mistermack

"Climate Refugee" is a misnomer anyway. They would be climate migrants. " refugee, generally speaking, is a displaced person who has crossed national borders and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution.[2" wikipedia.

No I don't realize that. Yes, and if you organise to damage the organisation that employs you, it's a form of self-harm, and needs to be prevented for their own good. In the case of public ownership, it's an attempt to milk the taxpayer cash-cow, when, as I said earlier, the tax payers are having to pay the exact same price rises that the unions are whining about.

Maybe thats why they all came to Manchester.

I know, I saw that. But Sindh is pretty dry in normal years. Manchester gets five times as much rain in an average year. Flooding rarely results from rainfall on flat land like Sindh. Here in Gloucester, we get plenty of rain, but the floods come down from Wales. The Indus Gorge is the highest gorge in the world, and you get a lot of snow melt this time of year, along with monsoon rains falling on the mountains. If Sindh got a lot of rain, then the mountains would have got a load as well.

I remember years ago, there was constant talk of flooding in Bangladesh. The cause was given as deforestation in the Himalayas due to firewood collection and over grazing. The water isn't held up long enough to soak in to the soil, and the soil itself gets washed down the rivers, making the run-off even more rapid. Pakistan has some of the highest mountains in the world, so chances are, something similar might be happening now.

I use evaporation a lot when the weather gets uncomfortably hot. A/C isn't worth installing in the UK, but you do get a few days or weeks of discomfort in the summer. I wear very little, and spray myself now and then with water, or have a wipe over with a damp towel. It's super-effective, and no effort or cost. It's the evaporation that works for quite a while, much longer than the cold of the water.

Seems like a lot of distraction tactics to me. The taxpayer funds trains, bin collections, barristers, all sorts. The unions seem to regard them as cash cows, ready for milking. If you want the lower paid to get more money, stop allowing virtually unrestricted immigration of unskilled labour. The reality of the figures doesn't match the "get tough" public stance. Rwanda was always a distraction. They knew perfectly well that it was a non-runner. It's just done to look tough, while the numbers remain huge. So long as there is a regular inflow, the market price for less skilled people will remain depressed.

Agreed. And that leaves society wide open to blackmail by strike. That's why I would introduce compulsory no-strike contracts for vital services. It already happens for some services. I say it should be much more widespread. The employment market should decide the level of the wages. I think that's a question-dodging red herring.

Absolutely. But I'm saying, prioritise help that works, and can be show to work. Not well meaning "help" that just gets you hooked on some fix, or help that only helps one percent of those 'helped'. All I'm saying is that if I had a million to donate, I would get far more tangible results for that money if I spent it on physical rather than mental health. Its really sad, but it's still a fact. You could blow the lot on psychiatrists and counsellors and achieve very little, whereas you could with the same money pay for hips, eyes, knees, veins or heart stents, and make a real difference to lives. I wish it were otherwise. I would love to see more effective mental health care. But wishing doesn't make it so. The truth is that even trying your utmost, outcomes are still poor. And many mental problems actually go away on their own, without, or in spite of the treatment they get. My mother suffered very badly when I was young from anxiety and depression. (she was a mental nurse, so she knew a bit). What transformed her life? A hysterectomy. She was a different woman after it, and she told me years later that looking back, she couldn't believe what she put us through.

That's fine, if you want to pay double the tax. And the workers are tax payers too, you know. When you have a cost of living spike, like now, if everybody got a rise to cover it, the cost of living rises furthur. There is no magic money tree. If the inflation is coming from abroad, as in the current case, then a country simply can not defeat it with their own wage rises. Do that, and your currency falls, and you stoke more inflation, and your wage rise is worthless within months. Rampant inflation can even lead to world wars. It's a horrific thing. It takes off, it has a life of its own. People see one lot getting a big rise, and demand the same or more. It's like lighting a fire. Governments have to print more money, and you end up carting it round in wheelbarrows. If prices rise, you can pay it or don't buy it. It's only when people stop buying, that inflation falls. Why should the tax payer cover the price rises for bin men, when they are having to pay the same price rises themselves?

