17 thoughts on “Appalling forest fires in Southern Europe”
Arthur the Cat
A warming world only means hotter on average. Locally it means weirder. I wonder what odds the bookies would give for flash flooding killing people in Tamanrasset?
Jonathan
Saw the weather on ITV early on this morning and the story is that although July has been colder and wetter than normal, we’ve actually had a hotter than average Summer because we had some higher temps in June.
So, don’t believe the evidence of your own lying eyes…
Boganboy
Minimum temperature tonight is predicted to be 11 degrees C. So Oz is warming up, as one’d expect since it’s about a month since the shortest day.
Presumably summer’ll be up around the 40’s mark. As usual.
As for the bushfires, since the Greens stop us burning off, as the abos used to do, no doubt we’ll have some beauts.
Addolff
IPCC AR 6 states that out of 33 man made ‘climate impact driver catetgories*:
There are 5 they have high confidence of effect apparent now,
There are 4 they have medium confidence of effect apparent now,
There are 24 that show no effect apparent now.
It’ll all kick off by 2050 or 2100 though and all the evidence and ‘projections’ are based on RCP 8.5 !!!!!!!!!
*Snow, ice, rain, ocean salinity, CO2 level, cyclones, fire weather, etc. etc.
Yes, June was caused by CLIMATE CHANGE ARMAGEDDON. July was just the weather. So we still have to PANIC.
On another subject, I’ve been hearing that the BBC have decided that ground temperatures are now what matters and comparing them to temperatures that used to be used – air temperatures. Not sure how much truth there is in this.
Tim the Coder
@AtC
Drowning is, surprisingly, a common cause of death in deserts.
People camp in a dry water course. 30 miles away, a thunderstorm deposits a downpour. Flash flood. Exit campers.
Steve Crook
In other news climate scientists have said that fog may get so heavy people are unable to stand up in it.
Grist
I find the current topic of climate change (nee Globule Warming) must be helpful for religious scholars who wonder what it was like a couple of thousand years ago when Jesus strolled around the Middle East turning water into wine and parting seas.
“You know that Jesus bloke? The one whose Mum was the local bike.”
“Yeah, did you hear what he did the other day at Fred’s party? Only pissed everywhere!”
“No, really?”
“Yeah, he got drunk and pissed in all the water they had there and told em he’d turned it into wine!”
“What a larf. What did they do with it?”
“Threw it all over im, course!”
“What’d he do then?”
“Said they shouldn’t a dunnit cos he can kill em all just by looking at em. Said ‘is Mum was a virgin really and that meant this big bloke called God was really is Dad, so he can do anything.”
“Load of bollocks!”
“I dunno, some people are scared of ‘im now”
“Really? Hang on a minute, I think I’ve got an idea…”
Bongo
Around 1/3rd million wind turbines in the world now.
Has anyone estimated their effect on global average wind speeds – even a small effect will increase the probability of holding patterns of warm dry weather lasting longer before being broken up by wind movements.
It’s an emergency, so I’d expect some scientist to have computed it. Even a small difference can affect the weather.
Addolff
Bongo. Short answer – Yes:
“As wind flows past the rotating blades of a wind turbine, some of its momentum is devoted to moving the blades and generating electricity. As a result, the downwind flow is slower and more turbulent. Assessing the characteristics of this wake has been identified as one of the grand challenges that wind energy science needs to face to drive innovation in the sector and meet future energy demand3. Wakes are particularly complex: their characteristics depend on the incoming wind speed, wind direction, and turbulence, as well as turbine operation and associated parameters. In convective conditions, wakes tend to be eroded rapidly by ambient turbulence. In stably stratified conditions with weak turbulence, wakes tend to exhibit a large wind speed deficit and persist for long distances downwind. For example, aggregated wakes from multiple turbines, i.e., wind plant wakes, can extend more than 50 km downwind of a wind plant, offshore in stable conditions. In addition to the wind speed deficit and the enhancement of turbulence at the heights above the surface corresponding to the wind turbine rotor, wakes can affect local surface conditions. For example, nocturnal surface temperatures can rise because of turbine-induced mixing of the nocturnal inversion”.
