Mar 17 2007

The public view of climate change

6 Responses to “The public view of climate change”

1. # Brian Tomkinsonon 17 Mar 2007 at 9:46 am

   A sober reflection of the situation. I hope your leader and colleagues take due note, as it applies to them also.

2. # Suzanne Fosteron 17 Mar 2007 at 10:35 am

   I whole heartedly agree with you. We should be spending more time looking at ways to deal with the effects and learning to live with climate change rather than making futile attempts to prevent it !
   Suzanne

3. # Stuart Fairneyon 19 Mar 2007 at 9:49 am

   Gore in fact, involuntarily denounces his own case, by saying that the balance of funding goes to those who publicly at least, announce CO2 causes global warming. Setting aside the clear problems with, and holes in this theory, clearly, if you are a scientist wanting funding, you have to subscribe to the orthodoxy.

   Incidentally, it is not the first time ill-informed hysteria has lead people to believe that some irresponsible people were affecting the climate. In the seventeenth century, we used to burn witches for weather cooking

4. # Peter Milleron 24 Mar 2007 at 8:09 am

   1. Climate change is the norm throughout this planet’s history; climate stability is an aberration.
   2. Carbon Dioxide is a “greenhouse gas”, but absolutely not at concentrations of one part in 3,500.
   3. Ice cores show a strong correlation between the Earth’s temperature and Carbon dioxide levels over the past one million years: BUT the temperature changes came first and carbon dioxide followed - nobody disputes this, so why do the purveyors of bad science keep saying it should be different now.
   4. Why is there “global warming” now. The principal answer is the sun is burning 0.5-0.7% hotter than a century ago; this raises Earth’s temperature slightly, increasing the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, which is the real “greenhouse gas”. Look at equatorial deserts and jungles - where the air is dry, temperatures plummet at night, not so in the jungles.
   5. The activities of man may have something to do with this period of “global warming”, but it has absolutely nothing to do with rising Carbon Dioxide levels - ask any competent geologist.

5. # Chris Wrighton 26 Mar 2007 at 6:55 pm

   Take a look at this graph from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre (a strongly pro-CO2 organisation).

   http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/obsdata/globaltemperature.html

   The bars for the last few years show no significant increase (the last green bar is 2006). The hottest year was almost ten years ago. Particularly if you regard 2001 as the first year of the century, then this graph shows that there has been virtually no global warming in this century. And yet the CO2 still goes up.

   Of course the world temperature could make a decisive move upwards. Or downwards. But if this global warming pause continues for a few more years - or if it starts to go down due to a fall in solar activity - then there could be a lot of very red faces!

   Chris Wright

6. # Peter Marshallon 29 Mar 2007 at 2:12 pm

   It seems odd that people are continuing to attack those who are genuinely concerned about the possible consequences of man made climate change as ‘bad scientists’, or as serving a sinister agenda against the industrialised world, when there are much clearer lines to be drawn between those who do not believe in man-made climate change and the industries that create large amounts of carbon emissions. The real ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ is pointless speculation on the degree of temperature change caused by natural atmospheric cycles or solar activity. No-one denies that these are the primary motors for global temperatures, but there’s nothing human beings can do about the way solar activity affects our climate. The reason so much money goes into researching man-made climate change is because it is important to understand how human behaviour will affect the continued habitability of our planet. As a historian, I have read a great deal about the fact that societies throughout history have had apocalyptic myths and concerns that in hindsight we mock, because we understand how and why the armageddon they feared failed to come to pass. However, there are societies who have brought about their own destruction because they failed to take the necessary measures to protect themselves: the Easter Islanders, for example, and the Aztec and Maya cultures.

   Those who are content to sit back and enjoy lifestyles incredible to people living a century ago, and think nothing of the environmental impact they are having clearly like any justification they have for maintaining the status quo. People do not like change. People certainly do not like change at their expense, but this doesn’t mean that change isn’t necessary. To all those who say that man made climate change theory is bad science, there are a few salient facts to consider:

   Firstly, no scientist has ever asserted that man-made carbon emissions will be directly responsible for catastrophic changes to our climate. They have always asserted that this is a possibility or a probability, because that is the nature of scientific hypothesis. It is for those who deny this possibility to offer CONCLUSIVE proof that it is false (and by conclusive, we mean actual, peer reviewed demonstration that carbon emissions do not alter climate). No-one has EVER offered this proof.

   Secondly, climatology and meteorology are very difficult sciences. The complex nature of the systems under study, and the centuries long nature of climate cycles make any hypothesis made about climate over a century difficult to study and to substantiate. That is why there are ‘holes’ in climate change theory that climate change ‘denyers’ are able to exploit to their hearts’ content. That doesn’t make the hypothesis false or unreasonable.

   Thirdly, there are some basic certainties that are objectively verifiable. Carbon exists in the atmosphere as part of a natural cycle. It becomes part of living organisms, they respire, expire decompose, and it is released. This cycle is stable. What introduces instability is the massive and sudden release of fossilised carbon (”new” carbon, if you will) into the atmosphere. It is like saying that suddenly minting a billion new pound coins would have no effect on currency circulation or inflation. The effects in the long term are uncertain, and there are ways for the economy to adapt and cope, but to assert that the effect would be negligable without any proof whatsoever is ridiculous.

   Fourthly, human beings have lived on the planet for a tiny part of its history, and our current climatalogical era, known as the holocene era, has existed very briefly. It is this climate that has allowed agriculture, and therefore the whole basis of human society and civilisation, to develop. There are now more human beings on Earth than ever before, many more than could be sustained and fed without the wealth allowed by the ready availability of massive amounts of food. It is not unreasonable, given the complexity of climatological systems, and the comparative instability of human society, to assert that even a small shift in our ability to sustain our population could have very serious consequences for possibly millions of people.

   A poster above mocked those who are concerned about our environment as 17th century witch-burners, frightened by changes they do not understand. He ignores the fact that those who are concerned about drastic, man-made changes to our atmosphere do so on the basis of scientific research, not superstition. They are not hauling 4×4 drivers from their cars and setting them alight, but calling for world-wide, sustained efforts to restrain how human activity is diminishing the viability of human life. He is also revealing his ignorance of the 17th century. These people reacted against members of their own societies, demonising them as witches, because of the vast social and economic traumas they suffered. If a civil war were tearing through this country, plague were running rife, I am sure that there would be plenty of modern equivalents of witch-burning would take place, just as it did in Germany in the ’30’s, when a society lost control of its economy. When people are poor and hungry and they see death and destruction that they are powerless to prevent taking place around them, then life has really become, in that great 17th century summation of Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish…and short”. Societies are not always as comfortable as ours in Britain today; indeed this kind of prosperity is historically abnormal. We ought not to be too complacent about its permanence.

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