Climate Change - a poll

[leicsmac]

9 minutes ago, CornwallFox said:

Clean energy is far, far cheaper than fossil. 

Clean energy is better for the environment than fossil. 

Clean energy production looks and smells better than huge fossil power plants. 

There's literally no benefits to fossil energy over clean. 

And that's before we mention the climate emergency that really is an emergency no matter how much science you choose to ignore.

 

Edit: cleaned up. 

Edited 16 November 2025 by leicsmac

[CornwallFox]

1 minute ago, leicsmac said:

Can understand the passion here, mate, but I'd wonder if you could simmer down a bit on this one.

 

I'd rather like this thread to stay open, even though, yes, what is happening and what will happen is obvious to practically anyone. 

I've removed the offending sentence so if you remove the quote it no longer exists 👍

[CornwallFox]

Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) reports for anybody wanting to explore the science behind human caused climate change and also what we can do about it.

 

https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/

[leicsmac]

4 minutes ago, CornwallFox said:

Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) reports for anybody wanting to explore the science behind human caused climate change and also what we can do about it.

 

https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/

Additional great resources are:

https://phys.org/earth-news/

 

https://drawdown.org/

 

https://www.climatechangenews.com/

[The Year Of The Fox]

42 minutes ago, CornwallFox said:

Clean energy is far, far cheaper than fossil. 

Clean energy is better for the environment than fossil. 

Clean energy production looks and smells better than huge fossil power plants. 

Clean energy is and will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. 

Clean energy gives the UK an opportunity to develop technologies to sell to the world.

There's literally no benefits to fossil energy over clean. 

And that's before we mention the climate emergency that really is an emergency no matter how much science you choose to ignore.

How much ‘carbon footprint’ are you anticipating to get all this ‘green energy’ ?

 

Nuclear all the way. 

[Zear0]

6 minutes ago, The Year Of The Fox said:

How much ‘carbon footprint’ are you anticipating to get all this ‘green energy’ ?

 

Nuclear all the way. 

So net zero then? 

[leicsmac]

25 minutes ago, Zear0 said:

So net zero then? 

And this is why when science mixes with democratic policymaking, the results can be...mixed. 

[CornwallFox]

48 minutes ago, The Year Of The Fox said:

How much ‘carbon footprint’ are you anticipating to get all this ‘green energy’ ?

 

Nuclear all the way. 

Nuclear is very much part of the mix. But it's also incredibly expensive and takes an age to get built so a mix of nuclear, wind, solar and tidal are needed. 

The good news is the government has taken big strides forward on nuclear this year and has got funding in place and signed contracts to get them going.

[Trav Le Bleu]

Wanting to use fossil fuels is very much a lack of vision and wanting a quick fix with short term gains.

 

I'd be interested to see a venn diagram of people who think we should carry on using fossil fuels and those who think we should sack the manager after 3-4 loses.

 

I reckon there'd be a large crossover.

[grobyfox1990]

4 hours ago, The Year Of The Fox said:

How much ‘carbon footprint’ are you anticipating to get all this ‘green energy’ ?

 

Nuclear all the way. 

Nuclear!!!!! That's a key proponent of net zero. And Nigel told me net zero is deluded woke madness that should be stopped. Another wokey been outed on Foxestalk it seems, this forum is full of left wing nutjobs. 

[The Year Of The Fox]

When I’m talking ‘nett zero’ I’m thinking electric cars, heat pumps that don’t work and things that cost the user thousands which we’re being forced into with no say whatsoever.

[leicsmac]

3 minutes ago, The Year Of The Fox said:

When I’m talking ‘nett zero’ I’m thinking electric cars, heat pumps that don’t work and things that cost the user thousands which we’re being forced into with no say whatsoever.

Then perhaps a closer look at what it is, means and the current activity is warranted. 

 

In any case, I'm not sure the cost of such schemes are less expensive than the cost of adapting to a vastly changed nation and world where the average temperature is higher by 2.5 degrees C or more. 

 

Buy now, or pay much more later. 

[The Year Of The Fox]

3 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

Then perhaps a closer look at what it is, means and the current activity is warranted. 

 

In any case, I'm not sure the cost of such schemes are less expensive than the cost of adapting to a vastly changed nation and world where the average temperature is higher by 2.5 degrees C or more. 

 

Buy now, or pay much more later. 

I honestly admire your persistence and commitment to the cause. It’s wasted on me. Prefer to pay later I’m afraid 

[Robo61]

25 minutes ago, The Year Of The Fox said:

When I’m talking ‘nett zero’ I’m thinking electric cars, heat pumps that don’t work and things that cost the user thousands which we’re being forced into with no say whatsoever.