There’s something they leave out of that, Addolff. Inefficiency. Turbines do not catch all the energy of the wind passing through them. Turbulence in the airflow. And that turbulence is transmitted to the surrounding air & continues downwind of the turbines. That’s loss of energy of an airstream that otherwise would have been unimpeded. But the energy has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? And obviously it comes out as heat. So, wherever you get a windfarm you will always get a rise in the temperature of the local airstream that otherwise wouldn’t occur. It is of course very slight but it has a great deal of volume. That in itself may be sufficient to alter wind patterns & convection flows.
bloke in spain
On the fires thing, I’d maintain the biggest culprit is the lack of goats & environmentalists’ obsession with rewilding. I was looking at some of those photos from Rhodes. Olive trees. Up near the house in the mountains, looks very similar. Except there’s no scrub growing between the trees. The goats eat it all. Because the Alpajarras is still a pretty poor area & the locals still keep goats. My guess, with all the tourist money floating around Rhodes these days, the locals have given up on goats in favour of milking foreigners. Much the same as they have on the coast here. And guess what we get in hot weather? Although, strangely, hardly any this year, so far.
bloke in spain
It’s worth remembering that none of these are natural landscapes. Haven’t been for thousands of years. Now, thanks to changing habits, some areas are going back to natural. And natural is periodic wildfires.
bloke in spain
Here’s a research study for any university “scientist” wants to get his grubby paws on some grant money. Map economic growth against prevalence of wild fires. I’m willing to bet you’ll find a correlation. Two or maybe three reasons. Reduction in grazing. Reduction in the collection of firewood. Increase in the amount of ground cover vegetation due to the desire to make areas look more “natural”. (And reduce erosion? Erosion’s a natural process. That’s how those arroyos got there in the first place.)
Climate change simply means that there will be winners and losers. The UK could be a winner: I read a prediction in a magazine that suggested the UK will end up with a climate like Madeira. Does not seem so bad. I could live with that.
Bloke in North Dorset
Addolff
July 27, 2023 at 9:39 am
We need to update the butterfly effect metaphor to windmills which probably means we need a scale to measure the turbulence from a windmill relative to the turbulence from butterfly wings, something like the Bel perhaps? We could call it a Wing (Wi*) and it would probably need to be a log scale to accommodate the large numbers involved.
“If a windmill turns in Cornwall Italy will reach 50deg C”
A warming world only means hotter on average. Locally it means weirder. I wonder what odds the bookies would give for flash flooding killing people in Tamanrasset?
Saw the weather on ITV early on this morning and the story is that although July has been colder and wetter than normal, we’ve actually had a hotter than average Summer because we had some higher temps in June.
So, don’t believe the evidence of your own lying eyes…
Minimum temperature tonight is predicted to be 11 degrees C. So Oz is warming up, as one’d expect since it’s about a month since the shortest day.
Presumably summer’ll be up around the 40’s mark. As usual.
As for the bushfires, since the Greens stop us burning off, as the abos used to do, no doubt we’ll have some beauts.
IPCC AR 6 states that out of 33 man made ‘climate impact driver catetgories*:
There are 5 they have high confidence of effect apparent now,
There are 4 they have medium confidence of effect apparent now,
There are 24 that show no effect apparent now.
It’ll all kick off by 2050 or 2100 though and all the evidence and ‘projections’ are based on RCP 8.5 !!!!!!!!!
*Snow, ice, rain, ocean salinity, CO2 level, cyclones, fire weather, etc. etc.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter12.pdf – Table 12
@Jonathan
Yes, June was caused by CLIMATE CHANGE ARMAGEDDON. July was just the weather. So we still have to PANIC.
On another subject, I’ve been hearing that the BBC have decided that ground temperatures are now what matters and comparing them to temperatures that used to be used – air temperatures. Not sure how much truth there is in this.
@AtC
Drowning is, surprisingly, a common cause of death in deserts.
People camp in a dry water course. 30 miles away, a thunderstorm deposits a downpour. Flash flood. Exit campers.
In other news climate scientists have said that fog may get so heavy people are unable to stand up in it.
I find the current topic of climate change (nee Globule Warming) must be helpful for religious scholars who wonder what it was like a couple of thousand years ago when Jesus strolled around the Middle East turning water into wine and parting seas.
“You know that Jesus bloke? The one whose Mum was the local bike.”
“Yeah, did you hear what he did the other day at Fred’s party? Only pissed everywhere!”
“No, really?”
