It appears that a meeting of governments, the worlds leading advisers and experts on climate change all agree. Climate change is with us and large parts of it are irreversible.
The most worrying part of their report was also that the changes we may have may be quite sudden. We are not talking about sudden in the way it happened in the film "The day after tomorrow", which had climate change happen in one day, but global temperatures could rise by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius in just a few decades.
It might make Britain a nice place to live, we it not for the fact that 35% of the country will be under water.
I now await a torrent of abuse from Tories who claim that they now one scientist (some even know two) who claim that it is all made up as part of some world conspiracy.
Update : And sadly I was proved right. All the Tories did queue up to have a go at me for writing this.
12 comments:
It's not a case of global warming denial, but as to whether it is human influenced global warming. There's certainly enough evidence out there to suggest that the whole thing is a natural phenomena and nothing humanity can do will influence it one way or another.
That's not to say we can poison our planet with impunity, just that we aren't necessarily the cause of it warming up.
By the way -5 degrees in West Sussex on Friday morning, coincidence?
As you recently left a comment on my blog complaining about my use of "Boadicea", let me be the first to point out that the word is "deniers".
Jonathan
Yes, Global warming means a shifting of the Gulf Stream (hence our awful summer). So yes, Global warming can mean colder winters.
Have you read up on how cold it is in the Sahara at night ?
Janothan, I will change it immediately. As for the boudicca thing, it is not your fauly. So many history books are wrong too.
There's no evidence yet of a shift in the Gulf stream.
Oddly enough there is the reduction of the polar caps on Mars, strange how far humanities grasp reaches.
How come the weather we had this summer was, according to experts, the weather iceland usually gets ?
I gave you an example of why weird weather can happen even during global warming (which is weird in the same way as the -5c you had today), yet again, let's deny the evidence.
Thank you anyway for justifying the title of my posting.
Bit odd that how you can justify the title of your posting by my not denying that there's global warming. As I posted earlier, the only doubt I have about global warming is that it's human caused, not that it isn't happening.
How arrogant can we be, to think that we can affect the earth's climate? If the earth wants to change, it will. Sit back and watch it happen. Next we'll be trying to change the earth's rotation.
Climate Change has happened for millions of years. Ice ages, warm periods - all part of the natural cycle of change. Looking at 100 or 150 years worth of climate change data, most of which is unreliable compared to todays standards, is not useful. It's such a small timescale in the grand scheme of things that the data is just too unreliable. That's how the same data can result in predictions of an ice age 30 years ago and global warming now.
It appears that a meeting of governments, the worlds leading advisers and experts on climate change all agree. Climate change is with us and large parts of it are irreversible.
So that's people who want to use climate change as an excuse to tax and control us and people who make a living from telling the people who want to tax and control us that we're all going to die? Well I'm convinced!
Few people, if any, deny climate change is happening - the discussions I've seen from these 'deniers" just question the causes of it. A big difference!
Justin, it's been happening for millions of years. Scientists can go back and see what happened to the climate over time but they can't tell you whether there was a quarter degree change in the temperature in a given year. What I'm trying to put across is that they can say over a period of a couple of centuries the temperature was 1 degree higher than the previous couple of centuries. During that time the temperature could have varied by quarter of a degree, half a degree over a decade but that couldn't be reliably detected. Micro-analysis of climate changes over a couple of centuries are irrelevant - it's the bigger picture that matters.
Firstly - climate change has been with us all the time humans have been on this earth and before.
There is plenty of natural climate change, for example we have been coming out of a little ice age.
Whether the current, apparent, global warming is down to human action is debated still, although it looks like at least a portion of it is.
Last I heard, the current predicted rise is 2.6C over a long period (IPCC), less than London has had over the last 100 years.
My problem is that there is a lot of gross exaggeration (like the current Greenpeace ad in Spain or Al Gore's 20ft sea level rise). There's a lot of alarmism, we're not all going to die, if we trade more and make the poorest richer (through the only means which is known to work - trade) then the effect on humans will be even less.
Most people also fail to take into account future progress in technology. Solar power is becoming cheaper and cheaper, in 10 years it should be plentiful at current rates of progress. There's interesting news on fuel cell technology too. There's several ideas on how to reduce atmospheric CO2 and how to cool the world.
We need to encourage these technologies. What we don't need to do is restrict people's liberty and spend billions on government intervention which is not working and will not work. That will make us poorer and make any changes even harder to deal with.
I dislike the global warming alarmism, its akin to jingoism and is being used by too many to manipulate us into forgoing basic freedoms.
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