I have to confess that I'm somewhat stunned at your assumption that "the unemployed" are qualified to insulate homes.

Without getting into the obvious insult to skilled tradesmen, you're hugely over-simplifying a very complex issue.

e.g. to insulate a typical late 1800s/early 1900s red brick terrace home, is not so straightforward as you might think, as in many cases you would first need to put up a stud partition, and plaster boarding in order to first have a cavity wall to actually insulate in the first place...

Then you would need to properly install loft insulation, which is not an easy job - I know because I have done it... if the house already has some kind of an attic conversion, you're potentially ripping up existing boards/flooring to install new insulation...

Then, though it's a lesser issue these days, as the majority have been done in the last 30 years or so, there is replacement double glazed units to consider - also a professional glazer's job, not something you can just rope in large numbers of unskilled and untrained, people for.

Also many of these homes aren't just losing heat - they are not properly heated in the first place - e.g. no proper central heating system: reliance on inefficient, gas fires, electric heaters, halogen heaters, etc.

So you need a central heating engineer / gas fitter / plumber to install all that - not something you can just get "the unemployed" people to do.

If I owned my own home and had a choice between either no insulation or untrained people carrying it out on a government scheme, I would choose the former.

Typical LQ.

Nothing happening on this thread, so I asked an obvious but searching question (post #310).

Everybody wakes up, nobody answers or has a thought about the question at the heart of Government inaction I got one or two answers on minor point; but mostly we're waffling about tangents, and tangents of tangents.

What's the point of putting subjects on threads anyhow?

Post #310 was effectively "vote for the hypothetical party who takes drastic action on climate change, or continue to vote for 'economy, economy, economy, growth, growth, etc".

You posed a question based on a fantastical scenario and you invited and got responses along the lines of wpeckham's reply, which correctly points out the purpose of taxation. Are you one of those people who truly believes that taxation on products like alcohol or tobacco is truly about a government deterring people from buying those unhealthy products? Or do you see it as it really is - just another means of raising revenue for the treasury by essentially "taxing addiction" with a health pretext for marketing purposes?

"Green" issues are really no different to any other smoke and mirrors game used to sell a product to the masses. To push a product, you make a competing one seem less desirable - it helps when the competing one already has a lot of bad press and negativity surrounding it.

Electric vehicles, for example, win "hearts and minds" partially because a given government backs the corporate interests behind them. They simply have to present a very one dimensional picture "zero emissions" and not factor in battery production, replacement, disposal, etc - and all the existing environmental issues, involving production, transportation, disposal and recycling automotive waste, which won't go way by simply changing the type of power plant. Most importantly - electric vehicles remove reliance on the oil industry - is that a bigger factor than climate?

Is the scheme of building all new homes in the UK without gas fired boilers, and thus reducing gas consumption, purely about carbon emissions - or is it more about a general strategy of reducing reliance on Russia via the European Union (Brexit) for gas supplies...?

Regarding gas: https://gridwatch.co.uk/

If you look at the largest single source of the UK's electric power, it's CCGT (combined cycle gas turbine). A lot of that gas comes from Europe, which is in turn tied in to the Russian supplies/market.

Hence Hinkley Point C: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkle..._power_station (and Sizewell C)

To hell with the UK. The topic is GLOBAL Climate Change!

UK was an example. Transpose that to almost any country and the same applies: Token measures, inaction and the needs of big business being put before the climate issue.

"The average temperature at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station between April and September, a frigid minus-78 degrees (minus-61 Celsius), was the coldest on record, dating back to 1957. This was 4.5 degrees lower than the most recent 30-year average. ...
The extreme cold over Antarctica helped push sea ice levels surrounding the continent to their fifth-highest level on record in August, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center." https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-...warming-world/

What's your point?

No point, just an observation that I think is important to note and one which is seldom mentioned in the media. A large portion of land roughly the size of the United States and Mexico combined and covered with an 'ice cube' varying from 1 to 3 miles thick sitting at the bottom of the World (relative to many of us) seems to be getting colder and may be accumulating more ice.

As per Fact Check-Six months of record cold temperatures at the South Pole Amundsen-Scott station does not discredit climate change:
(See also: It's Cold! Is Global Warming Over?)

Fact Check: 'Climate change' has been happening here on Earth for roughly 4.5B years.

Yes, and it's caused quite a few mass extinctions too, particularly the huge one at the end of the Permian. It's not the kind of thing you want to have to live through.

Hazel I have no trouble admitting the World seems to be heating up. I'm just not sure that it's anthropomorphic. Science still has no clear idea what caused the last great warmup <60M years ago - the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.)

Mjolnir let me ask you a simple question. Given that gas and particulate matter introduced into the atmosphere in a few hours to days from volcanoes can have month even year long climate effects, do you imagine that an order of magnitude greater than all volcanoes compined of continuous but similar "introduction" of gas and particulate matter into the atmosphere for ~150 years by humans to have zero effect?

