Global Warming To Hinder Wi-Fi Signals, Claims UK Gov't

radioweather writes with news of a government report from the UK's Dept. for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs which warns of global warming's harmful effect on Wi-Fi and other communication protocols. Quoting the Guardian: "Presenting the report, the secretary of state for the environment, Caroline Spelman, said that 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. The threat posed by climate change to internet and telephone access is a rare example of when the developed world would be hit harder than developing countries, which are in general more at risk from increased floods, droughts and rising sea levels. 'If climate change threatens the quality of your signal, or you can't get it because of extreme fluctuations in temperature, then you will be disadvantaged, which is why we must address the question,' said Spelman, 'and just imagine in the height of an emergency if the communications system is down or adversely affected.'"

Huh. Wifi has always worked fine in southern US

[sandytaru]

Wifi was working just great in Tuscaloosa, AL until the tornadoes hit. At that point, they had bigger problems. It's still working fine in NE Georgia where I live, when 100F+ temperatures are the norm in the summer. In fact, whenever our signal degraded, it was because a squirrel had chewed through an outside line, not because it was too hot or humid. I think TFA is missing the elephant in the room here.

Re:Scraping the bottom of the barrel

[similar_name]

BTW, wasn't Britain supposed to get drier winters with no snow because of 'global warming', not wetter ones? When did that change?

citation [independent.co.uk] needed [newscientist.com]

Re:Near the end of the hype?

[shutdown -p now]

GW would be easily falsified by a statistically significant (i.e. long) period of temperatures going down that could not be explained by some other clearly observing and temporary phenomenon. So far we haven't seen such a thing.

"just imagine in the height of an emergency ..."

[jc42]

just imagine in the height of an emergency if the communications system is down or adversely affected.

Um, it's not at all difficult to imagine this, especially if you've ever been involved in disaster relief. Until very recently, the communication systems were one of the first things to fail during most disasters of any sort. Wires are fragile things when faced with the actions of Ma Nature or a military force. This is why, back when (D)ARPA started the work that led to the Internet, almost all the diagrams showed a wireless comm system. It doesn't work too well to connect ships or jet fighters via cables. And even for ground installations, cutting the wires is the first thing that any enemy will do. The commercial world has dragged their feet tremendously, blocking the development of a real, universal wireless system at every stage. Our current cell-phone system is crippled by the lockings and licensing that makes it refuse to do most things we'd like it to do. The wi-fi system is mostly locked down by a hokey "security" system that doesn't much interfere with military decoding, but does prevent most civilians from using the system in over 99% of the US.

And we've just barely made a dent in this problem. It's possible to have trucks (or boats) full of generators and wireless comm gear at the scene in a short time. But this usually takes much longer than it should, due to poor planning, plus active interference from the authorities on the scene.

Our comm system is barely functional in small-scale emergencies much larger than an auto accident. In real disasters, such as Katrina, the comm system simply collapses and takes weeks to come back online.

There's also the example that would be funny if it weren't for all the deaths involved: The collapse in New York of the World Trade Center nearly a decade ago also crippled Manhattan's communication system. The idiots who built the system's infrastructure (mostly the phone company) had run most of the cables for the southern half of the island under the WTC. And they hadn't built redundancy, so there was usually only one path between two specific points. The ARPA people back in the 1960s would have been apalled. People in 2001 who'd been working on the Internet were apalled. There was a lot of discussion of this in any number of comm forums. Reports are that the situation is nearly as bad today. The comm companies see no need to waste money on redundancy (and in fact over-subscribe most of their capacity when they can). And the government agencies are controlled by people who don't believe in "government regulation".

It's interesting to contemplate the idea that someone actually thought we had a comm system that works during major emergency or disaster situations. I wonder who wrote that line, and what their experience in emergency work is.

Re:UK Government Hinders WiFi

[SnarfQuest]

Sorry, but the GW scientists have proven that the Sun has no part in the global temperature. They used the latest GW scientific method: they took a vote and got a consensus!