"Green" policies are destroying this country

Give over with your climate change deniers bs. The only industry that is being pandered too is the green industry, expecting everyone to jump, to implement and transition to their tech in an unrealistic time frame or it will be doom.

As you seem to have all the facts,can you state what % of global emissions Ireland is responsible for.

Your last paragraph resonates. So maybe you should try focus the attention of the green party to stopping Amazon deforestation and grow beef in more efficient and sustainable grasslands here?

That'd be far better than importing on the back of a green carbon swindle.

Where did I say they couldn't be spotted. I asked who they were.

That's your answer when I point out that 7°C is way beyond even the estimates for the implausible RCP8.5 ? How exactly is one supposed to deal with the risk of tipping points that are so vaguely defined that nobody knows when they might kick in, over what timescales, and at what cost. (Before you leap to say they've been quantified just look at the error bars, and those are for initial timing not how the effects will play out). There is no answer to this sort of tactic which, I suspect, is exactly the point. It another attempt to put the willies up those who haven't scared easily enough thus far.

There is no free lunch. If we are to spend eyewatering proportion of global GDP combatting a threat, we need to know what the trade offs are. Societies have tipping points too. Spending stupid amounts of money on unproductive endeavours is exactly the sort of thing that have driven economies over the edge in the past. You want trillions of dollars because the West Antarctic ice sheet might melt over the next several thousand years, I say show me your cost benefit analysis. The idea of planning for the next several thousand years strikes me as nothing short of absurd. It would be like asking Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom to plan the widths of streets in Luxor for 21st century traffic.

RCP 8.5 is dead. It will not even exist as a possible scenario in the AR7 report. Why, why, why do you insist on banging on about it. It is a non-thing. It's not the "business as usual" scenario. If we do absolutely nothing, it will still not be the relevant scenario. You can't sprinkle a few tipping points over it to revivify your climate Frankenstein. The only explanation for your fixation on it is that your brain is stuck in a doom loop that you can't get out of. You might as well say that aliens could arrive with a giant cosmic fan heater to tip us over the edge.

Yeah, about that, I was wondering if you were talking about the Steffen et al. paper. One of the things I find deeply troubling about the "tipping points" literature is that it literally all seems to lead back to one or two people. Those would be Johan Rockström from the Potsdam Institute and Timothy Lenton of the University of Exeter. The former has built a whole career around tipping points. He is a fantastically effective self promoter. Having been around enough business startups to know a great snakeoil salesman when I see one, he perfectly fits the archetype. You literally can't dip a toe in the tipping point water without immediately encountering Rockström and Lenton. They are joint authors on your PNAS paper.

Look up the Wikipedia page on tipping points ... yep the same two people are in all the references either directly or being cited in newspaper articles. (Oh yeah, and look up the Wikipedia page history -- it's largely constructed by another PhD researcher from University of Exeter). Do a Google search for tipping points. It'll tell you all about "the" nine climate tipping points, as if they were carved on stone tablets. The tipping point literature is one giant self-referential circle jerk.

I've been reading scientific papers on bleeding edge topics in physics for decades and it starts to be obvious when something is part of a fairly accepted overarching theoretical framework, or when it's the idiosyncratic musings of a few mavericks. Yet history is replete with scientific ideas that were accepted for a time through force of personality rather than scientific merit. Are they interesting and concerning? Sure. Are they a basis for deciding to spend $4 trillion dollars per year on specific mitigation policies? Not on yer nelly.

You know what isn't funny? An unsuccessful transition away from fossil fuels mean everybody dies. It doesn't get any more unfunny than that. The stakes don't get any higher. Greens betting our future on unsustainable and non-existent technology is sheer madness.

Yes, but they have weaseled their way into green thinking as practically certain to come to pass and only solvable by highly specific and unworkable Green policy options. Ursula von der Leyen delivered her EU State of the Union address today. (You probably didn't notice, most people didn't. I watched it.). Her aspirations for the EU are to be "green, digital and geopolitical". With such vacuous sloganeering I was surprised when she mentioned that the European wind industry was facing serious challenges. Was she going to talk about its inability to deliver energy at competitive prices? Sort of ... she's spearheading a new initiative to simplify permitting. Talk about failing to notice the 600 lb gorilla in the room. Same with solar panels and EVs -- she blames Chinese state subsidies and not the fact that the country with the lowest prices is the one using slave labour and unmitigated emissions. Basically her answers are all about making everything more expensive. This is not going to win over people being bled dry by green policies. She didn't even seem to be winning over a chamber full of bored Eurocrats who seemed to spend all their time staring at their phones.

You might as well paint "The End is Nigh" on a sandwich board. If you don't have a list of specific, affordable, achievable objectives, you are not even on the starting blocks. Remember, you have to persuade the entire world to sign up to this agenda. If you are not offering an improvement in living standards for billions of those people, you have lost. This is not about laying a couple of undersea cables off the Irish coast.

No objection there. The ideology comes in the back door with the blinkered Green approach to renewables. We need to get the finger out and figure out how we're going to actually make it all work. If it's so important we can't afford to have it led by a bunch of Luddites.

