Not surprised anymore to be honest.
During that thunderstorm last night everything went absolutely nuts for about 10-15 minutes and then stopped. Wind, hail, thunder, lightening. Not far off a full on squall. Then nothing.
Thatās what the missus is always complaining about 
Especially the wind.
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Because Iām talking at your level.
Come thatās well above your league! 
Leaving aside the jokes, get well soon!
The good news? Mankind is getting closer to wiping itself out.
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Hopefully not before we overtake Man U for PL wins
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That reminds me of a quip from a comedian (might have been Frankie Boyle) who said that people should stop worrying about saving the Earth. The Earth doesnāt care about us. We are merely a passing irritant like the dinosaurs. We should be more worried about saving our own sorry arses.
The dinosaurs didnāt knowingly destroy the planet, though.
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I read an article a while ago about various extinction events and it would appear that many are related to individual species (or, at least, orders) wiping out entire classes of animal and fundamentally switching the environmental makeup of the planet.
Of course the difference is that plants, for example, were unaware that they were filling the atmosphere with free oxygen. Humans denude the environment and pollute the atmosphere and merely shrug. The tragedy of the commons made global.
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Such environmental changes result in a change in selective pressures and that opportunity tends to get filled, incredibly rapidly (on evolutionary terms) by a very small group, albeit one that diverges extensively and rapidly (again, in evolutionary terms). That rapid emergence completely changes the competitive landscape and puts additional pressures on species who might otherwise have competed adequately if it was just environmental change they were dealing with, hence extinction ends up become far wider of a phenomenon.
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civilizations have been trying to find ways to live (in balance?) with our environment since the advent of fire. Weāre just another version of this. more modern and more complicated.
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Gigantic solar farms of the future might impact how much solar power can be generated on the other side of the world.
ā¦
Something similar happened when we simulated the effects of huge solar farms in other hotspots in Central Asia, Australia, south-western US and north-western China ā each led to climate changes elsewhere. For instance, huge solar farms covering much of the Australian outback would make it sunnier in South Africa, but cloudier in the UK, particularly during summer.
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this is a massive change of landscape for the australian political enviromentā¦
surely we can now get bipartisan support to turn this joint into one big solar panelā¦
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That would produce more electricity than the annual global demand.
weāre talking about āglobal warming, rightā
how much radiant heat would a massive solar array produce over/above that of the earth, which would raise the temperatures in the area?
Iāve oft wondered if the warming of the earth is mostly contributed to the amount land we have cleared of vegetation which absorb the sunās rays, instead of reflecting it back into the atmosphere
itās always 5āC cooler in the forestā¦how much rainforest have we cleared in the Amazon, as an example. deforestation.
Not mostly, but it is absolutely a contributing factor. One of the scary feedback loops is that ice caps reflect a lot of heat back into space, far more than open water. Disappearing ice caps increase the rate at which the ocean warms, which increases the rate at which ice caps disappear.
It is alarming how much the Arctic ice cap has changed in the past 30 years, much more than a simple extent map actually shows. The CCG used to consider certain areas impassable, because of ā1000-year iceā, thick ice masses with dense crystals that had been frozen for 1000+ years, becoming so hard as to slow an icebreaker down to a crawl. Those areas used to be quite large, and they would maintain maps of where they were, along with 100-year ice, and so forth. Routes they would maintain would generally be where the ice clears in the summer, where an icebreaker is able to sail at close to normal passage speeds.
Today, it isnāt really a meaningful concept. It is difficult to find 1000-year ice, it is still out there but not in the same uniform masses, and it is now far away from any desired routes in CCG terms, closer to the poles. A 1996 policy paper identified that Canada did not have enough ice breakers to maintain all desired routes (aging fleet), we now have basically the same number of ice breakers and have excess capacity.
The St. Lawrence doesnāt even normally freeze any more.
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pretty soon, Megatron is going to thaw out and weāre going to need to call Optimus Prime.
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Ever seen Fortitude? There might be much smaller but no less deadly nastiness buried in that ice.
canāt say that I have. will add it to the list
tomorrow starts our annual cold snap. supposed to reach -15āC by the weekend, albeit about a month later than usual this year.
Went out fishing last Sunday for steelhead, I didnāt even wear gloves. WTF is going on.
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