From Tom Nelson: Huffington Post: Carbon dioxide could ruin wifi connections for your kids
Climate Change Effects: Things Global Warming Just Might Ruin For Your Kids
[Scroll down at the link above: The alleged CO2-induced wifi problem is #26 of 53]
Here’s the claim:
A 2011 report from the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs found that climate change could affect certain infrastructure, like wireless internet. The Guardian reports, “higher temperatures can reduce the range of wireless communications, rainstorms can impact the reliability of the signal, and drier summers and wetter winters may cause greater subsidence, damaging masts and underground cables,” according to secretary of state for the environment.
And, the Earth could be visited by a race of super intelligent Wookie like creatures riding in flying saucers…demanding they be taken to the leader, and some HuffPo denizen offers up Al Gore.
I think the chances are greater of lightning hitting a car traveling down the road than a direct causation of widespread WiFi failure due to global warming aka climate change.
All of these potential calamities resulting from CAGW remind me of the ridiculous logical chains of causality of the “If You Give a Moose a Muffin” kids’ books.
Kids use smartphones with 4G data plans.
Wifi is mostly used indoors.
So people living southern Europe must have a lot more trouble getting WIFI to work than people in northern Europe, Sweden, where I live if understand it right. Never heard claims before that WIFI only is relieable far up north.
Guess they never heard of the Aloha network model… developped for wireless communication between islands… in Hawaii.
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years WIFI will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what WIFI is,” he said.
Hold on a sec, more CO2 is supposed to mean BIGGER hot spots, rite? What am I not getting? (playing captain obvious)
I think energy shortages from relying on wind would be a much larger wi-fi problem.
A handy list of EVERYTHING caused/killed/shortened etc by Global Warming.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
Warning. It is a very looooonnnng list. Sidebar perhaps Anthony?
[Reply: No need, this list is posted regularly here. — mod.]
Someone should test wifi in a high CO2 conc., high humidity, high temp. environment, like a real greenhouse.
So then WiFi is like the maintenance free battery.
Does this mean that global warming will be accompanied by the cooling of Wifi hotspots?
Oh! That must be why i can only make phone calls and access the interwebs in deep midwinter,and why our friends in warmer climes have to keep their routers in the fridge.
Kev-in-uk.
I`ll hold your coat if you like.
Note to all the fragile flowers still wetting themselves waiting for climageddon,this is not a threat.(probably)
rgbatduke says:
“The emperor penguin may or may not be in trouble in one part of the world, but it isn’t because of global warming.”
They cannot even get their geography right. The Emperor penguin is only found in Antarctica, which has been cooling for decades.
Total crap.
The only thing that can impact a WiFi signal is attenuation. Whilst heavy rain creates a slight attenuation on wireless signals (about 5.5 Db in the worst conditions) wind and heat have no impact on wireless at all.
And Telcos have been taking rain attenuation into consideration for years. A properly designed and installed wireless system has a built-in 20-20 Db margin of attenuation, MORE THAN ENOUGH to handle signal loss through water.
This is pure and simple deceit to get the teens/20 something people on the side of the Greens.
Déjà vu; didn’t we have a story like in the last year or two?
.
Dear Anthony,
did you by chance had the time to contact R. H. Essenhigh to post about his view on the CO2 level? Perhaps you remember some while ago I told that I would be very interested in his view and a discussion of it and you mentioned that you might look into it (which would be great)
All the best regards and keep up the good work 🙂
LoN
Well, this will throw the local tinfoil hatters into a frenzy. Imagine this – the same people who are fecally fearsome of “smart meters”, wifi and all other EM “radiation”, just happen to be the same ones scatalogically scared of CO2. So, if CO2 drops, their potential exposure to wi-fi will increase. They won’t feel safe even many miles from a wifi or cell-tower or microwave oven. Just how entertaining can this get? But wait, if CO2 goes up, all of our endangered species will be more protected from evil EM radiation. (Where I live, endangered species include rational thinkers. Sigh.)
