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I'm your host, John Tidgey, and today I'm joined by Vic Hudson.
How's it going, Vic?
I'm good, John.
How are you?
I am very good, thank you.
I would like today to talk about something that's a little bit different, I suppose,
for the show.
It's about how the sea levels keep rising.
Have you heard of this phenomenon?
I think I have heard a little about it, yeah.
Yeah.
Some people say that the sea levels are rising because of global warming, I guess.
And it's something that has always been in the news for the last probably 20 years, 30
years, I suppose.
And there's been a whole bunch of documentaries and, you know, scarimentaries.
Is that such a thing?
Those sorts of things, you know?
I think that is such a thing.
Yeah, and the one that comes to mind first of all is the one that Al Gore did, An Inconvenient
Truth.
Did you ever see that one?
I did.
It's been quite a while though.
Yeah, that's okay.
That's okay.
The other one, which was the No, It's Not Happening one, is one by, was done in the
UK called The Great Global Warming Swindle, which is the No, It Isn't Happening side of
things.
I don't think I caught that one.
Yeah, no, it's okay.
less well known but the fact that I remember gores made a lot of a lot of noise when it was out oh
yeah we're talking about it yeah I did it did and then this is the thing is that I don't want
okay the way I want to tackle this particular topic is that I don't actually want to debate
or even get involved with the discussion of whether or not whether or not global warming is
caused by carbon dioxide emissions or methane or anything like
the greenhouse effect or whatever you want to call it, you know, all of
these different theories as to exactly what's causing it, irrespective, I'm not
interested in talking about that and there's a whole bunch of reasons why I'm
not. One is I'm not a climatologist, I'm not, I'm an engineer and whilst I
have my opinions about that, I don't feel like I'm qualified to debate or discuss
that. So, you might think, well, okay, what's there to talk about
then if you're not going to talk about that? Because I guess also
just before I talk about exactly what I want to talk about is the
whole slither of human recorded knowledge that we have tells us
that the sea levels are rising. So, I'm not going to debate why,
I just know that they are. And the issue therefore becomes, how
How do you deal with it?
And I guess the other problem is the reason there's so many for and against arguments
and people say, "Oh yes, it's happening," or "No, it's not," is that the changes that
we see are all ... Everything's cyclic.
There's daily fluctuations.
The sun goes up, sun goes down.
The moon goes around the earth and therefore tides rise, tides fall.
Seasons change year to year and we have decade over decade increases and decreases.
we have averages and such.
So you really need to plot a heck of a lot of data
over a very, very long period of time to notice any trends.
Any trends, yeah, exactly.
And any trends you see are gonna be very subtle.
So your 0.2 of a degree Celsius,
or one degree Fahrenheit or whatever change
over a 50 year period is gonna be extremely subtle
to detect, but that doesn't mean that it's not happening.
So, obviously, there's recording measurements error.
So, you've got recording errors in your measurements and so on.
So, how far back do you want to go?
People quote, "Oh, well, you know, we did the, we looked at tree core samples
and ice core samples and going back a hundred thousands of years."
And it's like, yeah, but that's not as accurate as, you know, a calibrated thermometer,
you know, wet dry bulbs and digital thermometers and satellite imagery.
and radar measurements and all of these things that we can do
in the last 20, 30 years, for example, extremely accurate.
So, there's a whole lot of doubt.
And the other problem is that we as human beings,
we really don't live that long, statistically,
compared to how long the planet's been spinning, right?
And when we're alive, we think hand to mouth
and we have terrible memories.
So, it's like, oh, it's a hot summer.
Yeah, these summers are getting hotter.
and it's like, well, actually no, the previous summer was the coldest on record for the last three decades.
Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.
Yeah, so it's all very, that's why I think it's just some people argue about it, because it is difficult to spot the trend.
So let's start with what we can prove, what we do know.
So if we look at records, there is absolutely no question that sea levels are rising.
And the evidence suggests, yes, definitely happening.
So, the evidence suggests that over a millennia or so, the sea levels rise and fall by about
several hundred feet regularly, irrespective of whether human beings were present or not.
Now- It's a cyclical thing.
Yeah, exactly.
It's cyclical.
Exactly right.
So, again, why?
Well, that's complicated, but not interested in that.