The last three General Elections have been won by parties promising net zero.  PS electric cars are great and way superior than ICE in most repects. Modern heat pumps do work.  

[leicsmac]

19 minutes ago, The Year Of The Fox said:

I honestly admire your persistence and commitment to the cause. It’s wasted on me. Prefer to pay later I’m afraid 

And I admire your straight honesty regarding self-interest. Most people dress it up.

 

As things were, then. 

Edited 16 November 2025 by leicsmac

[The Year Of The Fox]

3 minutes ago, Robo61 said:

The last three General Elections have been won by parties promising net zero.  PS electric cars are great and way superior than ICE in most repects. Modern heat pumps do work.  

With enormous changes to most heating systems, at a cost of £thousands to the end user.

 

I’ve got a house I rent out as well as where I currently live. Much rather spend £4k on 4 boilers that’ll see me out, than I would £30k plus for two heat pumps

[CornwallFox]

3 hours ago, The Year Of The Fox said:

When I’m talking ‘nett zero’ I’m thinking electric cars, heat pumps that don’t work and things that cost the user thousands which we’re being forced into with no say whatsoever.

You don't have to buy an electric car and you don't have to buy a heat pump. Have you been walked to the heat pump shop by a government employee? 

Also they do work.

[ozleicester]

7 hours ago, The Year Of The Fox said:

Prefer to pay later I’m afraid 

and here is where the discussion ends

[Grebfromgrebland]

6 hours ago, ozleicester said:

and here is where the discussion ends

That's right. There's no point arguing or discussing further. 

 

Maybe some people don't have children or don't like them and just want to make the most of their remaining life span.

 

In reality apart from having opinions there's little any of us can do apart from prepare the best we can. 

[leicsmac]

6 hours ago, ozleicester said:

and here is where the discussion ends

 

2 minutes ago, Grebfromgrebland said:

That's right. There's no point arguing or discussing further. 

 

Maybe some people don't have children or don't like them and just want to make the most of their remaining life span.

 

In reality apart from having opinions there's little any of us can do apart from prepare the best we can. 

Pretty much right. 

 

You cant really appeal to the empathy or foresight of people that clearly have or want neither. 

 

All you can do is get enough people on board so the right stuff gets done anyway. Or at least try your best, anyway. 

[leicsmac]

Internet find. Welcome to the beginning of the consequences. 

 

Just the beginning.

 

If there's one under-examined news story in the world I'm watching super closely (besides Bird flu), it is the response to Iran's drought.

More than half the nation is facing extreme drought, with most water levels below 3%.  Fifty days after the start of the rainy season there, there hasn't been a drop in most of the major cities.  More than 150,000 people have already been displaced, many of them farmers, and there is talk of EVACUATING THE CITY OF TEHRAN.

Meanwhile, Iraq has less than 1/4 of the groundwater it had and is rapidly drying, so much that agriculture is dying out in some regions.  You remember you learned about the cradle of civilization and the first cities in school?  About the ways the Tigris and Euphrates shaped our world, with the water of those marshy regions creating the agriculture that created cities?  

Well, right now an increasing number of nations are damming what's left of those rivers, hoping to hold out for enough water for THEIR people - which means that Southern Iraq no longer has marshy wetland regions that it can tap for agriculture and human sustenence or natural sustenence.  In Sistan and Beluchitstan, the rivers and lakes have dried up almost entirely.

Extreme heat in the Middle East is now making Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, oil rich nations that can afford it, pay more of its GDP for desalinization than any others.  Poorer nations cannot afford desalinization, and there are consequences to desalinization - the salt from the plants is dumped back in the ocean, creating a brackish, high saline environment that almost nothing can live in, and destroying fishing stocks in the Gulf.  Saudi Arabia uses 300,000 barrels of oil per day to create fresh water, and temperatures rarely even at night fall below 34C in summer.

For years, people grew wheat and rice in the Gulf, irrigating heavily to make those crops.  Olives, date palms, pomegranates and other traditional tree crops cannot be irrigated and are dying. Now there's not enough water in many places even to irrigate traditional crops that do better in teh heat and drought.  Iran was the first country to repeatedly hit 50C temps, and the extreme heat and drought mean that agriculture is now largely impossible in many parts of the nation, and there is talk of evacuating the entire city of Tehran since water is inconsistent at best in the poorer parts of the city and resevoirs are headed to zero.

Meanwhile, Egypt is also headed to absolute scarcity - it is expected that by the end of this year, there will only be 500 cubic meters of water per person for the entire country for everyone even with the Nile.  It is hard to imagine, since the Nile has literally been the blood that flows through Egypt.

