Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "What is the link between extreme weather and climate change? - BBC News" video.

As an Australian you can't imagine how angry we are getting with the Murdoch Media as some of them are still claiming this is normal and there are still millions of our people listening to them and believing them. In late 2017 early 2018 I was in Saskatchewan Canada for work and experienced the coldest temperatures I have ever experienced. For a couple of days 14 of the 15 coldest temperatures on the planet were where I was. Later that year they had record high temperatures. My degree is in aerospace engineering and what most people do not understand is that when you have more energy in a system (any system) BOTH the highs and lows become more extreme. Climate scientists have been trying to explain this for decades. Unfortunately the media has trouble with anything to do with science.
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@Sonturist As I said I am an aerospace engineer and the short answer on anyone escaping to space is NO. And its as simple as NOBODY has solved the life support problem. Its the same reason why we don't have a moon base. The only way a moon base works or a Mars colony or giant Jeff Bezos space stations work is if we can solve the problem of a self sustaining life support system. We know what one looks like. Its called Spaceship Earth and its even solar powered. We just don't know how to replicate it and until we do there will be NO Moon base, NO Mars Colony and NO giant space stations.
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@jonnyhatter35 About 18 months ago I saw a vid here on YT about a British environmentalist who was taking a trip to Greenland with his grandchildren. He said in the 1990s they weren't pushing things as hard they could because they thought climate change would not be a problem in their lifetimes. Greenland is now where they thought his grandchildren would have to deal with it. Its not simply years ahead of where they thought its decades ahead. One of the biggest issues was China's growth and use of coal. There coal use is now MORE than what the entire planet was burning the early 1970s. BUT what is not in the data is the amount of coal that was simply burned in the ground. What most people DO NOT realise is that as soon as you expose black coal to air (oxygen) it begins to react and form CO2. If you aren't careful it simply ignites and starts burning. For over 20 years the Chinese were burning as much coal in the ground as they were in power stations. That's why its gotten so bad so fast. We are now starting to suffer the consequences of stalling any action that Exxon, Charles Koch and others have pushed since the 1980s.
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@sonicblue7real357 Your on the right line, but its solar energy that the planet turns into thermal energy not potential energy. The fascinating part is the 100,000 year Milankovitch cycles which is the long term cycles of ice ages where CO2 and Water vapour play major parts. The CO2 lets solar energy in but then keeps in the Earths thermal energy and warms the plant. Water vapour does 2 things. Like CO2 it helps hold in thermal energy but when there's enough in the atmosphere it forms a think cloud that reflects solar energy and stops the planet getting any warmer. But also at the point it slows the Earth cooling Its that property of water that throws the Earth into ice ages. As it builds up it helps warm the Earth after an ice age but at certain point it ends that and stops the Earth warming further. Eventually it cools enough and all that water falls as snow and rain in a massive way because there's not enough to keep the Earth warm the Earth dumps even more thermal energy off into space and we get an ice age. Right now we are at the top of the Milankovitch cycle and instead of the Earth having a warm humid patch before cooling into the next ice age we are overdriving the cycle. That's why the modelling gives 2 scenarios. We COULD either go into thermal runaway and end up like Venus or a massive thermal dump and end up like Mars. My bet is we'll end up with something in between, but its going to be wild with lots of wild weather. More thermal energy in the atmosphere means everything is running harder. Look at Texas last year and I have been there. Most of its a hot arid environment and yet it snowed so badly children froze to death in the beds. Australia was always picked as one of the most vulnerable nations. For the last few years its been stinking hot with some of the worst droughts ever and some of the worst bushfire seasons ever. This year its floods, floods and more floods. Our Snow season looks to be the best in decades. What worries me is this much water will cause huge amounts of growth in our forests so that when the next dry comes there will be huge amounts of fuel to burn. At some point in the next few years we will burn from one end to the other and just like they are doing now the deniers will claim its all natural.
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@AmericatheBeautiful-p4z I'd try and explain the reasons why people like you are so ignorant and wrong and stupid but its not worth it. But for anyone else interested here's some basic engineering and a bit of math. There's an oddish subject in aerospace I call planetary mechanics. I was introduced to it by a NASA engineer who visited our university one day. He'd done a project on what it would take to terraform Mars. He explained you just start with something basic like how much air do you need and what would you need to heat it up to a reasonable temperature considering Mars is cold. -60C on Mars is a warm day. Planetary mechanics is just the basic mechanics of what's needed (nuts and bolts). Its not the complex gas & water cycles that change and shift with seasons or the effects of the planets rotation and inclination or any of the other time related things. I call that stuff planetary dynamics as it involves things that move and change and cycle with time. To keep the math practical and get a basic estimate of what the task is, we do an approximation. I use the idea of a 1km think layer of breathable air because it makes the math understandable. I approximate the volume but just covering the planet in 1km cubes of air. Yes there's gaps between the cubes but its just an approximation and its within 1%. I also ignore things like gravity, solar wind, etc, BECAUSE I am just trying to demonstrate the size of the task. The surface of Mars is 144,000,000 km. That equates to 144,000,000 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000 cubic meters of air and at 1.2kg for a cubic meter of air, that's 172,800,000,000,000,000 kilograms of air. To raise that much air from -60 to +20 ℃ engineers use the basic equation: E = Cp x M x ΔT Energy Required (kilojoules) = 1.006 kJ/kg.C x mass of air in kg x temperature difference in ℃ We then get 13,906,944,000,000,000,000,000 Joules of energy required. So how much energy is that? It's the equivalent of 220,745,143 Hiroshima bombs which had 63 Terajoules of energy. Its also equivalent to about 64,683 Tzar Bombs the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. Lets not forget we still need to find or create that 172,800,000,000,000,000 kilograms of air and work out how to keep it attached to Mars because Mars only has 1/3rd of Earths gravity. Then there's the task of making the gas and water cycles work. This is why aerospace engineers don't talk about this stuff much because once you realise the basic scope of terraforming the numbers get so massive so quickly the scope confuses people. Half the problem is the idiocy of Hollywood. Remember the film Aliens? The one with the giant nuclear reactor that would convert the asteroid into a liveable planet in about 20 years. BULLSH1T If they had a few 1000 of those reactors running for a couple of centuries they might start to make a difference. Simple rule if it involves Hollywood and technology its 99.9% scientifically FALSE, WRONG or plain BULLSH1T. Don't get me wrong I still love sci-fi, its just I know what's fiction and what's NOT. If you have time and do want to learn about energy systems then I recommend the Illinois Energyprof channel here on YouTube. I can't say its exciting but it is informative. Disclaimer: I did my degree at U. Illinois, but have never met David Ruzic. I graduated before his time there.