If we just sort of look at the information that we have more recently at hand, in February 2016,
which is, well, the month we're recording this, NASA's GISS surface temperature analysis showed
that for the first time with modern accurate temperature recording instruments, the average
temperature on Earth's surface has risen by one degree Celsius. So, that goes back a hundred and
something years. Now, it's a fact that water will expand as its temperature increases in
accordance with well-established laws of physics. So, water is a liquid, there's volumetric
expansion and there's a coefficient of volumetric expansion. And the funny thing about water
is that actually that coefficient changes based on the temperature itself. So, the rate
at which it expands varies based on the temperature of the liquid itself, which is kind of funky,
there you have it anyway but at nominal sea temperature range at the surface it's about 0.000207
per degree celsius not a lot but there's a heck of a lot of water in the ocean and obviously as well
that temperature won't reach all the way down to the bottom of the ocean it'll be present in the
top few feet or meters of the ocean predominantly but again world's a big place that's a lot of
of surface area, a lot of volume and a lot of water. So it doesn't take that much even
though the expansion isn't that great. There is certainly going to be an impact, there's
no question. And there's also the not insignificant amount of water that's going to be caused
by ice. So as ice melts, obviously that water goes and dumps into the ocean, while that
water's got nowhere else to go except to rise the average sea level. So in North
America the National Snow and Ice Data Center has been collecting data about
ice pack in the Arctic for a long time and they've noted that this year 2016
has had the lowest amount of sea ice in recorded satellite image history. So
that's not so good. So obviously less ice more liquid water but the problems are
melting. Yeah, they are. Exactly. Need to add more ice cubes.
Oh, dear. Anyway, if the snow falls on land, though, that's kind of a
win because it means that it can freeze and it locks that water up, doesn't go back into the ocean
again. So, it's more like because the Arctic is kind of different because the
Arctic is almost entirely water.
So, you know, obviously, there's not this parts of Greenland, but Antarctica is a bigger area as well.
There's other glaciers all around the world and they're all melting.
They're not...
They are slowly melting.
The water that was trapped in them, well, it's now flowing into the ocean and the
level has only one way to go and that's up.
Okay. So, now I've sufficiently worried everyone listening, let's
stop and take a breath.
Get your water wings, people.
good. Oh dear. Float in Australia, we call them floaties.
And in the UK, I think they call them angel wings or something.
I forget what it is, something like that anyway. But yeah, I
know what you mean. So, this is not one of those inflatable
things with a rubber ducky head at the front that looks just
weird and wrong, but never mind. Confusing too.
I can picture you in that.
Oh, no, that's disturbing. That's just not right at all.
- Oh, yeah, yeah.
Okay, cool.
Well, maybe we should keep some of those in a spare
just in case, but anyway, all right.
But the fact is, anyway, as far as sea level rises go,
it is real, it is happening.
And since about 1992, the Topex Poseidon satellite
and several others since then has been launched,
have been accurately measuring the mean sea level.
And in the last 25 years,
the sea levels have risen 3.2 millimeters
with plus or minus 0.4 of a millimeter of error.
So, that's just in the last 25 years.
So, it's not much, but, you know,
it is going up. Reports of...
It's a cumulative thing.
Yeah.
It's going to matter eventually.
Yeah, exactly.
It starts somewhere.
And 3.2 millimetres is nothing, really.
But it's more interesting.
Well, I'll get to it.
So, the reports of the impacts on global warming on island nations,
Island nations in the Pacific, you know, like Palau and
Tuvalu. I think they're a little bit questionable
because, you know, they claim that people have abandoned the
islands due to rising sea levels and erosion as a direct result.
But the reality is it's actually more driven by unemployment.
So, I'm not sure.
I'll put a link to one of those alarmist articles in the show notes if you want to read it.
but read the comments at the bottom,
and especially the comments that are from people
that actually came from Palau.
So definitely worth the read.
So there's a little bit of scaremongering
going on out there, that's also undeniable.
Anyway, but the CSIRO's Antarctic Climate
and Ecosystem Cooperative Research Center website
is probably the most interesting set of projections.
And that's based on the satellite data
I just referred to before.
and it correlates that with known measurements and predicted ice sheet melt contributions
and according to their projections, by 2100, that's another 85 years time,
the worst case mean sea level rise will be about 81cm, that's 32 inches.
So that's their worst case and if you look at the trend line for the last 25 years,
it's unfortunate but the trend line seems to be very close to their worst case curve line.
but it's not exact obviously it goes up and down and it could trend down again
it might level off, it's hard to be sure it's just a prediction
so it's complicated
but anyway, since we have developed as a civilization
we've got very very accurate topographical maps about all the world's land masses
it's pretty easy to actually overlay the predicted sea level rises with those maps
maps to see exactly what it's going to look like. Now, in Australia, there's a site called
Oz Coasts. And rather selfishly, I decided to look at what Brisbane would look like.