You may not have a point, but I have a point. Your facts are correct but the conclusion is wrong. The very article you linked went on to point out that the changes to the Gulf Stream due to Global Warming combined with other effects can strengthen the polar vortex at the South Pole some years, resulting in the effect you pointed us to. Did you read the full article? It explained why we should not read anything into the ice increase.

Your post is somewhat inconsistent when you consider overall ice. The Arctic ice cap is vanishing consistently, but the South Pole grew one year. In other years it calved huge icebergs, The West Antarctic peninsula is disappearing in large chunks Greenland is losing massive amounts of meltwater. All mountains are losing their glaciers. So you understand why people might have difficulty thinking you don't have a point when you highlight the one statistic that can (but shouldn't be) interpreted as going against the inexorable trend.

Of course not, I'm sure it's had some effect but I believe you are over-simplifying the effects of past volcanic eruptions on 'climate change.' Sure, soot in ice and the CO2 released, both volcanic and generated by us both tend to trap heat but another component of volcanic eruptions is SO2. In and of itself not a greenhouse gas but if the eruption has enough energy these gases penetrate the stratosphere, react with water vapor and can have long lasting effects:
"Sulfur dioxide is short-lived in the atmosphere, but once it penetrates into the stratosphere, where it combines with water vapor to convert to sulfuric acid aerosols, it can last much longer — for weeks, months or even years, depending on the altitude and latitude of injection, said Simon Carn, professor of volcanology at Michigan Tech.

In extreme cases, like the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, these tiny aerosol particles can scatter so much sunlight that they cool the Earth’s surface below." https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard...sulfur-dioxide

It also appears that for most of the 'Industrial Revolution' and for a large part of the semi-reliable weather data we have, we've been, thankfully, the recipients of a dearth of super energetic and prolonged volcanic eruptions:

"Climate Change and Human Health Literature Portal Sulfur dioxide initiates global climate change in four ways"
"Global climate change, prior to the 20th century, appears to have been initiated primarily by major changes in volcanic activity. Sulfur dioxide (SO2) is the most voluminous chemically active gas emitted by volcanoes and is readily oxidized to sulfuric acid normally within weeks. But trace amounts o SO2 exert significant influence on climate. All major historic volcanic eruptions have formed sulfuric acid aerosols in the lower Stratosphere that cooled the earth's surface similar to 0.5 degrees C for typically three years. While such events are currently happening once every 80 years, there are times in geologic history when they occurred every few to a dozen years. These were times when the earth was cooled incrementally into major ice ages. There have also been two dozen times during the past 46,000 years when major volcanic eruptions occurred every year or two or even several times per year for decades. Each of these times was contemporaneous with very rapid global warming. Large volumes of SO2 erupted frequently appear to overdrive the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere resulting in very rapid Warming. Such warming and associated acid rain becomes extreme when millions of cubic kilometers of basalt are erupted in much less than one million years. These are the times of the greatest mass extinctions. When major volcanic eruptions do not occur for decades to hundreds of years, the atmosphere can oxidize all pollutants, leading to a very thin atmosphere, global cooling and decadal drought. ..." https://tools.niehs.nih.gov/cchhl/in...erence_id=8437

As I'm sure you know methane is some 25 times more potent as a 'greenhouse' gas than CO2, and that volcanoes tend to produce very little methane - that said there is another little understood source of methane upon which this 2020 study shed a little light.
"An escape route for seafloor methane
Leakage from frozen layers was a puzzle, but a new study shows how the potent greenhouse gas breaks through icy barriers." https://news.mit.edu/2020/seafloor-methane-leakage-1130

"Methane, the main component of natural gas, is the cleanest-burning of all the fossil fuels, but when emitted into the atmosphere it is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. By some estimates, seafloor methane contained in frozen formations along the continental margins may equal or exceed the total amount of coal, oil, and gas in all other reservoirs worldwide."

and:

'Early on, Fu saw photos and videos showing plumes of methane, taken from a NOAA research ship in the Gulf of Mexico, revealing the process of bubble formation right at the seafloor. It was clear that the bubbles themselves often formed with a frozen crust around them, and would float upward with their icy shells like tiny helium balloons.

Later, Fu used sonar to detect similar bubble plumes from a research ship off the coast of Virginia. “This cruise alone detected thousands of these plumes,” says Fu, who led the research project while a graduate student and postdoc at MIT. “We could follow these methane bubbles encrusted by hydrate shells into the water column,” she says. “That’s when we first knew that hydrate forming on these gas interfaces can be a very common occurrence.”'

Climate change is real but I contend that there are many as yet poorly understood factors besides what 'Man' has introduced into the environment in the last 150 years.