Ah James, my house got flooded but it is a cute dog. It’s not the end of the world

James I usually comment on the obvious link to climate change but why bother!? Denial has let it get to this. Cute dog. Next time he may not be so lucky. May as well appreciate him now :)

He is a lovely dog

Theresa – climate change is not at fault, in so far as we are at the mercy of the weather. What is at fault is improper planning – building of flood plains, failure to provide & maintain adequate drainage, use of materials which prevent drainage etc

Would be funnier if it was a cat.

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/187/467304611_22fe70dcd6_o.jpg

I know that dog and he is a decent hard working sort who never drew the dole and never hurt nobody in his life. Ok he has many bitches around the city and has been known to go dogging but who hasn’t? Leave him alone. Politicians and bondholders blah blah blah

Joanne the changing climate is showing them up alright. Wonder how they plan to deal with the increase in these unwelcome weather events.

Joanne, too true, my son went to UL, one year part of the campus flooded, my son asked a lecturer why they built an a flood plane the reply he got was like a master card advert priceless. “because they didn’t listen to me” . we are extending our towns and cities far too much. Not only by building on flood planes but of green fields creating a run off that would normally be soaked u by the soil

People whose rented accommodation has been damaged. If the council have a option that is cheaper than futile repairs they should go for it.

But you are forgetting about social segregation remember? You can’t just move these people willy nilly wherever there are houses. That would lead to uproar among people who want a peaceful life, and would surely lower housing prices further. It sounds a bit callous, but it is true

If people want to be able to choose where they live they should pay for it. If living off state funds they should be prepared to take what is offered. This is the way it works for those who work for a living

Not everyone who lives in council housing is unemployed. That’s such a generalisation.

I never mentioned not working. But if people want to choose where they want to live they need to either make decisions to make that happen, or live with the consequences of choices they have made which make it impossible.

Fintan – regardless of employment status, if someone is in housing provided by the council they are living off the state. Putting a roof over your head is the single biggest cost of living. People renting privately & paying mortgages struggle to do this every day.

You can still get plenty of state assistance while employed

Joanne everyone in the Dail, the Seanad and every civil servant is living off the state. Why are you targeting people who cannot afford to enter the property market and accusing them only of living off the state. Do you claim childrens allowance or any other state allowance or benefit? If you do you are also living off the state.

Patricia – I get no benefits from the state and pay a marginal tax rate of 52%. Regardless, if the only benefit someone gets is the children’s allowance they are hardly ‘living off’ benefits. Where state handouts cover the cost of housing, and hence make up the majority of your income, you are living off the state at the expense of those who are not

Joanne, are you getting dizzy looking down on everyone who ” lives often state”?

Off(Feckin typo)

I’ve had a few shags in Lahinch

The Irish people helped the banks stay in business…..is there no way they can pull together and help those same people that kept them in their jobs. Some of those people were flooded before and may not even have insurance. Just a thought.

That is true Deirdre. The Banks only take charity, they don’t give it. As for the Insurance companies they are just another gang of swindlers. They will not pay up either.

Did you really mean “bail” or should it more aptly be “bale”

Sorry I meant Bale not Bail (I’m dyslexic)

This has got more to do with poor town and flood planning than anything else. Even if flooding and rising sea levels is a result of fossil fuel burning, it is not something new that we are only hearing about now. The Irish government and councils won’t get up off their arse and rectify the problems caused by building on flood plains and lack of construction of flood defences, It doesn’t even start there though because of the shite they have go through with the EU on budgets, there isn’t very much funding provided to planning for the future.

At the end of the day flooding isn’t going to get better anytime soon, and large scale use of fossil fuels isn’t going anywhere either. I think that if the government is going to let companies like Shell exploit our gas and oil resources we should at least increase taxation on what they get so we can provide money to invest in infrastructure to defend against the results of climate change.

It is hard to accurately predict what future weather patterns will be like, but you can be sure that if it is beside the coast, it will probably be underwater

@michael. I didn’t know whether to green or red thumb your comment. What is an environmentalist?

Hey Foxy, climate change is exactly why the flooding and extreme weather is happening far more regularly. Watch this documentary, it really opened my eyes to the extent of damage us humans have inflicted on the world. But watch and judge for yourself,

http://youtu.be/SWRHxh6XepM

It’s terrible for those people whose homes have been destroyed. I can’t imagine the heartbreak and worry they are going through. I hope something is done to protect them from this happening again.

I agree David Icke is a bit on the loony fringe! I prefer the scientific approach myself, as epitomised by the IPCC process. It is understood that warm air holds more moisture – on the massive level of regional and global weather, this translates into more intense storms with heavier rainfall or snowfall. This is a basic of meteorology – we all know that warmer climes are prone to the kind of storms and hurricanes we don’t get in temperate climes. That’s why climatologists said that storms could get more intense because of global warming, and indeed we have seen that across the globe.

So while, because of the complexity of global weather patterns it can be difficult to prove that a particular event is linked to warmer air, I know what I think – you only have to turn the telly on!

Sea levels are not a cause for alarm.1 mm a year in the middle oceans is hardly a disaster.