And the impact to the CBD with that level rise in 85 years time is pretty negligible.
And for those people that are from Brisbane or have been to Brisbane, you'll know that
the CBD and South Bank, they sit up above the river level by a fair way, several, quite
few meters. Mind you when it floods it's going to be a bit nastier but anyway. So Sydney you know
might be a little bit more interesting some of the waterfront properties won't fare so well but
it's not going to be catastrophic you'll still be able to get around. Melbourne for some odd reason
has a big no data sign in the middle of it. I don't know why, never mind that. But the visible
parts that you can see well they're not too bad either. And then I thought okay well let's have
have a look at the States. So, I checked out around San Francisco. Some parts of Mission
Bay and Hunters Point are going to get their feet wet. Unsurprisingly, the Coit Tower will
be unscathed, as you'd hope. In New York, the southern end of Manhattan around Battery
Park for several blocks will be a bit damper than normal, but the vast majority of Manhattan
will be fine. I mean, I could go on all day, right, about all these different cities around
the world. But honestly, a one metre or three foot rise in the
mean sea level will not greatly affect most cities on an average
day. But that's not so much the problem. The problem's more
about the storm surges and flooding caused by reduced
drainage rates, because as the sea level is higher, the
king tides that are going to come in are going to cause the
biggest issues. They may not happen all the time, but they'll
happen regularly enough to be quite a pain in the neck.
So, yeah.
So once you hit big numbers in sea level rises like 5 or 6
meters, yeah, and it's way, way, that's way too far out to
accurately predict at this point.
You cannot look at anyone with a straight face and say, oh,
yeah, in 2150, it's going to be 6 meters.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
But anyway, so just to turn the problem back around, I just
decided for fun.
I have a strange idea of fun, clearly. How high would the sea level need to be
before my house started to have water flowing through it? And it needs to be 32 meters or 105 feet.
So we're a ways off that for at least for my house. But anyhow, all right.
That's the alarmist section over. Okay.
- Ding ding. - Ding ding. Moving on.
So, let's see.
So, I guess the thing is when I started doing engineering, I had a very
different idea of what the point of engineering was.
I thought it was just like inventing cool stuff and, you know, building and fixing cool stuff.
And the thing that I learned, the more I did, the more I did engineering
was that engineering is more about longevity up to
point. So when we're asked to design something, you know, from
a civil point of view, it could be a structure, which is
probably the most directly impacted by things like sea
level rises, you know, a facility of some kind of a
network, we have a design life. You know, that's the amount of
time that the system is expected to survive. And we'll select
components that have that cost trade off and say, right, well,
I could build you something that's going to last 1000 years,
but it's going to cost you 200 times as much. Would you like something that lasts 50 years?
Oh, that's much more manageable. Yeah, that we can do that for, you know, like five bucks. No worries.
There you go. So, that design life drives the cost, the complexity, the just the difficulty
of the project, you know, it's a very, very important factor. But when we decide things
like design life it's very singular you know it's like well we are going to build a bridge we're
going to build a building we're going to build a road what's its design life 50 years 100 years
what sort of maintenance do we expect before we're going to have to tear the thing down and build
another one people don't realize but when you build a bridge you don't build a bridge to last
forever you build a bridge to last for 100 years 200 years and you inspect that bridge and after a
while it's going to get like corrosion cracks in it damage and it's going to become more expensive
to maintain it than it is to just build a new one. And that's when you decide to build a new bridge
next to the old one and tear the old one down. And that's just what they do. So, the thing that
occurred to me, Vic, when I was thinking about this is that it's very singular, you know. How
many people approach a city that way or a town? I think very few townships, towns, cities, whatever,
have a design life set to them, because no one sees it that way.
We think it's always going to be there.
I guess you could argue some of these mining towns, that's
just a bunch of demountable buildings and like the camps that I've
spent a bit of time at in the last couple of years when the construction phase.
But I suppose you could argue that if you knew you only had 50 years worth of copper in a
hole in the ground, you would only design the town to support that for 50 years.
And then after that, who cares? Because you're just going to shut up shop and, you know, put
everything back all environmentally nicely.
And that's the end of that chapter, you know.
