Climate change global warming natural disaster freak weather etc. (2 Viewers)

[magicbastarder]

I suspect the main glitch in predicting the weather a week away is that it's a fool's errand usually.

 

[ann post]

The weather is definitely something that is always living in survivorship bias.

if the weather forecast is wrong in a big way it's a national bitching event, and has been for centuries. If the weather forecast is correct every day the bitching switches focus to the actual weather rather than heaping as much praise as there was bitching on the forecasters.

Someone i know kept talking to me about too many yellow weather warnings recenlty. I kinda got bored of it and asked them what a yellow weather warning meant. They had never looked it up, they'd just been bitching about it for two months anyways.

Anywhoo they look at massive weather systems globally and model them on computers within ranges and forecast the most probable outcome, which literally changes from second to second to answer the question.

 

[nuke terrorist]

The weather is definitely something that is always living in survivorship bias.

if the weather forecast is wrong in a big way it's a national bitching event, and has been for centuries. If the weather forecast is correct every day the bitching switches focus to the actual weather rather than heaping as much praise as there was bitching on the forecasters.

Someone i know kept talking to me about too many yellow weather warnings recenlty. I kinda got bored of it and asked them what a yellow weather warning meant. They had never looked it up, they'd just been bitching about it for two months anyways.

Anywhoo they look at massive weather systems globally and model them on computers within ranges and forecast the most probable outcome, which literally changes from second to second to answer the question.

Is that what they call the 'butterfly effect'?
Yeah there were several click bait articles of dire weather warnings recently, mostly from bog standard newspapers.
Met Eireann website didn't mention any of it and guess what? The dire weather never materialised.

Met Eireann's forecast going over a week into the future is surprising.

 

[magicbastarder]

the butterly effect is essentially chaos theory, which would basically be that chaotic systems are extremely sensitive to tiny variations in initial conditions.
i think met eireann only recently started going more than a week out on their website - i see they're including tuesday week in the forecast now, and at a six hour granularity. it'd be more sensible surely to drop to a 24 hour granularity that far out?

 

[chris d]

Is there some way we could harness the heat generated by Dr Oetker Bistro Baguettes and use it to help climate change?

 

[ann post]

$500K Dune Built to Protect Coastal Homes Lasts Just 3 Days

The handmade barrier, which used 14,000 tons of sand, quickly crumbled.

www.thedailybeast.com

 

[pete]

$500K Dune Built to Protect Coastal Homes Lasts Just 3 Days

The handmade barrier, which used 14,000 tons of sand, quickly crumbled.

www.thedailybeast.com

You Canute be serious.

 

[magicbastarder]

america has a fucked up law where the government insure them for stuff like that, and can't refuse insurance. so you can repeatedly rebuild your house on the coast and are paid when the sea washes it away.

 

[Jill Hives]

america has a fucked up law where the government insure them for stuff like that, and can't refuse insurance. so you can repeatedly rebuild your house on the coast and are paid when the sea washes it away.

But you pay ALOT for that insurance. Anywhere near water dramatically raises the cost. My brother's house is like 8 blocks from a creek, it has never flooded anywhere near his house but his insurance is significantly higher than say my mother's whose house is no where near water.

 

[ann post]

I get the local water levels question every year now.

 

[egg_]

Just been working out the greenhouse gas emissions for walking versus driving, and it's surprising

(sorry about the mixed units)

A 155lb human burns 177 calories when walking at 2.5mph, so that's 71 calories per mile

There are 340 calories in 100g of wholemeal wheat flour, so walking one mile takes around 21g of wheat

Wheat flour creates carbon emissions of 0.80 kg CO₂e/kg, so walking one mile creates carbon emissions of 170 g CO₂e

Driving a vehicle powered by petrol produces tailpipe emissions of around 400g per mile

So driving a petrol car emits twice the carbon of a wheat powered human walking

...

Interestingly, a beef powered human is different

100g of beef gives you 217 calories, so you need 33g of beef for your walk

Irish beef creates around 20kg of carbon per kilo of meat so a 1 mile walk will emit ~730g of carbon, a little under twice what you'd have emitted if you drove

 

[nuke terrorist]

Wonder what Mattie McGrath and the Healy Raes will say to that.

 

[Richie]

Just been working out the greenhouse gas emissions for walking versus driving, and it's surprising

(sorry about the mixed units)

A 155lb human burns 177 calories when walking at 2.5mph, so that's 71 calories per mile

There are 340 calories in 100g of wholemeal wheat flour, so walking one mile takes around 21g of wheat

Wheat flour creates carbon emissions of 0.80 kg CO₂e/kg, so walking one mile creates carbon emissions of 170 g CO₂e

Driving a vehicle powered by petrol produces tailpipe emissions of around 400g per mile

So driving a petrol car emits twice the carbon of a wheat powered human walking

...

