Saturday, 23 July 2011

Warble gloaming will cut your feet off

The mind just boggles sometimes, it really does. The Real World Libertarian notes the latest warble gloaming related insanity has resulted in some very strange construction regulations in a Victorian town.
Port Albert, on the southern coast of Victoria has to go even further to meet the challenge. There is a fascinating story from a couple of days ago about how, owing to two sets of regulations, they have to lower their height.
That’s right, residents of the town have to get shorter.
Because of the requirement that sea level rises have to be planned for, new housing has to be built on stumps 1.5m above ground level, despite the fact that the town's original colonial buildings have survived on ground level since the 19th century. Normally, this would not present that much of a problem, other than for the infirm who would now have to climb steps.
Unfortunately, heritage rules prevent rooflines being built higher than the roof of the pub, which may be Victoria's oldest continuously licensed hotel.
Once heritage listings come into effect, its damn near impossible to get rid of them. You see where this is going, …
Yep. The difference is near as dammit five feet, so either lower ceilings for two storey buildings or single storeys which either have pointlessly high ceilings or aren't built up as high as they could be. And this just as research has emerged which found that sea level rise is decelerating and has been the whole time the world has been soiling its pants over Goracle predictions of 6m sea level rise (presumably not calculated from his condo a few hundred metres from San Francisco Bay).

And on that topic I'm adding another warble gloaming date to the list, courtesy of a commenter called Roy UK over at Watts Up With That a few days ago in response to a post asking for some help.
I’m looking for pronouncements in press and blogs from prominent players and scientists in the AGW issue where they’ve said “We’ll have an ice free Arctic by the year xxxx”.
Very much like my occasional 'warble gloaming dates for your diary', and Roy UK found a corker from 2007 (my bold).
Louis Fortier, scientific director of ArcticNet, a Canadian research network, said the sea ice is melting faster than predicted by models created by international teams of scientists, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
[...]
"The frightening models we didn't even dare to talk about before are now proving to be true," Fortier told CanWest News Service, referring to computer models that take into account the thinning of the sea ice and the warming from the albedo effect - the Earth is absorbing more energy as the sea ice melts.
According to these models, there will be no sea ice left in the summer in the Arctic Ocean somewhere between 2010 and 2015.
"And it's probably going to happen even faster than that," said Fortier, who leads an international team of researchers in the Arctic looking for clues to climate change.
So we're a third of the way into that six year time frame and it has not yet occurred, not forgetting that Fortier said that it would probably be even sooner than that. Given that the article comes from 2007 I'm not sure how much sooner Fortier was expecting since there were only two years to go before the earlier end of his no-ice time frame but if he was serious then we're probably about halfway through the period in which he predicted the Arctic Ocean would become ice free. Being harsh this looks like it's already a fail, and even being charitable and treating it as a prediction to occur by 2015 it's looking decidedly shaky.

So the revised list now looks like this:

Still, we're getting a carbon tax anyway for all the good it'll do.* Reality generally trumps modelling but when it comes to political decisions it's the other way around.


* My prediction is none at all, or at least nothing that can be measured.
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