Global Warming - A lot of hot air

[Mr E]

and what exactly are yours?

And yours are..........

Doesn't add to the debate - the question was asked to a statement presented.

This is the real nub of the issue here - the debate spirals into personal statements and positions, whether here on t'internet, in the media, or elsewhere. Can we please stick to proper science and reasoned debate?

 

[hawk20]

Bearing in mind that the biggest tax on cars is the fuel tax which is now over £3 per gallon. Take an average motorist doing say 12,000 miles per year and needing 400 gallons at 30mpg average. That is £1200. Then up to £440 of VED (rising later to £455) making over £1,600 p.a. AND that is from after tax income. So he/she needs to earn over £2,000 p.a just to pay fuel duty and VED. For a lot of people on fairly average mid twenties incomes that is one pound in every twelve they earn.

Then there is all the parking and speeding charges so often sold with environmental messages and the congestion charge.

And soon to come the 'showroom tax' on new cars; up to £950 in the first year of ownership.

Enough!

 

[Dieselman]

Bearing in mind that the biggest tax on cars is the fuel tax which is now over £3 per gallon. Take an average motorist doing say 12,000 miles per year and needing 400 gallons at 30mpg average. That is £1200. Then up to £440 of VED (rising later to £455) making over £1,600 p.a. AND that is from after tax income. So he/she needs to earn over £2,000 p.a just to pay fuel duty and VED. For a lot of people on fairly average mid twenties incomes that is one pound in every twelve they earn.

Then there is all the parking and speeding charges so often sold with environmental messages and the congestion charge.

And soon to come the 'showroom tax' on new cars; up to £950 in the first year of ownership.

Enough!

Only for high emission vehicles, and that applies to increased VED as well.

It's really easy to avoid the additional charges, just chose a lower emission car. Hardly difficult, is it. The specs are in the brochures and every showroom.

How do speeding fines get dressed up as 'environment' charges.??

They are not a tax based on anything at all, they are a fine for breaking the law..

Any Government needs to raise funds through taxation, which is necessary but always unpopular.
The tax on road fuel hasn't changed much in the last 5 years, so why is is more of an issue now than previously.?

 

[Ade B]

Tricky to stay on topic... the jump from climate change to speed cameras..

There seems to be no forum concensus on 'green' taxes other than VED. My quick google trawl has thrown up a couple of speculative articles on future tax systems similar to the individual carbon credits system alluded to on another thread.

My gut hypothesis is that the relationship between tax and climate change is not (yet) as widespread as people think.

Carbon credits are presumably in there (which from what I read is a rickety system at best). - is that a 'tax' on industry which gets passed on to us as consumers..?


Ade

 

[Dieselman]

Carbon credits are presumably in there (which from what I read is a rickety system at best). - is that a 'tax' on industry which gets passed on to us as consumers..?

Surely that would depend on whether the industry reacted to the levy and reduced it's emissions.
If it does then there will be no additional charges, if not, then it's either impossible to do in which case the goods/service will cost more, or it's badly run.

It makes sense for any business to save money if it can.

 

[glojo]

Tricky to stay on topic... the jump from climate change to speed cameras..

There seems to be no forum concensus on 'green' taxes other than VED. My quick google trawl has thrown up a couple of speculative articles on future tax systems similar to the individual carbon credits system alluded to on another thread.

My gut hypothesis is that the relationship between tax and climate change is not (yet) as widespread as people think.

Carbon credits are presumably in there (which from what I read is a rickety system at best). - is that a 'tax' on industry which gets passed on to us as consumers..?


Ade

I agree but am baffled by this yuppy carbon footprint mumbo jumbo. How can anyone but anyone compensate for a flight from here to the US and back? How much carbon dioxide would that use and how could they possibly offset that amount? It is surely mumbo jumbo?

How many very large aircraft are involved when the US president travels abroad? Nah we are being conned.

If folks want to go abroad on a holiday then so what? If a pop group wants to perform on stage for any type of charity, then so what, but to say they have offset their carbon usage is to me mumbo jumbo.

I also note how folks are steering away from the topic of the thread and its title 'Global Warming' Are we perhaps all leaning towards 'Climate Change'?

My posts may be worded as statements but they should be considered more as questions.

John

John

 

[normanr]

The usual SNIDE remark from Dieselman you seem to enjoy contradicting what people say all the time on this forum.

People are sick and tired of all the expense to run a car now and to say change your car, not that simple I want to do just that but can't sell my car because the larger car market has crashed.

So get your facts right before you start telling us what we should be doing,
check the second hand car market for starters.

 

[Dieselman]

Hmm, thanks normanr.

I take it I didn't agree with your thoughts so you will have a personal dig.

Well sorry, I wont be bullied by you....

You are spouting that the cost of running a car is soaring, in what way other than the cost of fuel increasing.

From your avatar you run a 1999 car. This isn't affected by the new VED charges so it's having no bearing on the fact that you say you can't sell it.

Please be accurate with your postings.