Egypt and many of the coastal Gulf states also have a huge salinization problem, as rising sea levels contaminate soils and fresh water with salt.  40% of Egyptian cropland is affected by salt contamination and much will have to be removed from agriculture soon.  Rice cultivation is now banned in Egypt, and Wheat turns yellow and dies due to salt sensitivity. 

In Turkey, the same is happening to sunflower crops, and in Thrace, the largest sunflower oil region, yields are down by more than half.  Turkish rainfall is down by 39%, and dams are so low that in some of the tourist regions, the water has to be shut off during the daytime.

Every single assessment of climate change indicates that the Middle East and North Africa will be one of the worst affected regions in any climate scenarios, and they are in particularly dire danger if in fact AMOC decline or shutdown continues to progress, which well, it is.  

The 4.2 Kiloyear event, which was more than 100 years of extreme drought in the region that brought down multiple empires seems to have been linked to AMOC decline.  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a character laments "we have reduced the forest to wasteland."  The Curse of Akkad, written 500 years later, talks of a megadrought in which the "great agricultural tracts produced no grain."

At only 1.5C over historic norms, many states in the region are reaching wet bulb temperatures and seeing untenable drought.   The two potential futures are expanded and accellerating climate change that bring us to 3C+ quite rapidly, or worse, an AMOC shutdown which will increase the heating of the region as well as shifting rainfall away.

Right now we are largely tracking the IPCC's worst case scenarios, and there's no major plan we can see that would keep us below 3C by 2050 - and that's only 25 years.  By the time today's children are adults, the odds are extremely good that most of the region will be inhabitable only by the wealthy and a much smaller percentage of poor people who serve them, since only the wealthy can afford major climate mitigations and imported food in extreme climate disasters.

The blunt truth is that the land that everyone is currently fighting over for extractive purposes is likely to be largely uninhabitable within decades, and that isn't a "today is fine and tomorrow everyone leaves process" - it is a process of droughts, floods, extreme heat events, crop failures, hunger, extraction, disaster capitalism, water wars and violence, and we are all completely unprepared for what's coming.

We know that some tiny countries facing extreme sea level rise are making plans for evacuation, but Iran has a population of 86 million and the region has nearly 500 million.  Everyone will not leave, nor will every nation be affected in the same ways, but I would expect that by 2060, the population to be halved in the case of AMOC shutdown, and dropped by a quarter without it, and the politics of water, food and life in that region to get stunningly worse in a place that is already deeply fraught.

Which brings us back to Tehran.  If 15 million Iranians have to evacuate, where do they go, with more than half the country in extreme drought?  What incentives does that give their government to either create or resist conflict?  How does that change the entire picture of the region and the world order?  I don't think anyone really knows for sure.

[CornwallFox]

24 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

Internet find. Welcome to the beginning of the consequences. 

 

Just the beginning.

 

If there's one under-examined news story in the world I'm watching super closely (besides Bird flu), it is the response to Iran's drought.

More than half the nation is facing extreme drought, with most water levels below 3%.  Fifty days after the start of the rainy season there, there hasn't been a drop in most of the major cities.  More than 150,000 people have already been displaced, many of them farmers, and there is talk of EVACUATING THE CITY OF TEHRAN.

Meanwhile, Iraq has less than 1/4 of the groundwater it had and is rapidly drying, so much that agriculture is dying out in some regions.  You remember you learned about the cradle of civilization and the first cities in school?  About the ways the Tigris and Euphrates shaped our world, with the water of those marshy regions creating the agriculture that created cities?  

Well, right now an increasing number of nations are damming what's left of those rivers, hoping to hold out for enough water for THEIR people - which means that Southern Iraq no longer has marshy wetland regions that it can tap for agriculture and human sustenence or natural sustenence.  In Sistan and Beluchitstan, the rivers and lakes have dried up almost entirely.

Extreme heat in the Middle East is now making Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, oil rich nations that can afford it, pay more of its GDP for desalinization than any others.  Poorer nations cannot afford desalinization, and there are consequences to desalinization - the salt from the plants is dumped back in the ocean, creating a brackish, high saline environment that almost nothing can live in, and destroying fishing stocks in the Gulf.  Saudi Arabia uses 300,000 barrels of oil per day to create fresh water, and temperatures rarely even at night fall below 34C in summer.

For years, people grew wheat and rice in the Gulf, irrigating heavily to make those crops.  Olives, date palms, pomegranates and other traditional tree crops cannot be irrigated and are dying. Now there's not enough water in many places even to irrigate traditional crops that do better in teh heat and drought.  Iran was the first country to repeatedly hit 50C temps, and the extreme heat and drought mean that agriculture is now largely impossible in many parts of the nation, and there is talk of evacuating the entire city of Tehran since water is inconsistent at best in the poorer parts of the city and resevoirs are headed to zero.