Not if the Hadley cell has dropped dry air on the ocean. As I mentioned earlier in this thread. You can buy a humidifier for a building. They don't have to use heat. There are many different types. Two of them are spray humidifiers, and impellers. The impeller type has a rotating disk which flings the water against a diffuser, breaking it up into tiny droplets. So your above statement is wrong. Nobody said pumping was free. How much is astronomical? That's just stating the obvious. If there was no significant onshore wind, you wouldn't embark on a project in the first place. My suggestion was for siting an installation where there WAS a reliable onshore wind. If there was an onshore wind for a significant period, then an installation would be turned off whenever there was no wind. That's obvious. You would only be using energy when the wind was significant and onshore.

We already use sprays as humidifier in buildings. You can go online and buy them, and they will probably provide figures on power consumption and humidifying performance. They aren't designed for large scale, though, or for sea water or for use in a wind. But it is a starting point. You could use balloons to track the winds on site, to find out where your humidity would end up.

If there was a genuine market for labour, as there is for everything else, then the market would decide the pay levels. If you can't recruit bin men, then by all means pay them a rate that will attract more applicants. That's not what's happening now. The bin men have their jobs, but refuse to do it. So basically they blackmail the public for more money with their closed shop. I haven't heard of a shortage of applicants. If there were, then the wage demands would make sense.

The clue is in the title, that this is a speculative idea. So thanks for your thoughts. I don't think you've quite got the picture. You site powerful pumps along the coast, with spray heads some distance from shore. On days when there is a significant onshore wind, you turn on the pumps. The spray heads produce a fine mist of sea water, sprayed upwards into the air. Because the droplets are so small, most of it evaporates before it falls back into the ocean. Evaporation DOES cool the air, but as the wind is constantly blowing, the cooled air moves inland, carrying with it the water vapour that you have produced. Once inland, rising thermals turn it into clouds. The clouds reflect solar energy, producing some cooling. And produce rain, affecting the climate. That's my off-the-cuff idea for humidifying onshore winds. There may be better ways, or it might be a waste of energy, depending on the outcomes. The sad thing is that there's no way to test it in a small-scale trial. Not one that I can think of anyway. Modelling might provide an answer as to whether it would be viable, or a waste of time. It sounds like an unlikely thing to try, but on the other hand, if it worked, the long term gains would be gigantic.

Why do you want to increase the extent to which the public are exploited ? Oh right ! That's the relationship where an employee can quit any time he likes, but can't get fired any time the employer likes? When the employer has to pay you for doing nothing, if you choose to have a baby? Or when the company is losing money, rather than making it, the employee still gets the same wages? Or when the employee gets sick, the employer still has to pay them, even though he's getting nothing for his money. Etc etc etc. You're right, the relationship IS fundamentally unequal. If you don't know what ways, then you do not know enough about the issue to have a meaningful viewpoint on it.

I have to say I'm highly suspicious when it comes to psychiatry and psychology. Not that it's all woo, but that they have a huge tendency to overstate what they know, and what they can do. In any other branch of science, you don't get the reversals of consensus that you do in the mental field of medicine. In the treatment of the mentally ill, you seem to constantly change and reverse what was considered best practice just a few years previously. And to me, the biggest pointer to the bullshit element, is that in a trial for murder or some other horrendous crime, you can have two psychiatrists on the opposing sides, giving completely contradictory opinions on the mental state of the accused. What more proof do you need that someone's bullshitting? You wouldn't get that for a broken bone, or traces of poison, or dna signature. But psychiatry seems to be a licence to bullshit. Especially when you are being paid for giving evidence a certain way. I would be very wary, if I was in charge, of spending money on mental health. Not because I dismiss the torture that mental health can inflict. But because the outcomes of treatment are so shrouded in mist. In physical medicine, if an operation produces bad outcomes, you can see it, and measure it, and do something about it. In psychiatry, you can have weeks and months of expensive treatment, with a strong element of "try this" or "try that" and at the end of it you are worse than when you started. When outcomes are not fully demonstrable, I would prefer to take that money, and spend it on hearts, and hips, and eyes and teeth, where results are more or less guaranteed beneficial to a high percentage of cases.