“Yeah, he got drunk and pissed in all the water they had there and told em he’d turned it into wine!”
“What a larf. What did they do with it?”
“Threw it all over im, course!”
“What’d he do then?”
“Said they shouldn’t a dunnit cos he can kill em all just by looking at em. Said ‘is Mum was a virgin really and that meant this big bloke called God was really is Dad, so he can do anything.”
“Load of bollocks!”
“I dunno, some people are scared of ‘im now”
“Really? Hang on a minute, I think I’ve got an idea…”
Around 1/3rd million wind turbines in the world now.
Has anyone estimated their effect on global average wind speeds – even a small effect will increase the probability of holding patterns of warm dry weather lasting longer before being broken up by wind movements.
It’s an emergency, so I’d expect some scientist to have computed it. Even a small difference can affect the weather.
Bongo. Short answer – Yes:
“As wind flows past the rotating blades of a wind turbine, some of its momentum is devoted to moving the blades and generating electricity. As a result, the downwind flow is slower and more turbulent. Assessing the characteristics of this wake has been identified as one of the grand challenges that wind energy science needs to face to drive innovation in the sector and meet future energy demand3. Wakes are particularly complex: their characteristics depend on the incoming wind speed, wind direction, and turbulence, as well as turbine operation and associated parameters. In convective conditions, wakes tend to be eroded rapidly by ambient turbulence. In stably stratified conditions with weak turbulence, wakes tend to exhibit a large wind speed deficit and persist for long distances downwind. For example, aggregated wakes from multiple turbines, i.e., wind plant wakes, can extend more than 50 km downwind of a wind plant, offshore in stable conditions. In addition to the wind speed deficit and the enhancement of turbulence at the heights above the surface corresponding to the wind turbine rotor, wakes can affect local surface conditions. For example, nocturnal surface temperatures can rise because of turbine-induced mixing of the nocturnal inversion”.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-02089-2#Abs1
There’s something they leave out of that, Addolff. Inefficiency. Turbines do not catch all the energy of the wind passing through them. Turbulence in the airflow. And that turbulence is transmitted to the surrounding air & continues downwind of the turbines. That’s loss of energy of an airstream that otherwise would have been unimpeded. But the energy has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? And obviously it comes out as heat. So, wherever you get a windfarm you will always get a rise in the temperature of the local airstream that otherwise wouldn’t occur. It is of course very slight but it has a great deal of volume. That in itself may be sufficient to alter wind patterns & convection flows.
On the fires thing, I’d maintain the biggest culprit is the lack of goats & environmentalists’ obsession with rewilding. I was looking at some of those photos from Rhodes. Olive trees. Up near the house in the mountains, looks very similar. Except there’s no scrub growing between the trees. The goats eat it all. Because the Alpajarras is still a pretty poor area & the locals still keep goats. My guess, with all the tourist money floating around Rhodes these days, the locals have given up on goats in favour of milking foreigners. Much the same as they have on the coast here. And guess what we get in hot weather? Although, strangely, hardly any this year, so far.
It’s worth remembering that none of these are natural landscapes. Haven’t been for thousands of years. Now, thanks to changing habits, some areas are going back to natural. And natural is periodic wildfires.
Here’s a research study for any university “scientist” wants to get his grubby paws on some grant money. Map economic growth against prevalence of wild fires. I’m willing to bet you’ll find a correlation. Two or maybe three reasons. Reduction in grazing. Reduction in the collection of firewood. Increase in the amount of ground cover vegetation due to the desire to make areas look more “natural”. (And reduce erosion? Erosion’s a natural process. That’s how those arroyos got there in the first place.)
Climate change simply means that there will be winners and losers. The UK could be a winner: I read a prediction in a magazine that suggested the UK will end up with a climate like Madeira. Does not seem so bad. I could live with that.
Addolff
July 27, 2023 at 9:39 am
We need to update the butterfly effect metaphor to windmills which probably means we need a scale to measure the turbulence from a windmill relative to the turbulence from butterfly wings, something like the Bel perhaps? We could call it a Wing (Wi*) and it would probably need to be a log scale to accommodate the large numbers involved.
“If a windmill turns in Cornwall Italy will reach 50deg C”
*Obviously it can’t be a W.
Jings!
That geezer on the roundabout is a heavy vaper!