Interestingly, a beef powered human is different

100g of beef gives you 217 calories, so you need 33g of beef for your walk

Irish beef creates around 20kg of carbon per kilo of meat so a 1 mile walk will emit ~730g of carbon, a little under twice what you'd have emitted if you drove

Interesting, although that's only accounting for fuel usage and presumably doesn't include for the substantial carbon emitted in building the car itself (if you were factoring this into your calculation I guess you would divide the typical amount of carbon involved in car construction by the total number of journeys it is expected to be used for).

There's also the question of whether that figure for tailpipe emissions is literally just the greenhouse gas emissions coming of your tailpipe, or if it also includes GHGs produced in the extraction/refinement of the petrol/diesel and transport to its location of use, etc..

 

[ann post]

(sorry about the mixed units)

Unforgivable

It'd be a tiny amount but the human also still burns calories while operating the car,

I do get where you are going with it, and it is interesting -

The factors that play in here that make it more carbony to drive are going to be how it effects lifestyle. Literally nobody in my neighbourhood lives less than 8km from a shop big enough to feed a household - so groceries by default are gonna be 16km and i promise you it is not a neighbourhood of tiny hatchbacks and nissan leafs and stuff. That lifestyle is only possible with a 2-3 car household setup. If people here lived more or less the same without cars the shop that is walking distance would sell more than crisps, petrol and sausage rolls because the demand would be there, or people just would stop fucking moving out here to watch netflix.

But I do enjoy how you look at it.

 

[magicbastarder]

Interesting, although that's only accounting for fuel usage and presumably doesn't include for the substantial carbon emitted in building the car itself (if you were factoring this into your calculation I guess you would divide the typical amount of carbon involved in car construction by the total number of journeys it is expected to be used for).

There's also the question of whether that figure for tailpipe emissions is literally just the greenhouse gas emissions coming of your tailpipe, or if it also includes GHGs produced in the extraction/refinement of the petrol/diesel and transport to its location of use, etc..

my car creates about 120g/km of CO2 - but the actual footprint of petrol is very approximately double the tailpipe emissions. so egg's 400g per mile would be about right.

 

[ann post]

Thats about 250g per km FOR THE LOVE OF BARLYCORNS

 

[magicbastarder]

argh, edited to nothing, i misread.

but; the link egg provided about the carbon footprint of beef; are they using CO2 equivalent figures for the methane output? thats something the farming lobby have been fudging massively for the last few years.

 

[magicbastarder]

forgot to post this yesterday, came across it while googling for the above topic - a study in the states has claimed that growing your food at home has a much higher CO2 output than buying conventionally grown food; seems the biggest difference is down to the infrastructure in the garden which obviously would have really poor economies of scale compared to industrial farming.

Urban Farming Has A Shockingly High Climate Cost — Here’s How Growers Can Bring Carbon Down, According To Scientists

Scientists found that food produced in cities had, on average, six times the carbon emissions as conventionally grown food.

www.forbes.com

 

[magicbastarder]

"Farmers and gardeners at urban agriculture sites in France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States were recruited as citizen scientists and used daily diary entries to record inputs and harvests from their food-growing sites throughout the 2019 season.


Inputs to the urban agriculture sites fell into three main categories:

• Infrastructure, such as the raised beds in which food is grown, or pathways between plots.
• Supplies, including compost, fertilizer, weed-blocking fabric and gasoline for machinery.
• Irrigation water.

“Most of the climate impacts at urban farms are driven by the materials used to construct them — the infrastructure,” Goldstein said. “These farms typically only operate for a few years or a decade, so the greenhouse gases used to produce those materials are not used effectively. Conventional agriculture, on the other hand, is very efficient and hard to compete with.”"

not going to say we're more or less conventional than anyone else, but working back up through that list - we rarely use chemical fertiliser and i *hate* weed blocking fabric. we buy a few bags of farmyard manure every year, that's about it for the bought in compost. our raised beds are reclaimed scaffolding planks, and we have 300l of water butts but do use tap water during dry weather.

 

[egg_]

I thought that article was kinda illuminating - a bit like the walking versus driving calculation above

You think you're doing the climate a favour by growing your own veg, but you're not necessarily. When we built our (pretty big) raised beds we bought wood for them, plus put in a load of drains which meant a mini-digger and a couple of lorryloads of gravel. Also we have a polytunnel and a fruit cage. That's a lot of infrastructure