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@jonnyhatter35 Lats year here in Australia were were gripped with drought. This year we have been flooded flooded and flooded. We have been flooded so many times this year people can no longer get flood insurance and we are considering abandoning certain towns or parts of towns. When the first bog flood hit the climate deniers said here we are back to normal after a drought. After the 2nd flood they said not to worry, We told to explain the 3rd flood they couldn't. By the time of the 4th and 5th floods they didn't dare speak. we've had 2 more floods since and we aren't even through winter yet or the spring rains. When I look around the world I see things like drought in Germany and England. In Australia we might not know much about the weather in Germany but we sure as shite know about English weather and I have never heard of an English drought before.
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@jonnyhatter35 I first found out about the inground coal fires about 12 years ago when I saw a German documentary on it. Because the Germans have a long history with coal mining they have a long history of dealing with fires in coal mines. The Chinese hired a specialist German company to help them out. The Germans produced a film about it and it was aired here in Australia. But if you want to check the data go and look for the IEA Key data reports that come out every 2 years (even numbered). The IEA (International Energy Agency) is just a data collection and reporting organisation. They are the main source for energy data for researchers. Their reports are free. What people forget is their high school science class: C+O2 -> CO2 and that works for tons as well as atoms. Remember a C has an atomic mass of 12 and oxygen 16 add it up and 1 ton of C makes 2.67 tons of CO2. So 3 Giga tons of coal makes 11 Giga tons of CO2 and if you're burning that much also in ground fires that's 22,000,000,000,000 tons CO2 EACH YEAR for about 25 years. And the whole time Western economists told how how great it was that we made everything in China because cheaper goods were good for consumers. Now you know why its accelerating and why we are in twice as much trouble as we thought..
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@jonnyhatter35 No problems mate. Here's a slightly longer version of the subject. I did aerospace engineering and back in college we had an alum who worked at NASA visit and do a special lecture one Friday. He'd just done a project where they assessed the viability of terraforming Mars. He introduced us to what I call planetary mechanics - the basics numbers of what you need to do. The making it all work as a functioning atmosphere is what I call planetary dynamics because that's about dynamic systems as things that move rather than just the basic numbers. So in planetary mechanics you look at things like size of the planet and how much air you need if you want a breathable atmosphere. The numbers are massive because planets are massive. If we go to an air conditioning company they'll ask how many cubic meters the house or building has and we'd be talking maybe a few hundred or a few 1000 for an office block. The quick way to estimate that is to look at the floor space of your house and multiply by 2.5 because most rooms are about 2.5 meters heigh. So if your apartment has 200m2 of floorspace you have about 500m3 of volume. For an office block with 5,000m2 its about 12,500m3. But the Earth has 500,000 square kilometers of floor space that's 500,000,000,000 square meters. So just for the first kilometer of air around us its 500,000,000,000,000m3 (500 trillion). At about 1.2kg/m3 that's about 600 billion metric tons of air. That's just the first kilometer above sea level and there's a lot more above that. Its one of the main reasons its so hard for engineers and scientists to communicate what we've actually done to our planet. The numbers are so large most people can't get their heads around it. How do you get average citizens to consider 600billion tons of air when for their basic daily life air weighs nothing? I can do this because I met the right guy back when who introduced this subject.
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@jonnyhatter35 Its one of the things i keep telling people who think Elon Musk is just going to whip them off to Mars. Once you get your head around just the basic numbers of how much stuff you need you then get into the stuff to make it work. At that point you start trying to handle so many concepts simultaneously it just blows brain cells away. Complex problem solving is one of the things aerospace engineers have to be trained in because you need that skill to do things like send a probe off to Pluto and think of all the things that might happen, consider their effects and then solve those problems without creating new problems.
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@LK-pc4sq Yeah telling me something I don't know. I'm Australian but went to college in Illinois, but in late 2017 I was working in Saskatchewan and experienced a similar event. For about 3 days 14 of the 15 coldest temperatures recorded on the planet were in Alberta and Saskatchewan. At one point it was colder than the actual North Pole. Instead of being home experiencing nice sunny +30-40C days I was indoors while outside its was -30 or lower with windchills as bad as -50. The only person I knew who went outside was the police officer who lived across the street who came to check I was Ok.
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