Meanwhile, Egypt is also headed to absolute scarcity - it is expected that by the end of this year, there will only be 500 cubic meters of water per person for the entire country for everyone even with the Nile.  It is hard to imagine, since the Nile has literally been the blood that flows through Egypt.

Egypt and many of the coastal Gulf states also have a huge salinization problem, as rising sea levels contaminate soils and fresh water with salt.  40% of Egyptian cropland is affected by salt contamination and much will have to be removed from agriculture soon.  Rice cultivation is now banned in Egypt, and Wheat turns yellow and dies due to salt sensitivity. 

In Turkey, the same is happening to sunflower crops, and in Thrace, the largest sunflower oil region, yields are down by more than half.  Turkish rainfall is down by 39%, and dams are so low that in some of the tourist regions, the water has to be shut off during the daytime.

Every single assessment of climate change indicates that the Middle East and North Africa will be one of the worst affected regions in any climate scenarios, and they are in particularly dire danger if in fact AMOC decline or shutdown continues to progress, which well, it is.  

The 4.2 Kiloyear event, which was more than 100 years of extreme drought in the region that brought down multiple empires seems to have been linked to AMOC decline.  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a character laments "we have reduced the forest to wasteland."  The Curse of Akkad, written 500 years later, talks of a megadrought in which the "great agricultural tracts produced no grain."

At only 1.5C over historic norms, many states in the region are reaching wet bulb temperatures and seeing untenable drought.   The two potential futures are expanded and accellerating climate change that bring us to 3C+ quite rapidly, or worse, an AMOC shutdown which will increase the heating of the region as well as shifting rainfall away.

Right now we are largely tracking the IPCC's worst case scenarios, and there's no major plan we can see that would keep us below 3C by 2050 - and that's only 25 years.  By the time today's children are adults, the odds are extremely good that most of the region will be inhabitable only by the wealthy and a much smaller percentage of poor people who serve them, since only the wealthy can afford major climate mitigations and imported food in extreme climate disasters.

The blunt truth is that the land that everyone is currently fighting over for extractive purposes is likely to be largely uninhabitable within decades, and that isn't a "today is fine and tomorrow everyone leaves process" - it is a process of droughts, floods, extreme heat events, crop failures, hunger, extraction, disaster capitalism, water wars and violence, and we are all completely unprepared for what's coming.

We know that some tiny countries facing extreme sea level rise are making plans for evacuation, but Iran has a population of 86 million and the region has nearly 500 million.  Everyone will not leave, nor will every nation be affected in the same ways, but I would expect that by 2060, the population to be halved in the case of AMOC shutdown, and dropped by a quarter without it, and the politics of water, food and life in that region to get stunningly worse in a place that is already deeply fraught.

Which brings us back to Tehran.  If 15 million Iranians have to evacuate, where do they go, with more than half the country in extreme drought?  What incentives does that give their government to either create or resist conflict?  How does that change the entire picture of the region and the world order?  I don't think anyone really knows for sure.

The fact that this stuff goes pretty much unreported, while our majority broadcasters still insist on having equal numbers of climate change deniers on TV as they do those explaining the science, is abominable. 

[grobyfox1990]

7 hours ago, CornwallFox said:

The fact that this stuff goes pretty much unreported, while our majority broadcasters still insist on having equal numbers of climate change deniers on TV as they do those explaining the science, is abominable. 

It’s defo not unreported. The ft have covered ‘the relocation of Tehran’ extensively. There’ll be potentially huge money to be made in it 

[leicsmac]

41 minutes ago, grobyfox1990 said:

It’s defo not unreported. The ft have covered ‘the relocation of Tehran’ extensively. There’ll be potentially huge money to be made in it 

Tbf the original response did say "pretty much". it's not like the FT is widely read and disseminated compared to other sources, is it?

 

I think the point about the effects still being largely ignored by comparisonto much smaller problems, wilfully or not, still stands.

[grobyfox1990]

1 hour ago, leicsmac said:

Tbf the original response did say "pretty much". it's not like the FT is widely read and disseminated compared to other sources, is it?

 

I think the point about the effects still being largely ignored by comparisonto much smaller problems, wilfully or not, still stands.

The FT and economist have covered it (considered to be 'the readership of the informed') as well as Guardian I think. That's a wide enough spread for anyone to catch it if they're interested.

Western media is designed to influence not inform. You can't read the BBC everyday and expect to hear about news from an adversary.