Comments by "Mat Broomfield" (@matbroomfield) on "President Biden pledges 50% cut in US carbon emissions at global climate summit - BBC News" video.

No they don't. They flood because of climate change.
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@4scended498 Most rivers do NOT flood annually. SOME rivers (such as the Gangers in India or Yellow River in China flood annually.) It depends upon the river topology, the surrounding terrain and the annual rainfall. Calling a flood plain "necessary" is like calling covid the "necessary" consequence of eating bats. As for your other comments, while I can see what you are getting at, I think you have a somewhat simplistic and reductive comprehension of the subject matter. Flooding events are becoming more extreme due to climate change. Climate change leads to greater extremes in weather which can dump more rain water upriver leading to more extreme floods. River flood risk is graded partially according to how frequently they are expected to flood - 50 years, 100 years, etc. NO developer builds on land that floods annually, nor would they receive planning permission to do so. The problem is, flooding events that were formerly seen as 50 or 100 year likelihoods, are now happening with significantly greater frequency. This means that homes that were built in areas that were not expected to flood in two entire lifetimes, are now starting to flood every few years.
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@Mac-dx4rd "the climate has always changes and rivers have always flooded" Yes it has, but the frequency and the location of those floods is what matters. Climate change this rapid is unprecedented in the existence of human life on this planet. Again, yes, rivers have always flooded, but our building permissions are granted based upon the rarity and extremity of those floods. They are becoming more extreme and less rare.
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No it's not.
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@johnallan1134 There is absolutely concrete evidence. We can chart the rise in rainfall, sea level, the transition of weather events, the frequency and direction of frontal systems, changes in global sea temperature, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, rates of flood deposition, even tree ring growth rates, and we can compare all of that against records (ice cores, plant growth, deposition plains, then written records) stretching back tens of thousands of years. It is absolutely indisputable that the global climate is changing with dangerous rapidity. Yes, there have always been floods, but not this frequent or severe in the areas where we build houses. I can drop a bucket of water on your garden once a year and it will probably survive, but if I drop a tanker load every week your flowers and vegetables will not survive. Do you really think anyone would put a housing estate somewhere that was expected to be underwater every year?
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@dreadsou1475 Nope, you're talking about milankovitch cycles which bring ice ages approximately every 100,000 years. The weather doesn't get "erratic"; the global temperature DROPS and glaciation occurs. Yes, they WILL continue to occur due to orbital imperfections of the Earth around the sun. But IN ADDITION to those cycles, man-caused effects brought about by an increase in greehouse gases reduces the amount of sun's heat being radiated back, causing a further rise in temperatures. If enough greenhouses cases get into the atmosphere, a potentially irreversible phenomenon called "runaway greenhouse effect" occurs, in which the atmosphere cannot eventually rebalance itself. That would lead to the extinction of all life on Earth.
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@brainrot4919 Well you have my condolences then. Congratulations on managing to spell "IQ" correctly.
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@toons2676 No. Weather is short term local effects. Climate is long term changes in trends.
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@gabriellex3098 I'm hoping that some of them are just ignorant rather than wilfully stupid Gabrielle. Sadly, when there is so much corporate money invested in preventing them learning the truth, it's an uphill battle. Jeez, in a global pandemic you can't even convince half the population to wear a mask and get vaccinated! Sigh.
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@Kfader1210 You're an engineer huh? But you're not smart enough to recognise that a covid model of what WOULD happen if we did nothing, necessarily bears no correlation to the results after we did all we could. I hope you don't engineer anything bigger than a garden barbecue with intelligence like that. When it comes to climate, I'll trust the 90+% of qualified experts in the field thanks man with no relevant expertise. Then you cite a Swedish scientist (NOT a climatologist) who DIED in 1927, before we had the tools and the science to measure the climate with great accuracy, and you think that somehow makes your point? I quote from the Guardian article on his work "As the first to put hard figures on the greenhouse effect, it's unsurprising Arrhenius's estimates weren't spot on. He thought it would take millenia to see a 50% rise in CO2 - but modern measurements show a 30% rise during the 20th century alone. He thought a doubling of CO2 would raise temperatures by 5-6C. Scientists now say 2-3C is more likely." You've clearly just learned this man's name from some conspiritard web site and now you think it makes you look clever to throw it into conversations when in fact it does the complete opposite. The sad thing is that 14 other people thought your moronic comment was worthy of a thumbs up.
