Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "BBC News" channel.

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  21.  @Aa-ron01  Do you understand even the basics of climate change, because a lot of people don't. Its pretty simple if you heat up the planet you evaporate more water and sooner or later it will fall out of the sky. Basically it turbocharges the weather. In a nutshell the side of the earth the faces the sun is getting energy pumped into/onto it by a monstrous nuclear furnace. The other side of the planet is dumping excess energy off into space. We are still getting the same amount from the sun on one side but not dumping as much on the other as a result the entire planet has slowly heated up. When its hotter there's more evaporation. If you have more evaporation you have more clouds and eventually you have these events with huge amounts of rain and snow. It was always called climate change by the scientific community it was journalists who called it global warming because that was easier for them to type. Your remark on vegetation is half right. Vegetation doesn't absorb surface water what it does is allow it to be absorbed. The problem with soil (particularly Australian soils) is that when it dries out it switches from water absorbing to water repelling and if you dry it right out its hard to get it back to water absorbing. What vegetation does is help keep moisture in the soil. So it keeps the soil in a water absorbing state so that when it rains the water can soak into the soil. If its dried out then rain can simply run off the land into the creeks and rivers taking topsoil with it. Its one reason why our environmental scientists (not the greenie tree hugging clowns) have been telling us for a while that we have to stop simply clearing land for pasture as we have done. They've now got the evidence that keeping 20% of native trees and vegetation makes our land more productive as it helps maintain the moisture in the soil. Trying to convince people that's true is the next problem.
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  28.  @kausthubh  There's plenty of open unforested space space. I'm Australian we have several million square kilometers for starters. North Africa has massive amounts of open space and YES I damn well know how hard that will be. But that can also be mitigated with tree selection and planting arrangements. There's some pretty amazing videos here on YouTube on re-wilding and how they are reclaiming lots of open space. One of the really important things that has come out of that is variety. If you try and to it via monoculture it will be a disaster. HERE'S the inescapable fact. We have to get 3.5 Trillion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere and do it fast. There's a clown down the list here (idm3027) who's pulling numbers out of his butt like it will only cost $100 a ton by DAC. IF THATS TRUE and lets not forget that Douglas Chan COO Climeworks is claiming they hope to get it down from $1000/ton to $3-400/ton, then at $100/ton its still going to cost $350 TRILLION. WHERE TF DOES ANYONE THINK THEY ARE GOING TO GET THAT $350 TRILLION? Then there's the actual energy costs. In how many places would we need new power stations to drive that AND WHO'S going to pay for those power stations. Then that's that whole problem of the environmental cost of all the materials required to build all those plants. I started with a degree in aerospace but have spent 30+ years working in industrial control systems and automation. I have spent time in both manufacturing and mining and I KNOW how much energy those industries consume. Do you know there's mor energy used in making a car than it consumes in its lifetime? people forget it take energy to dig all those materials out of the ground and process it into stuff that you can makes bits out of so you can assemble those bits into a car. Its the same for most manufactured goods. In fact a great way to help save the planet is to STOP manufacturing crap products and instead manufacture everything with better quality to last longer. It would massively reduce energy consumption. The other thing is to triple glaze all those glass towers we've build over the last century. mark Blyth the political economist at Brown U. mentioned an engineering report that said if America just triple glazed all its office blocks and skyscrapers the saving in energy would help America get most of the way to meeting the Paris Accords. Architects might be good for designing aesthetically nice buildings but they don't know a damn thing about energy efficiency.
