Watching her

We went to dinner at our son's house last night. He has a son and a daughter. The daughter is what used to be called a handful. But not in a disgusting way, she is very clever, sometimes irresistibly naughty and sometime as sweet as … well good.

Like this:



She drifts out to one extreme or another but finds it difficult to get back, she gets stuck in naughty quite often and needs a quiet talk to get her back to good, then again she demonstrates a sudden clever remark or skill or knowledge. Last night she showed a wonderful spanish accent, she has been doing spanish at school. I don't know whether is is mimicry or genuine mental switch to the language, but it sounded very clever to me.

And then another day I loaded a Mandarin Chinese learning program on my iPad and she got going writing the Chinese characters and the English words. She sure has a way with languages.

Climate change - ACTION

It is now without doubt that climate change is underway, and will continue unless we stop (yes stop) using more CO2 producing fossil fuels! They have to be left in the ground - whereas the industry is spending £600B yr trying to extract more… and the capital of these companies makes up a lot of the investments in your pension fund…



The recent IPCC report uses four scenarios they call RCPs. (RCP2.6, 4.5, 6.0 & 8.5). These are named according to the "forcing" scenarios, i.e. how much of the agents that cause warming actually come about. The positive forcing agents are CO2 emissions, CH4 (methane) emissions, Halo-carbons and NO2; of which CO2 is the biggest, closely followed by CH4. Overall the total radiative forcing upwards has gone like this by 1950, 1980 & 2011:



So things are going from bad to worse, quickly. Putting it another way these are the contributors:



Here's what is happening:

1 Arctic sea ice melting, adding to sea level rise



2 Increase in CO2 due to fossil fuel emissions:



3 Land and ocean surface temperature rise as a result of forcing



4 Ocean CO2 & pH fall, killing off all sea life from corals to fish:



5 Sea level change due to thermal expansion and ice melting (poles and glaciers):



6 Heating of the oceans - much more energy is stored in oceans than in the air, so it is much more important to look at sea heat content than air temperature (the 2C story…). This is hell of a lot of Joules of energy:



7 Finally here are the main effects depending on the RCP scenarios:



YOU HAVE GOT TO BELIEVE THIS STUFF. WE NEED TO ACT, OR DROWN, OR STARVE, OR START BLOODY WARS, or…

This is all a very slow process, but it is going on. We can expect by 2100 - warmer days (certainty), hot days (certainty), heat waves (very likely), heavy rain (very likely), droughts (likely), cyclones (likely) and high sea levels (London and New york under water? Likely).