You just can't help yourself. All what talk? RCP8.5 has been fiction since its inception. Frodo throwing the ring into Mount Doom doesn't mean Mordor isn't still out to get us. That's another thing I'm not losing any sleep over.

Not according to the IPCC. I mean the science papers, not Chief Doom Monger Guterres. Oh, did I mention Ursula vdL talked about "global boiling" at the State of the Union? It's obviously the new UN-mandated buzzword. While I'm at it, you just reminded me about the other new scare tactic apart from tipping points -- the new "science" of extreme weather event attribution. What you're seeing on a daily basis is not climate. Except, apparently, when it supports the narrative. Now it's attributable to climate change. There is literally no more "science" to this than if I roll a dice four times and happen to get two sixes, it makes it more likely that the dice is artificially loaded in favour of six. While absolutely true, it in no way negates the need to perform dozens or hundreds of tests to establish the actual variance and thus the significance.

Have a look at the BBC's reporting of the floods in Libya:

It's all about the climate change narrative. Not about how this is the fifth catastrophic flood in 80 years. Not about how a report just last year (Ashoor 2022) said that immediate maintenance action was required on dams in the Wadi Derna to avoid a catastrophic flood. And definitely not what the IPCC science says about flooding -- low confidence about peak flow trends over the past decades, low confidence in general statements to attribute flood events to anthropogenic climate change, low confidence about human induced changes in high river flows on the global scale. And specifically about Africa: on a continental scale, a decrease seems to dominate in Africa (Tramblay et al. 2020).

All this scare mongering while people on here rabbit on about "climate change deniers" who are "a waste of air" and "frankly an annoyance". Some of us actually read the mainstream science and almost certainly know more about it than the bunch of resident doom mongers. It's getting kinda boring at this stage.

As long as we understand that by "we" you mean the eight billion people on Earth. Not some insignificant dot in the north Atlantic that most of those people have never heard of. What are you offering them to make their lives better? (Note: "less hurricanes" is not going to sell them on the idea, even if it were true).

Hah. Speak of the devil. I covered that just as you posted it.

There absolutely is. And you're part of it.

No tipping points eh? I guess we're just imagining all that methane spewing out from the permafrost that's already started to melt...

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107632118

The Russians did it. Of course...

Of course not. Germany was very clear that they were going to rely heavily on Russian gas for their economic growth.

"Today, in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is clear that Russia’s machinations have effectively made a large number of Member States dependent on raw materials from Russia"

This bit is hilarious though. How exactly did Russia make them do anything? It's a nonsense.

I was wondering how long before someone mentioned Libya and climate change in the same breathe. Was climate change to blame for all the other floods that occured there over the decades. Did corruption and shoddy building work contribute to the dams collapsing. Was there any management issues in how the sluices were controlled. Was there an early warning system in place for the residents if the dams failed.

Search for "tipping" ... phrase not found. Your point?

Was climate change also responsible for the 1959 Derna floods or the 1941 floods before it or the 1986 floods? The area has a history of massive infrequent flooding events.

This is much more an event attributable to poor infrastructure (old and what seems like badly maintained earthen dams) in an area prone to significant flooding events throughout history. Rolling out the climate change is the only explanation narrative is so lazy, but common these days.

Nonsense. The Greens got what 5% of the popular vote in the last election. They are the looney fringe.

Yes, Green policies ARE trying their best to destroy this country.....and any other country that tolerates their foolishness.

Look, Ladies and Gentlemen. Every cult, religion, cause, -ism etc. has always had its fanatics, often referred to as zealots or loonies. Yes, the climate is changing and we have to get used to it but this latest -ism is no different so it has its own army of fanatics subdivided into various "platoons" such as the likes of JSO, XR, Friends of the Earth, Thunberg's Infant-ry, The Fridays for Future Wan-Corps, Major Eamonn Ryan and his Green Paranoids, the Get-rid of-the-Farting-Cows Brigade, the Besotted-with-Leaves Outfit, plus one or two outliers on here and, of course, RTE's DoomMeister himself, George Lee, fresh from his several-times-a-day promotions of those crazy Microsoft Excel predictions that came from the obsessive self appointed Covid Prophets of Doom all done in the name of putting fear into the population.

So, relax everyone. Take a deep breath. Don't live in fear. Ignore the crazy Excel predictions that start with an agenda and work backwards. Even an Accrington Stanley FC fan and moderately experienced Excel user could produce a spreadsheet that would predict his team to win the English Premier League by 2030. Not going to happen.

Bear in mind that if every man, woman and child in Ireland did exactly as all the fanatic "platoons" put together demand it would not amount to a hill of green beans in stopping or slowing the changes in climate. That's the reality.

So, if you are going to borrow 50 grand don't waste it on "retrofitting" your lovely houses and installing useless and noisy "heat pumps". Install that en-suite you've always wanted, a bright new front porch or a conservatory and don't forget that Mick O'Leary has a large fleet of jets waiting to transport you to your dream destinations. But, if you still believe that the Irish Sea will soon be lapping its waves halfway up the Sugar Loaf then, by all means, build an Ark instead.