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  32.  @nm5310  I don't mind the longness of that comment at all. I've read through it several times and I agree with all of it. I was really surprised by the number of displaced people. Last I heard was a few years back and they put it around 60 million and growing. So I expected it to be higher but 108 million is where the world needs to STOP and start thinking. You've actually described WHY Australia came down so hard on the boat people issue. The vast majority of those arriving were unaccompanied men. It was kept quite but there were several very ugly incidents in Australia with unaccompanied men coming from cultures where women are seen as property. They simply had no idea of how Western liberal societies operate. Your final paragraph goes right to the core of why Australia reacted as it did. These people had access to enough money to pay the people smugglers. We traced some of that funding back to people already in Australia and that infuriated people. There were millions of dollars leaving the country every week and most of it wasn't helping anyone because it was ending up in the hands of a couple of Pakistani mobsters. The other thing that infuriated people was the money spent on legal claims which was funded by Australia. The concept of "NO - your claim does not meet the criteria." means NOTHING to certain people. You might know it better or explain it better but there is a certain psychology where people define themselves by the attention they get from helping people. My mother made a comment about Mother Terresa many years ago. She said (paraphrasing) "Mother Terresa is a hypocrite. She fights against government funded contraception programs because it would mean fewer orphans for her to take care of and get attention." There's a condition called "Munchausen by proxy" where people seek attention for the illness of others. I think this is something similar where certain people like the attention they get from fighting causes. I think Nigel Farage did that with Brexit. I don't think he cared about it at all except that it got him a lot of attention. We have people in Australia who define their existence on fighting certain causes to the death. I met a lawyer at a social event about 20 years ago when there were a lot of boat people arriving out of Southern China. They explained part of the problem was that they destroyed any and all documentation they had. It makes it almost impossible to identify who they are or where they are from and evaluate their claims, but that never deterred the lawyers supporting their claims and filing claim after claim after claim. We now call these people undocumented arrivals and they are still a problem. Those lawyers actually made the situation WORSE not better and it lead to the "Pacific Solution" that we get condemned for. A significant event was the Tampa Affair, and there's a Wikipedia page on it that's fairly accurate. What's not there is that Australia flipped it back on the international community to asses the 400+ claims which were done under UN supervision. Initially the UN only passed about 20 of the 400+ but over time that number increased but it cost heaps to work out who people were. An odd personal story out of that time. A friend of my father is married to a German and her family in Europe called her up and asked what sort of disgusting racist nation was she was living in. Around 2010 her family were in Australia and all they wanted to know was how did Australia mange to shut down the people smuggling. The answer is unfortunately harsh - we had to be as ruthless as the people smugglers. We simply made it a rule that unless there are exceptional circumstances if you arrive in Australia via a people smuggler we will not let you settle in Australia. It has the tragic outcome that people we should take in miss out and a lot of it stems from how the lawyers behaved that got us so frustrated that we reacted the way we did.
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  44.  @francois-xavieresperance5007  That's fairly blunt across a whole field of issues. The pacific is almost lost as it is to China. Australia, America and others have been very slack and taken for granted all those small island states would always be in our camp. China turned up a decade ago and started funding projects as part of "belt & road." They are no so entrenched its almost impossible to get them out, because so many of those nations now OWE China for the loans (as in the debts). China now has an economic strangle hold on quite a few of them. We found that out very rudely when they all blasted off at Australia over climate change. China was a guest at that conference and it was obvious they were pulling strings to test out their influence. What's truly scary is that the West has totally ignored what China was doing. We all forget that the UN general Assembly is like the US Senate. Every country gets 1 vote irrespective of population size. So 1.4 Billion Chinamen get 1 vote while all those small Pacific nations get over a dozen with barley a million people. What I expect is that China will eventually go for economic sanctions on America and we are going to be stunned on how many nations vote with them. It will only be then will people realise what "belt & road" actually is. I've been trying to tell people for a while how scary this is. They actually learnt this from the Japanese who manipulated the international whaling commission in the same way. Plus to add into that are the immense issues China is going to face over the next 20years. First with its skewed demographics that have resulted form the 1 child policy. Second form its idiotic construction of ghost cities which has sponged up a staggering amount of cash. Third from all the wealthy Chinese who are getting their money out of China as fast as they can. Fourth that massive army they have produces no food or products to sell they are just 1 enormous sponge on resources. If you take a look at the Soviet collapse one of its major factors was the massive military it had in terms of people. Military personnel produce nothing but costs that the rest of society has to provide. Because America's military is more technology bases it doesn't have as many people as some think. Plus because of how America works its military produces a lot of economic turnover which Russia's never did and China's does not do. Plus all those foreign companies that have factories in China can now chase even cheaper labor in India and Africa.
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