But but when they were building Manhattan, did they stop and think, you know, maybe it's not
going to be here in another 100 and 200, 300 years?
Nope, I don't think they did.
So that's the funny thing about engineering is that is that towns and cities seem to be treated
differently, like they're going to be there forever, but they're not going to be.
And this is the problem. So, what if we did design our cities with a design life?
And if we did, at what point would you abandon ship?
I mean, that's actually a really terrible mixed metaphor because after all, it's the ocean that's coming to you.
But anyway, but you know, so here's the thing, can you even protect cities against rising sea levels?
And the short answer is sometimes because nothing's as simple as it seems, right?
So, I thought it might be interesting to see if we accept, okay, so here's the fact, we
accept sea level is rising.
Yes, it's slow.
Yes, it's going to have a minimal impact, at least from a static point of view, but
from a storm surge point of view, it's going to be a problem.
So how do we deal with this?
And we can- There are already two fantastic examples of how this is
being handled already.
And the first one for those people in London, have you ever heard of
the Thames Barrier?
I have. Excellent.
Have you seen the episode of Doctor Who where they went to the Thames Barrier?
Before you go any further, I can unequivocally say yes.
If we're talking, if we're talking Nuhu, most definitely, I've seen everything.
Yeah, the Sycorax.
If it's classic who, there's still pretty good odds I've seen it.
Excellent. Yes, it was a good episode, that one.
Go Donna. Anyhow, sorry, geeking out there.
Anyway, so that was built in 1982, and it was built to protect London
from flooding caused by king tides.
So, that's an example that exists right now.
It was built, what's that? '82 to 2016.
So, that's 34 years.
I need to calculate, do that kind of math in my head.
I think that's right. Anyway, so, that's a recent example right
there. Now, a far better example is an
entire country.
Ever heard of the Netherlands? I have. See, I've never been to the Netherlands, but I hear that they have-
I've never been, but I've heard of it. Yeah. I've heard that they sell some interesting stuff there that you can, you know-
I have heard that as well. I've heard that a lot of that is a little bit of misinformation, but-
I don't know. I think the rumors are just rumors, really. Anyway, so who knows, maybe someday I'll
I'll go there, but we'll see. But I think that Holland's, sorry, the Netherlands, I should say,
is incredibly impressive for what it's managed to achieve in from a civil
engineering point of view. It's absolutely incredible.
So, some people know this, some people don't.
So, I thought it might be interesting just to do a little bit of history of how the Dutch have dealt
with this problem, because in the Netherlands, they've been reclaiming land from the
ocean for hundreds of years. And I say reclaiming land from the
ocean, it's a funny way of thinking about it. It's like,
they didn't stand on the shoreline and said, right,
that's it, that's my land and shout the ocean. Although maybe
some of them did. But anyway, also got to realize that when
the Netherlands was first way, way, way, way back 2000 years
ago, the majority of the Netherlands was just swamp. It
was peat swamp land and it was just uninhabitable. You couldn't build on it, you'd just sink.
You walk on it, you'd just sink. It was just a swamp, most of it anyway. So, they kind of
figured, well, we got this bit of land, what can we do with it?
So, what they've done successively over many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years is
that they have gradually extended the dams and they called them dykes.
And they first started to build them just to hold back storm surges.
And when they did, they realized it was possible to actually then use the land
that was between the seawall or the dike and where they wanted to live
and they could actually start to control their destiny.
So, the methods that the Dutch developed, I think, are going to
start to be employed more and more in different cities around the world as we try- As we
turned civil engineering as a way to protect our existing
investments in low-lying cities from rising sea levels. Of
course, the problem is that there are simply going to be
some cities that you just cannot economically protect. It's just
the Dutch and the Netherlands did what they did because they
had a geographical advantage, an unfair advantage, you might even
say. The topography made it possible. It won't always be
possible to do it without spending billions and billions,
if not trillions of dollars, at which point some people will simply draw the line in the sand and say,
"You know what? Hey, it's been fun, but abandoned ship, abandoned town, abandoned city. Oh, well."
That's going to be a terrible event if and when that we get, well, when we get to that point.
I think there's no if about it, it's just a when.
Yeah.
May not be in my lifetime. Maybe, don't know. We'll see.
So, what did the Dutch do exactly?
Well, there's a lot to be learned about what they did, so let's go over it.
So, between about 500 BC and 700 AD, there were
several cycles of habitation and abandonment, pretty much
in timing with the sea levels rising because the sea levels have been rising and falling
periodically, cyclically, as I said, for a very long time before we were ever burning a
heck of a lot of stuff.