If the value of cars has gone down then the cost of the car you wish to replace it with will also have gone down, thus you may actually be in a better position than previously.

At what point did I say 'change your car'.

Hawk mentioned the yet to be introduced 'additional first year tax'. That is easy to avoid.......

CHOOSE A LOWER EMISSION VEHICLE....!!!

Just to clarify another of your points.
Yes I do sometimes have a different point of view to people on this forum that want to just moan and rant about the politics of running a car.

Cars cost money and taxing on emissions has been mooted for a long time.

 

[Ade B]

Surely that would depend on whether the industry reacted to the levy and reduced it's emissions.
If it does then there will be no additional charges, if not, then it's either impossible to do in which case the goods/service will cost more, or it's badly run.

It makes sense for any business to save money if it can.

Fair enough..

Building Regulations offer an interesting take on this. The logic is that they cannot reverse engineer installations/building fabric but they do insist that any replacement or new works comply with current legislation.

In theory this makes for zero additional cost as worn out or obsolete stuff gets replaced in a 'natural' cycle anyway. A simple example would be a domestic central heating boiler - you cannot now install anything other than a condensing boiler which is purportedly more efficient (and saves on our gas bills). Win win?

Ade

 

[normanr]

It is not a personal dig just check a lot of your other replys to forum questions you have the happy knack up upsetting people by your I know it all attitude.

It is none of your business what car I am running and what I want is to buy a newer car but can't sell my car because of the large car hype that is going around,not everybody is conversant with the new rules so that is why the car market for larger cars has been effected.

 

[st4]

And yours are..........

Doesn't add to the debate - the question was asked to a statement presented.

This is the real nub of the issue here - the debate spirals into personal statements and positions, whether here on t'internet, in the media, or elsewhere. Can we please stick to proper science and reasoned debate?

A BSc (Hons) in Chemistry. We even did a course on green chemistry. Suprisingly its very relevant to this area

From BBC news website

"Methane is the second most important gas causing man-made climate change. Each molecule causes about 25 times more warming than a molecule of CO2, but it survives for shorter times in the atmosphere before being broken down". Its actually 275 times more potent but never mind...

 

[TonyVianoAmbiente]

I also note how folks are steering away from the topic of the thread and its title 'Global Warming' Are we perhaps all leaning towards 'Climate Change'?

To me it has always been climate change. I'm not worried if it gets a few degrees hotter in the UK - that is something we could probably cope with fairly easily.

In my professional career, what concerned me were issues such as sea level rise, increased storminess leading to ever more severe waves attacking our sea defences and changes in rainfall patterns resulting in increased frequency and severity of flooding.

Sea levels are increasing steadily and the rate of sea level rise is getting faster. Estimates of sea level rise by 2100 were around 0.4m to 0.6m when I worked in that field and ten years on, those estimates are now in the 1.0m to 1.3m range.

What concerns me is that the estimates of sea level rise are looking far too conservative because of the effect of feedback loops such as the exposure of permafrost to the air. The resulting methane emissions are 25 times more powerful than the same amount of carbon dioxide:

Methane rise points to wetlands

This just one of many feedback loops that aren't represented in climate models. Further reductions in the area of ice will expose even more earth to the atmosphere and even methane-free soil will contribute to climate change by absorbing heat from the sun where ice and snow reflects it back.

Sea level rise may therefore be significantly higher than the current predictions. Even if the predictions are correct, we will lose (for example) much of the most highly populated area of Bangladesh, the whole of the Maldives and even significant parts of Florida. In the UK, many coastal defences will be abandoned as impracticable and the sea will be allowed to flood large areas around our coasts. The Norfolk coastal defences are already being abandoned to the sea at Happisburgh and large parts of the Norfolk Broads will become saline over time.

Our domestic food production depends crucially on low lying lands in the Fens of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, much of which is below
current sea levels and is critically dependent on pumped drainage. The need for pumping is steadily getting greater and some of the land is beginning to go saline, reducing crop yields. Eventually, mush of this land will have to be given to the sea making the UK even more dependent on imported food - we grow less than 40% of our needs.

So that's why I am concerned about sea levels.

My second concern is increased storminess, which has also played havoc with sea defences. Back in the 1990s I was concerned about an increase in wave heights since the mid-1980s. Waves are driven by the wind blowing over the sea. The harder the wind blows, and the longer it blows, the bigger the waves. So the increased wave heights were a sign of increased storminess.

The wave heights have continued to increase, and the average is now more than 15% higher than in the mid-1980s, and still increasing. The result is that more beach sand is being washed away than ever before, to the point where (for example) 70% of the sand on beaches in Wales has been lost. Previously, there had been an equilibrium where winter storm waves washed it away, and small summer waves gradually washed it back, but it has now disappeared from the coastal zone and cannot return. You can find sand with a dredger and pump it ashore, but that is very expensive and it tends not to stay there for more than a few years.

The high waves also batter the sea defences with a ferocity for which they were not designed. New defences are designed to be stronger but cost so much they are unaffordable except where they protect towns and cities, so that's another reason for some coastal lands to be given to the sea. Are you beginning to see a trend here?