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@turbolevo8703 Nobody is arguing that SOME parts of SOME rivers flood annually. Not really sure what that has to do with sustainable living but I agree we should treat our home planet with far greater respect.
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@gabriellex3098 I agree, but every now and then I feel inspired to give it a go anyway. :-)
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@Mac-dx4rd No it didn't. To look at the sea level rise brought about by the END of an ice age, and compare that to sea level rise brought about by the total destruction of our polar ice caps is not remotely comparable. Even so, in the past, there were entire populations of protohumans living in the former landmass that is now the channel between Britain and Scandinavia that got wiped out. At least two major floods in north America wiped out vast numbers of animals. At one point, a tsunami in the mediterranean reduced the early human population so low that we almost became extinct right there. Yes, ice ages and sea level change have been a constant throughout our planet's history, but time and again, they have led to signifcant changes in the life that existed at the time. And your comment does not refute the rapidity of climate change now. You merely mentioned that at some point approximately 10,000 years ago, sea levels rose. Over what period did it occur? How high were sea levels prior? What percentage of the population lived coastally? What was the cause?
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@Mac-dx4rd The Mediterranean DID exist. It was hit by a tsunami. The North Sea exists precisely BECAUSE water that was not there, arrived - precisely the sort of thing that we are hoping to minimise along inhabited coastal areas now. As for planetary temperatures; several points: 1. NASA are not climatologists. 2. It's a hypothetical. 3. Global temperature is not the issue - sea level is. 5 degrees more is not a massive amount for most of the planet in terms of comfort, but in terms of the ice it displaces, it's catastrophic. NASA are clearly talking about living comfort not sea level. Given that climate change produces extreme weather, people all over the planet are living with the consequences: more hurricanes, greater flooding, and higher mean temperatures. Given that the planet has experienced the hottest decade since records began, with each year hotter than the one before, most of us ARE experiencing it personally.
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@Cotac_Rastic " all i'm hearing is "Stop heating the Earth so we can freeze faster" " If that's what you're hearing, you need to pay closer attention. If the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere gets too high, they may NEVER decrease again, causing a runaway greenhouse effect as they think happened may have on Venus. Given that Venus is the 2nd planet from the sun but is the hottest in the solar system at almost 900 degrees f, with a toxic atmosphere. one degree hotter would not be noticeable to you, but has implications for the planet's future inhabitability.
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@mcmc1863 When you start with the words "Earth isn't a planet" you're already way too dumb to waste my time on.
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@Cotac_Rastic The planet will survive. The life on it may not. Virtually all life on earth has been wiped out on multiple occasions. Early life almost wiped itself out by overbreeding and excreting too much oxygen which was poisonous to it. You wanna talk about fragile? A single asteroid 65 million years ago wiped out the dominant lifeform on the planet. It's not about the duration of the event, it's about its severity. So yes, I do think that less than 500 years of industrialisation can do the same thing. "Humanity is an absoloute force of nature, one of the most incredible creations in the known universe." If you believe that, then why would you not want to take better care of our home? "nature itself produces more toxic influence upon the earth than we ever could have dreamed of" We can't control the sun, and man's output massively exceeds that of volcanoes. Methane would remain trapped underground if we didn't keep freeing it in our search for oil, so no, nature doesn't. "if we're a venus bomb as you claim it would've happened a helluva lot sooner bub." Utter nonsense. That's like saying, "If someone was going to drown in a tsunami, they would have done so before the one that killed them." There were never as many people on the Earth. Farming and car use and industrialisation was never as great. This is kindergarten-level logic. You shouldn't need it explained to you. "Listen, if you want high taxes and authouritarian rules that restrict your freedom then go ahead. But i will not kow-tow blah blah" Yeah, I get it - you're not willing to tolerate ANY inconvenience for the future of the planet. That's already abundantly clear. You want the freedom to kill yourself - that's fine, do it. But you don't have the freedom to kill everyone around you. Lots of people just like you died from covid for exactly the same reason. Fortunately, the world's governments who know the truth are starting to take the choice out of the hands of people like you. The switch to low carbon cars and fuel sources has been underway for decades, and even America, filled with the most selfish ignorant citizens on Earth, is slowly having to change, with Biden pledging to halve C02 emmissions by 2030. Anyway, you're clearly too stupid to waste more time on. You're dismissed. Bub.
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Talk is cheap. The next Republican will simply break the treaty or worse. America is the most selfish nation on Earth.
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