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Network Rail: British line threatened by climate change
Andrew Leadbetter = Chicken Little. More flooding, more big storms? No documentation.
Andrew Leadbetter intelligent. Below not so much.
We can’t accurately predict the weather next week. Yet, this is considered valid?! Haha.
10 thousand years ago, big chunks of North America were under a sheet of ice as much as a mile deep. The climate changed, the ice melted and average temperatures have continued to rise over the long term. That’s what climate change is about. Raising the temperature of the earth requires a huge amount of energy that is captured from the sun. Energy drives the global weather machine and the greater the amount of energy available, the more active the weather can be.
Serious scientists agree that climate change is real even if they disagree about the reason - burning fossil fuel, natural causes or some combination. The reality of climate change is documented by responsible organizations and readily available on the Internet. Andrew Leadbetter didn’t have to come up with his own documentation - the British Meteorological Office has already done the job.
The practical issue is how to deal with the knowledge that weather is likely to get more severe and produce more, stronger storms. Responsible organizations are looking for parts of their operations that might be vulnerable and developing plans to reduce the risk. Transit operators around New York have certainly taken this approach after ‘Sandy’ and rebuilt facilities more capable of withstanding high water situations. Trains Newswire has lots of stories on their work.
The rail lines in the story run along the coast, right on the sea wall. If they want to preserve service they will have to find engineering solutions to protect the existing line, or they will need a new route away from the sea. There is no easy answer and getting agreement on the solution will require time and eventually major investments.
Jim Norton still can’t tell the difference between weather and climate, I see…
It’s not that people who believe in global warming are stupid - it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.
Another technique used by people like the semi-esteemed Al Gore is the attempt to dismiss those who disagree with their nonsense by saying that all real scientists agree with the global warming hysteria. In fact, there are thousands of scientists who say that the whole thing is a hoax, including the gentleman who founded the Weather Channel and the former head of Greenpeace. For some reason, the unbiased, non-liberal “mainstream” media never seem to give their views any air time, nor do they report UN IPCC findings and other unimpeachable data that prove there has been no warming since 1995, that polar bear populations are INCREASING, and that claims that the polar ice caps are melting are pure fiction. But the truth IS out there, for those of us who care enough to actually find out, and not just mindlessly regurgitate MSNBC talking points.
More extreme weather has been predicted by climate scientists since the 1990’s, as the first symptom of climate change. They have been proven correct, everywhere except the USA, it seems.
The weather isn’t any more extreme than it has been at any other period in our history - witness the absolute absence of hurricanes striking the US the past several years. There were a number of huge, killer storms in the 1920’s and 30’s, and then again in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. In 2005 the global warming crowd told us that we would see more and more powerful storms, and it hasn’t happened. Our climate is most seriously affected by minute fluctuations in the sun’s output, not mankind burning coal and oil for energy. The reason our perception is skewed is because of the mass media acceptance if this fraud, and the 24 hour news cycle where misinformation is spewed out in a never ending stream.
Dan wheeler says: “The weather isn’t any more extreme than it has been at any other period in our history”. Try telling that to the good folk of Devon and Cornwall who last winter saw their homes and businesses destroyed by storms the ferocity of which has never been seen before. And we are not talking frail timber built buildings like you have in the US but stone built structures that have stood for hundreds of years. Seas creating waves taller than buildings and crashing several streets inland.
I’m not entirely convinced by those who claim “climate change” is all man-made and would have us return to the middle ages but something is happening. Go back only a little over 100 years and much of Europe was in the grip of a mini ice age. That was attributed to natural causes and much of the warming we are now seeing is the same - it’s nature’s cycles but it doesn’t mean we don’t have to adapt to deal with the challenge.