This topic contains 36 replies, has 15 voices, and was last updated by 
Hero42 4 days, 10 hours ago.
- #1736112Hero42 October 30, 2019 at 4:07 pm
It is hard to argue with what we see around us and yet some still will.
California.
Nine of California’s 10 most destructive wildfires on record started in the last four months of the year, including most recently the Camp and Woolsey fires in November 2018, the Thomas fire in December 2017, and the Nuns and Tubbs fires in October 2017. The one raging at the moment may or may not rank with these.Australia.
By July 2019, a climatologist at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology stated that present the drought was now officially the worst on record in the Murray–Darling Basin, and “had now exceeded the Federation Drought, the WWII drought and the Millennium drought in terms of its severity through the MDB”.
At the start of October 2019, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology stated that drier and warmer than average conditions were expected to persist at least until the end of the year with no relief in sight for most of the drought affected areas.Global
Earth is now the warmest it’s been in some 120,000 years. Eighteen of the last 19 years have been the warmest on record.Almost 400 all-time high temperatures were set in the northern hemisphere over the summer, according to an analysis of temperature records.
The records were broken in 29 countries for the period from 1 May to 30 August this year.
A third of the all-time high temperatures were in Germany, followed by France and the Netherlands.Antarctica
Home to the greatest ice sheets on Earth — isn’t just melting significantly faster than it was decades ago. Great masses of ice that scientists once presumed were largely immune to melting are losing ample ice into the sea.Arctic
The ice sheet has started its annual grow as winter approaches but Arctic sea ice extent for September averaged 4.32 million square kilometers, the third lowest in the 41-year continuous satellite record, behind 2012 and 2007. This is 2.09 million square kilometers below the 1981 to 2010 average.NZ
Pohutukawa trees in and around Wellington have started flowering, some are almost finished flowering.#1736196Hero42 October 31, 2019 at 2:18 pmClimate change activist Greta Thurberg has refused to accept an environmental award worth NZ$80,000.
The teen posted on Instagram on Wednesday to announce she had won the Nordic Council Environmental Award, which comes with a prize of 500,000 Swedish kronor.
“The climate movement does not need any more awards,” the teen posted, explaining her reasons for declining.
“What we need is for our politicians and the people in power to start to listen to the current, best available science.”
Well that shows the lie of the deniers that she was only in it for the money.
Cheers 🙂
#1738793TedE December 10, 2019 at 3:41 pmThank you for your thoughts on this topic.
Is it true that our coal and oil deposits were laid down over many millions of years by photosynthesis extracting it from the atmosphere?Is it also true that we have extracted a vast amount of the known deposits of this carboniferous material in the form of coal, oil and gas in the past 250 years?
Is it reasonable to assume that if we release so much of this material (by burning it) back into the atmosphere in such a short space of time, that we could cause an imbalance in the atmospheric conditions that we, and most living species had adapted to?
TedE - Papakura -
#1738819TedE December 10, 2019 at 5:55 pmI meant to say: “Is it true that our coal and oil deposits were laid down over many millions of years by photosynthesis extracting carbon from the atmosphere?”
TedE - Papakura -
#1738928Hero42 December 12, 2019 at 1:18 pmTedE
Both coal and oil are fossil fuels. That means they’re formed from organic matter – stuff that was alive on Earth millions of years ago – that was covered by heavy layers of rock. Over time, the increased pressures and heat resulting from the overlying rock transformed the decomposed matter to coal or oil.Both coal and oil are carbon-based fuels – they’re made up mostly of carbon and hydrogen. Coal usually forms from buried tissues of higher plants. Most of Earth’s coal originated as trees, ferns, and other tropical forest plants that lived in a warmer time in our history. That’s why the world’s coal beds are found on land.
Oil mostly originated as very simple organisms – such as bacteria, algae and plankton. This organic matter – and often the sandstone or limestone beds that hold the oil – was deposited in marine or lake basins, and in the ocean.
But what we have to remember is that it took millions of years to create the oil and coal reserves and we have used, depending on which estimate you use, about 70% of it in 150 years and most of that in the last 100 years.
Cheers 🙂
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