So, if you know, again, CO2 argument, whatever, right.
So, the first dykes were actually just very low embankments.
They're about a metre or so high, and they were built specifically to surround
fields. So, the idea is you'd build up these embankments to keep the storm surges out
and then the fields, your crops inside the embankments, like big squares, big
rectangles, circles, essentially, they were protected from the ocean.
And that also protected their- You know, that protected their crops.
They also would build their houses on mounds. They would build these mounds and they called them
terps as in T-E-R-P-S, terps, as opposed to not terps as in mineral turpentine.
Anyway, so yes, and they would build their houses on top of these mounds and that would keep, of
course, their houses from getting flooded in storm surges.
Yeah, worked okay.
So, around about the ninth century, the sea was on the advance again and many of the terps needed to
be raised, but as they were raising the turps and then rebuilding the houses on top of them,
they essentially had combined a bunch of these single turps together.
So, each of the mounds, think of them like a watchtower, if you'd like.
And what they did is they built these raised walkways between them, the pathways between
them. And that would connect what these turps grew into villages.
And as they then built these pathways between them and built them up and built them up to
be all weather raised pathways. They essentially joined a bunch
of these together, and that became the first recorded dykes.
So, by about 1250 AD, most of the dykes had been connected
together, and they created a continuous wall, and that acted
as a defense against the sea. And driven by, I guess, the
population was increasing because of this, and there was
a, you know, apparently there was a fair bit of funding and
motivation from the local churches at the time. But what's
interesting is what happened next. Over a few hundred years
of the tides cycling in and out, the artificial barrier that
they created, created a turbulent section out from the
base of the wall. And what this turbulence created was a whole
new layer of sediment. And that sediment layer was deposited
Just further enough out from the base of the wall, base of the dike wall, along long
sections of the wall, it built up to such a degree that only the high tides would come
over them, or first there was a storm surge.
So, then they had the idea, well, geez, OK, we could just-
Just a little bit of added buffer.
Exactly. So, we could build another wall.
So, let's do it. So, they start to build another wall, and this allowed them to
essentially build a new ring of dykes that were further out to
sea. So, the shoreline essentially was moved further
out towards into the ocean. Well, what was the ocean? So,
the process, obviously, that sort of process wasn't always
possible, but the vast tracks of their coastline, it was. And
gradually, over many, many hundreds of years, the dykes
spread further out into the sea and reclaimed more and more
land. Now, just to give you an idea of the dykes, like
how many raised dykes there are in the entire country of the Netherlands.
As of late last year, the dyke network is approximately
22,500 kilometres long.
That's 14,000 miles of dykes.
That's a fair bit. Yeah.
So, go the Netherlands, I guess.
I also mentioned before...
They're fighting back.
They are. They are.
Take that, nature.
So, anyway, that was what they did with the dykes.
Just as an aside also, before I wrap up on this is, I guess the question...
The question for the Netherlands also wasn't just keeping the ocean out, it was draining the
swamps and conveying the swamp lands into something usable.
And one of the things that I always fantasize is why is it they always have the big windmills
you know, the big windmills because whenever you see a postcard from like
Amsterdam or whatever, there's always a conveniently placed windmill somewhere in the background
It's like, oh, look, windmill, nice. Why? Anyway, yeah, well, they were draining the swamps
So, what they did is they built...
They basically built some channels to channel the water out and they would then pump the water out
and that would then allow the swamps to drain.
The peat would dry and then they would start to build on it.
Unfortunately, because it was peat.
Are the windmills powering the pumps?
Some of them, not all, but some.
And the problem is that as the peat dried, though, it naturally just compacted because peat's
very- what's the word? Once you drain it out, it just packs down
because there's not much in it. It's just like dead plant matter and grass and stuff.