The third concern I had and still have is the massive change we have seen in rainfall patterns, and that change is ongoing and apparently getting faster.

For many decades, prediction of inland floods was based on historical data. If you had good data, it was reasonably easy to predict the extreme floods that river flood defences needed to be designed for.

In the 1980s, all that began to change, and rapidly. We now have storm events with rainfall whose ferocity is unprecedented in the UK, and they are increasingly getting worse. We are seeing several inches of rain falling in only a couple of hours; this was something that was previously associated with the tropics. Prediction of flooding and design of flood defences has become much more problematic as a result.

These intense bursts of rain cause flash flooding, and river systems that worked well when rainfall was less intense are now overwhelmed on a regular basis. The flash flooding is made much worse by people paving over their gardens. Previously the water soaked into the ground and was only released slowly into the drains. Now, it all goes straight into the drains and the drains simply cannot cope. The combination of increased rainfall intensity and the unwanted results of urbanisation are a very powerful combination.

Some people say this is just natural variation. Well, it isn't, because the changes are far in excess of any natural variation that has ever been recorded. Lots of people want to put their head in the sand and pretend that none of this is happening. Some people admit it is happening but deny any link to human activity, seizing on a tiny minority of scientists, most of whom are funded by the oil companies, who say it has nothing to do with us. Some people ask why they should even care, when they will be long dead before the sea rises.

There are a lot of climate change deniers who do it from ignorance, but there are plenty of people who should know better yet are prepared to take the pieces of silver on offer from vested interests who want to make a fast buck before it all goes sour on them.

Which group you are in depends partly on your knowledge, partly on your willingness to learn what is happening, and partly on your conscience. I have had the benefit of seeing more of the research than most people, having commissioned some of it myself on your behalf. And I have absolutely no doubt about where it is all leading, and about what lies at the root of it.

I don't expect I will convince anyone who already has their head in the sand, but I would encourage anyone with an open mind to learn more about it. The Rough Guide book recommended earlier in the thread by Grober would be a very good starting point:

Try this:- The Rough Guide to Climate Change (Paperback)
by Robert Henson of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/
buy it here
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Climate-Cha...ooks&qid=1211412110&sr=1-1&tag=amazon0e9db-21

 

[Colin_b]

Tony, good explanation. But there is something missing.

That is the 'so what' question. We have problems with flood defences and the like, which will killl lots of people - maybe a few million globally.

In the same time, how many people will have died from malaria, aids, malnutrition and indeed smoking?

I can't get it clear why 'global warming is the greatest threat to mankind, and sea level rising a few metres doesn't seem species threatening, beyond inconvenient.

Homo Sapiens is unique in the existence of the universe (as far as we know) because we can evolve much faster than any other species, thanks to a 1250cc brain and communication of learing and experience.

Mankind will adapt quickly to changing CO2 levels and climates, as will nature, albeit more slowly. And yes, there will be casualties, but their niche will be filled.

Fundamentally, why is global warming so bad - the greatest threat? A serious question, and one that seems to be difficult to get anything approaching a concise answer to, beyond 'MMGW is bad'

 

[glojo]

Plus of course we have had this type of flooding before. Were we once joined with those 'orrible folks from across the channel.

Regards
John

 

[hawk20]

Tony I suggest you read the US senate report quoted earlier and Lawson's book and then you will worry less.

According to core samples, 8,000 of the last 10,000 years were warmer than we are now. Climate changing is nothing new. Happened throughout history. I remember in the 60's and 70's listening to people like you, just as alarmist, just as convincing from a few titbits of information, arguing we were going into a new ice age. Global cooling then.

When most of the major scientists at all the top universities can agree it will be time to worry. At the moment as the Senate hearing clearly shows we are nowhere near that position. For goodness sake they can't even predict next Tuesday's weather, let alone the weather in a hundred years time.

 

[DieselE]

Yes I do sometimes have a different point of view to people on this forum

Viva la difference.

If we all had the same views it would not be much of a forum.

 

[recycled]

Only for high emission vehicles, and that applies to increased VED as well.

It's really easy to avoid the additional charges, just chose a lower emission car. Hardly difficult, is it. The specs are in the brochures and every showroom.

How do speeding fines get dressed up as 'environment' charges.??

They are not a tax based on anything at all, they are a fine for breaking the law..

Any Government needs to raise funds through taxation, which is necessary but always unpopular.
The tax on road fuel hasn't changed much in the last 5 years, so why is is more of an issue now than previously.?

read the rules


http://www.mbclub.co.uk/forums/announcement.php?f=17

 

[Dieselman]

Err, you've got me there recycled.....????

Looks like you're pressing for an argument on an old thread.

isn't this what john posted about.? shame really.

 

[recycled]

just do not like being victimised and singled out.
you have made posts on politics, sports, e.tc. so i suggest you read the rules as well, as i will be.
I do not want an argument and that is what john posted. by singling me out you seem to be the one to want to start it.
Anyway, forget about it. i shall be .