists?


I wish!

Find me a leftist who has suffered for these causes. It's always white people moaning that other white people haven't yet been stretched tightly enough upon the rack.
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Boreades


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Ishmael wrote:
It's always white people moaning that other white people haven't yet been stretched tightly enough upon the rack.


No one expects the Spanish Inquisition / IPCC Crusaders.

Our chief weapon is ..
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Boreades


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Ishmael wrote:
Leftist politics is all about some white people needing desperately to feel superior to other white people and, in pursuit of this goal, they are willing to ruin the lives of those other white people where necessary.


This is how the National Socialists got started. It was the original European Green Party.
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