The only ‘possible’ link I could imagine would be to water vapour. The frequencies that are used by wifi are actually ‘deliberatly’ chosen to be absorbed by water mollecules so that they don’t propagate too far. Its actually intentional and its how you limit to a few 10’s of meters range instead of 1000s. Now since there is supposed to be an increase in water vapour in the air with CAGW that ‘could’ in theory mean more limited range to certain frequencies that are absorbed by water.
This is similar to the microwave oven. The frequencies are chosento be absorbed by water which is how it heats food, it only heats the water mollecules in the food because their dimensions are exactly right to get excited by the 2.4Ghz signal.
Grandpa, what is wi-fi?
That was a short distance communications system for computers before everything went nanowave. It was good for around the house.
Well you had cell phones back then. Why didn’t you just use that?
It gave people a sense of security since you could use passwords and encryption, which cell phones didn’t have. That was before kilobyte-key proximity implants protected everyone, of course. That and they used to charge a lot more for cell use. Would you believe it cost as much to use a cell phone with a computer for a month as they charge for a gallon of real gasoline out in California?
Note that above some people are implying that cellular is not impacted much by water but are using the term wifi as if wifi and cellular are the same, they are not. Cellular picks frequencies that are not absorbed by water while wifi deliberately uses microwave frequencies designed to be absorbed by water. There were cases with ‘rain fade’ when Telco’s used microwaves for point to point communications in the 2.4Ghz band but cellular deliberately avoids that particular frequency for good reason. Something similar happens with fiber optics too. There are certain frequencies of light that are absorbed by the still small quantities of water mollecules in the fiber, as a result we skip over that band of frequencies so that the light can travel further in the fiber.
Not that the above has anything to do with CAGW – however its true that wifi is not cellular and wifi at 2.4Ghz is a sensitive to humidity by design.
CAGW makes it BOTH wetter and drier. Too much rain? Bad Reception! Too little rain? Subsidence of towers! And now a lightning strike too! Oh the humanity…
Interesting. If you can’t get people upset with rising oceans, melting artic ice, doomed species, extreme weather, etc., etc, then try loss of WiFi? That’s an absolutely brilliant plan.
I have a better suggestion to panic people: rising CO2 levels may cause more Al Gore appearances.
It’s much, much worse than we expected.
/sarc
Still my favorite CAGW silliness:
Climate Change implicated in increased sex industry human trafficking:
http://greenanswers.com/news/274241/effects-climate-change-shows-correlations-human-trafficking
Oxygen and water vapor are the two biggest gasses in attenuating the signal strength. And while higher temps can hold more humidity, I suspect that it “COULD” lower it.. But it would be so slight as to probably be un-measurable given the low power output of wifi.
But Then… I looked at this neat little attenuation chart. Shown by the chart here..
http://www.mike-willis.com/Tutorial/PF5.htm
Water vapor doesn’t really have an affect on attenuation for signals until they reach the 4ghz range.. Give most wifi routers are 2.4ghz,, UM FAIL MR NELSON!
Sure there are some 5ghz wifi 802.11n. And at 5ghz you get 0.0015 db per kilometer attenuation.. OMFG So .. Lets do a little math.. (Its been a while since I was in college so help me out). Maximum power output for 802.11 is 20dbm. I get roughly 400m range IF nothing is blocking the router. Minimum SNR is 10dbm to receive wifi.. So that gives me a drop of 0.025dbm per meter. If we pushed up the humidity and took away a whole 0.0015db per km, thats an extra 0.0000015db loss per meter. In other-words I lost 0.0006m or ZERO POINT 6 millimeters. HOLY COW! I might not get my wifi in my bedroom now!?! Sorry couldn’t resist..
Mr Nelson.. You are a frickin moron.
Please correct me if I did this wrong.
Rob Roy says:
“We can create the WIFI networks but we MAY be unable to maintain them. Oh the Humanity!!”
‘Oh the Vogonity!’ surely?