I'd like to see a compulsory no strike contract for all essential workers. The strike weapon is nowadays being used against the public, not aristocratic mine-owners, which it originally came into being for. I would also like to see companies have the right to take civil action against a union for damages due to losses caused by a strike. I don't know why that doesn't happen now, maybe they have some kind of immunity. But that right exists in all other fields of activity, I don't see why unions should be exempt. Everyone has the right not to work, but I don't see why there should be a right to strike without consequences. Just looked at a UK government website, and strikers are protected from dismissal, and companies cannot hire agency staff to provide temporary cover during a strike. That is just pure madness.

The new "high temperature superconductor magnets" are looking more and more like a real game changer in Tokamaks. (high temperature is a bit of a misnomer, they run at very low temperatures, but a lot less cold than previously) The ITER project is being assembled at the moment. Their magnets were designed years ago, I haven't been able to establish if it will be able to make use of the new superconductors, probably not, to start with. But you can bet that they will be working on incorporating them as early as possible. It seems to be likely that the new technology will enable the size of later designs to be smaller without losing efficiency, whereas the philosophy with ITER was 'bigger is better' which it was with the old magnets. I believe that the new magnets enable much stronger field strengths, making a big difference to stability of plasmas.

There is an ongoing discussion on this, in Climate Science, started by Studiot titled "Floods and drouths", it's been going for a month. Maybe this should be merged ?

Agreed. There are some really good items on youtube about re-greening semi desert by ensuring that the soil remains covered, and the results look pretty dramatic. It might be that grazing goats by humans is responsible for the spread of a lot of desert. Besides eating every green thing, they will also eat anything that ever WAS once green, and you end up with bare soil. I do take the point of the Hadley Cells. But exploring it further, if Hadley cells are dropping dry air on Australia inland, they are almost certainly doing the same onto the ocean around the continent as well. So onshore winds when they do blow will not be very humid which might be a big factor in the dryness of the continent. If that's the case, then humidifying those winds artificially, when and where they do blow, could make a substantial difference. It would have to take some intensive modelling at University level, to work out if it was a viable strategy, and I'm pretty sure that it would never happen anyway. Although, climate modelling has instigated some gigantic spending lately, without any certainty of the benefits, so maybe it's not a totally lost cause.

I never read that, but I believe he also wrote "on the beach". That was a gripping read.

That 800 feet would take a hell of a lot of energy to get past. Niagara Falls are about 170 feet high on average, but look at the power in the water when it drops. The river Thames only drops 360 feet, from source to the sea. You could recoup some of the energy, on the other side of the mountain, with a hydro-electric plant, but that would be and expensive installation, for a tiny gain. The output of a desalination plant is tiny, compared to a river. Do you have a link for that? I can't find that stated anywhere, and I'm struggling to see why, when the main energy input is powering very high pressure pumps. If the pumps are off, where is the energy being used? In any case, if it's not worth turning the desalination plant off, there would surely be a market for the excess water genrated by keeping it running. It could be used locally for agriculture and industry, surely a more economic use that pumping it miles away over mountains.

Two of the best books I read in school were 'I, Claudius' and 'Claudius the god'. Also any of the Thomas Hardy books I can highly recommend. He really knew how to paint word-pictures and word-movies.

Unfortunately, the economics would be horrendous. Pipelines are very expensive, and rarely make economic sense, even for oil which is thousands of times as valuable as water. And piping up and over a mountain would involve huge technical challenges and costs compared to on the flat, both in construction, and energy costs powering the pumps to lift the water upwards. And desalination plants only produce a small quantity, compared to rivers. So from a cost and engineering point of view, it would be a complete non-starter. Water is so heavy that lifting it requires a hell of a lot of energy. That's why we can extract so much electricity from the reverse process of letting it fall in hydro-electric schemes. Sending water up a mountain is the reverse of that.

I have to disagree. Time is a property that applies to all known matter and energy. It's common to everything in the universe. You say we are all trapped in the same rate of change. That IS time. If your imaginary unit was doubling or halving, that's not a unit of time, because time is what we experience in relation to the rest of the universe, and as you say, we would not be able to detect it. Time is what we CAN detect. You are describing something other than time.