So, when you dry that out, it just compacts down, which meant anything you build in it just sinks
and that's what happened. But the worst part of it was as it dried and compacted down,
that lowered the ground level significantly, which then made the whole area prone to flooding
again. So, they were basically at the point where they had to
say, well, okay, we'll take the rivers that we have and we're
going to build dams. And these dams will have drainage valves
to let the water out, but it will not let the water flow back
into them again. So, at that point in time, they decided it
was time to start, you know, the townships would naturally form
right around those dams because that was how they would get the
goods from one side of the dam to the other because there was
Back in those days, they had no locks, because you know how you have locks to raise and lower
boats? Well, locks hadn't really been invented at that point. So, you couldn't actually take
boats up river. You had to cart the stuff around the dam, put on another boat, and then
go up river. And the bigger the trading points were, the bigger the cities were. And the
two most well-known examples are, I mentioned one before, Amsterdam, and another well-known
one is Rotterdam. So, that's a brief history of the Netherlands, I guess, and how they've
sort of fought back against the poor hand that they were dealt. But the lessons that
you can learn from how they've dealt with it would stand the rest of the world in good
stead I think for what is inevitably coming, which is the sea levels are going to rise
to a point where we're going to have to do something about storm surges. We're going
to have to do something about things like the drainage system, like stormwater drains.
So, stormwater drains will drain out to the river, the ocean, whatever.
As the sea levels rise, they will start to reverse flow and you'll start to have, for
example, in Brisbane, we have a couple of areas of the city that go under extreme king
tides already.
And there's signs and you'll drive around coming into Fortitude Valley.
There's a few spots.
There's another one near Bowen Hills and you'll see the yellow signs out once every, oh, I
know, nine, 10 months, not often. And the sign will be up,
you know, it says, you know, warning, do not park cars in the
following streets because, you know, there's a super high, huge
king tide today. And that's how it'll start, right? Is that will
become more regular. And it'll become a little bit more
regular, a little bit more regular. And then that is when
people realize, oh, the sea levels are rising. Oh, this is,
we should probably do something about this or oh, dear.
The funny thing is, I don't really have too much more to add about it.
I just thought it was interesting to talk about because people just have this strange idea
that everything lasts forever and it doesn't.
Like you look at a city, like the city's always going to be there.
It wasn't there. There's a city in the Mediterranean,
was it in Crete, whatever they called it.
There's been a few cities like the, you know, it was built at ocean level at the time or whatever.
There's a whole bunch of like cities, if you go in the Mediterranean that are underwater, not by much
water, but underwater.
And they've been taken by rising sea levels.
And those sea levels have been, you know, up for a thousand years.
Someday in the future, maybe when anyone listening to this podcast is long gone,
some city that you've been to at some point in your life will be underwater.
I think that that's inevitable. We might be able to stop it, we might be able to hold the water
back, you know, for a while, but eventually it's just going to become very difficult and very
expensive. And at some point you're going to have to say, well, that's it, we're done.
And I wonder, though, someday if people are going to stop with their obsession of living by the
ocean or living by the river, because it's really been a long time since we've needed to, because
we don't rely on boats to bring our goods to us anymore.
So, we don't need the waterways for that.
And as for drinking water, we build dams that are inland.
We treat the water and we pump it to our houses.
We don't need to live by the ocean other than the fact that it's pretty.
So, I do wonder at what point that will start to change, maybe someday.
But anyway, there you go.
What do you think? That's a lot to think about.
The worst part of it is this precious little we can do about it, you know?
I mean, if you believe that it is all caused by burning fossil fuels, and it may well be, I
mean, I don't know, probably, but if it is, it's like
there's a thing called hysteresis.
Do you know what hysteresis is?
They do not. That's a term I'm unfamiliar with.
Okay. It's- I'm trying to think of where the name came from.
The idea is that there's a momentum of sorts, like
electrically. So as your magnetic field, let's say it's a
transformer, as the magnetic field is establishing, it has a certain amount of
energy in that magnetic field. If you turn off the electrical current,
then on the input side, the magnetic field will start to collapse. But there's a time
but there's a time delay between the power being turned off on the primary side and the power
disappearing from the secondary side because the fangling field has to collapse. That time delay
between switching on and off essentially is a hysteresis and if it is true that burning fossil
fuels is causing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to go up there's no question about
that, but if that's what's causing the global warming and
the sea level rises, if that's what it is that's causing it,
well, then, if you were to stop all CO2 emissions today, like
all of them across the world, there's still going to be an
environmental momentum that's already been kicked off. And
people say there's like a critical tipping point, maybe
there is, maybe there isn't, we just don't know enough to know
for sure. But what we do know is that the sea levels are rising,
That's all we know, for sure. As for what's causing it, that's open for debate.
And if I was a climatologist, maybe I'd be debating that, but I'm not.
So, anyway.
So there you go. If you want to talk more about this,
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They can find me on Twitter @vighudson1
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thank you everyone for listening and
Thank you Vic. Thank you John always a pleasure
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