“During the past centuries, the present and the near-future sea level changes have been and will be dominated by three main variables; glacial eustasy, thermal expansion and redistribution of water masses, all of which can be handled as to rates and amplitudes. Today, the contribution of ice melting and thermal expansion seems to be in the order of 1 mm/year (10 cm/cy). It surely has to be well below 10 cm/year (or 1 m/cy), which was the mean rate of glacial eustasy at the maximum rate of ice melting after the Ice Age. Thermal expansion may amount to 1 mm/yr in the open oceans, decreases with depth towards the coasts, and will always be zero at the shore. Redistribution of water masses (horizontal eustasy) is another prime factor. The present rate of sea level changes lies between ±0.0 and +1.0 mm/yr (higher rates represent local effects or mistakes), and is likely to remain so for the next century.”
From
Nils-Axel Mörner completed his Ph.D at Stockholm University in Sweden with postdoctoral studies at Western University in London, Canada. He was the head of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics at Stockholm University. He was an IPCC author and has published more than 500 papers in reputed journals and several books. He has presented some 550 papers at international conferences. He is a world expert on sea level changes.

It is instructive to note that over the past century and a half of ever-increasing fossil fuel utilization and atmospheric CO2 buildup, the frequency of the most intense category of hurricanes in the Northeastern Gulf of Mexico has been lower than it was over the prior five millennia, which speaks volumes about the climate-alarmist claim that continued anthropogenic CO2 emissions will lead to more frequent super cyclones and hurricanes.”

Lane et al. (2011)

Well he is a long retired elderly gentleman no longer working in his area (paleogeophysics), and he is in a tiny minority with his views on sea level rise. His claim that sea levels are not rising has been criticised for ignoring correctly calibrated satellite altimeter records, all of which show that sea levels are rising.

Mind you, perhaps we should listen to him as he is also a big advocate of “dowsing”!

I do think that his work being included along with the 800 or so scientists who contribute to the rigorous IPCC process does show the openness and inclusivity of that process. Unfortunately, in my view on reading the evidence, his observations have been rebutted by others in his own field and other fields related to this matter.

Here for example is what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Center of the USA says:
“Local communities are growing more concerned about the effects of sea-level rise with global warming. To assess local sea-level rise, the NOAA Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services maintains a National Water Level Observation Network of 200 stations throughout the United States. Using at least 30 years of data from 117 of these locations, NOAA analysts calculate relative sea-level trends. The relative sea-level trends for about half of these stations are above 2 mm/yr, which is above the IPCC current global sea-level rise estimates.”

Ipsum, I cannot believe what you have said about the frequency of intense hurricanes. You must be aware that climatologists predicted (and not even with high certainty so why act like you caught them out when they admit their predictions are not 100%) anyway, they predicted more intense storms, NOT a greater frequency of storms – they specifically said not more storms! D’uh!

Who is yer man Lane anyway?

Surely fans of sea level alarmism must wonder why their guru Al Gore bought a $7million plus beach-front house ?

I suppose the other thing is that not all scientists are working on the same things – they are not a homogenous body! So like your friend Lane, others are also working on this to try to find evidence – here’s a link to papers that find evidence of the link between global warming and increased intensity of storms etc. http://www.skepticalscience.com/extreme-weather-global-warming-intermediate.htm

But as I said you cannot say “They” said anything until you have a consensus on this link from the long and rigorous processes of the IPCC that everybody has signed off on, and the IPCC have not as far as I know said anything about this.

So thankfully a lot of highly qualified scientists are studying this area and the results should be interesting…

I don’t really care about Al Gore, and for me sea level rise is not the most scary aspect of all this by a long shot. It is the fact that what we are emitting now will continue to have an effect for hundreds of years, and once we reach tipping points we do not really know what the domino effects could bring.

No, what we appear to be suffering now (eg more intense storms and flooding, life-threatening and record-breaking heat in Australia, massive forest fires, mind-boggling ever-worsening drought in California) are just the very beginning and the tip of the iceberg.

When we start to get the feedback loops and domino effects – that is when the sh1t will really hit the fan and sea level rises, although they will be severe for some major cities, will likely be the least of our worries. Feeding ourselves in this brave new world will be the real challenge – and nobody will be exempt from the effects.

Morm you do Harrp on sometimes. Credit where credit is due. Where is Stephen Fry? I prefer his avatar.

I doubt the average joe has even heard of HAARP

Well Patricia there seems to be plenty of hot air around these parts, so probably by balloon.

ANGELS DON‘T PLAY THIS HAARP

Almost all the models from the “97%” have been flat out wrong. And all because they omit the influence of the sun, should believe the 97% who are wrong, or the 3% who are proven right.? Will we get another ‘Maunder Minimum’ ?only time will tell.

Pierre Gosselin!!! You cannot be serious!!! He is not a climatologist. He is an engineer who blogs!
As for the sun, do you not think climatologists and all of the other thousands of earth scientists who contributed to the last IPCC report are not a bit more capable than Mr. Gosselin or yourself in understanding the role of the sun in all of this!!! And they have shown that the sun is not the cause of the recent fast rate of warming of our planet.

The sun has been in a cooling phase for the last 35 years – god help us when it starts to heat up again.

As regards the models of the 97% of scientists who support manmade climate change, firstly the models have been surprisingly accurate, and secondly you are not admitting that models admit openly their level of confidence in their own accuracy and are developing over time.

However, it is absolutely untrue that science relies on models to demonstrate the fact of global warming and that this is related to CO2 emissions – that is proven by hard scientific observations and evidence.

If you are going to go against the huge body of work that has contributed to this consensus, then you had better provide some very good evidence to back up your view.

The link is to a NASA video – NASA are well aware of the effects of the sun and how this needs to be taken into account when considering climate change, as is every other serious scientist working on the climate. NASA fully supports the view, from sound evidence, that CO2 emissions are the only possible explanation for the unprecedented rate of global warming in recent times – they have really looked into this and the evidence is there – the rate of rise of CO2 and the rate of rise of global warming match!!!

The sun has been in a cooling stage for the last 35 years by the way, whatever about right now, and over the last 35 years global warming has continued to rise.