On Tuesday, 11 August 2015 20:18:11 UTC+1, Dawlish wrote:
On Tuesday, August 11, 2015 at 7:17:33 PM UTC+1, Nick Gardner wrote:
On 11/08/2015 16:17, Tudor Hughes wrote:
I think you've mentioned this before, Graham, and to me it seems very significant but not well known. Do other places in the UK show a similar trend? The current orthodoxy among non-scientists, especially journalists, is that it's going to get stormier and that is going to cause all manner of dire effects. I even have a friend (he stood for the Greens in a local election) who insists this is what will happen. It seems that even the Good Guys have their fundamentalists and very tiresome they can be.
One study I have seen predicts the jet stream will move north but could actually be stronger in certain zones. Overall it seemed that the mean wind speed in the UK would be little changed.

I find the rhetoric coming out from 'green' NGOs and other interested
parties that the world is going to turn 'nasty' if the world warms
rather odd given our knowledge of the past climate.

Every time I hear somebody say that it is going to be a disaster if the
world warms more than say, 2C it makes me think of the Eocene Optimal.

The one that sticks out is oceanic acidification. During the Eocene the
world was warm right to the Arctic Circle and temperate diciduous
forests grew in the Artic and on Antarctic. The CO2 levels have been
estimated to be around 700 to 900 ppm and some estimates have put that
figure as high as 2000 ppm. Yet the seas were tropical over most of the
globe with coral reefs in far greater abundance than now. The world must
have been a more beautiful place with no areas frozen/ice bound for many
months every year, or as in the case of Antartic - practically life-less.

--
Nick Gardner
Otter Valley, Devon
20 m amsl
http://www.ottervalley.co.uk

A couple of points Nick.

1, The Eocene Optimal had a temperature rise nothing like as rapid as this one has been and the current rise is more likely to accelerate, than it is to slow down.

2. There were not 6 billion people around.

Where did the other 1.3 billion go? We reached 6 billion in 1999.