To Think Global Warming Can't Be All Bad?

[afteralongsquawk]

My carefully planted main crop tomatoes are long finished; but the runty little seedlings I dumped on the compost heap are doing great and still producing lovely toms in the last third of Nov!

AIBU to rather approve of this global warming thing?

I'm not sure that we're likely to get an ice age in the next 100 years...

Britain will get colder with global warming, because ocean currents will change and we wont get warmed up by the gulf stream.

So it will be more year-round snow and ice.

damnit.

Agree about overfishing of sand eels. It doesn't take away from the fact that climate change is also affecting their numbers. It just means we're exacerbating an existing problem. It was an example of how one species is affected but the change in plankton levels affects pretty much every marine food chain on Earth.

We will get colder, I think we're on the same lattitude line as Moscow? Or near to it. Great.

Colder ? It's bloody roasting.

Typical, I finally get central heating put in and it's barely been on

The issue about tackling it is it is cheaper to deal with the worldwide issues than stop it - even if it is man-made. Carbon taxes are wrong.

God, how depressing, such ignorance....

All the money and effort and agnst should be going into finding out what the consequences of climate change might be and working out ways to cope with them.

The climate changes all the time and it is ridiculous to give up the benefits and comforts of civilisation in the the uncertain hope that it will stop an uncertain process of climate change.

Personally, I think in 20 years we will be looking back at the climate change hooha as an example of millenarianism.

Trying to leave - yes, climate change is uncertain but we know what the general trend is going to be.

As to 'giving up the benefits of civilisation' - no-one is asking you to live in a mud hut, we're just being asked to be a bit more responsible for our own carbon emissions, e.g. the car that we drive, recycling etc. I don't think that's unreasonable. It might not make much of a difference but if everyone did it. And lets face it, most changes to do with cutting carbon emissions save, you personally, some money.

You won't be dismissing climate change as 'hooha' when, in 20 years time, you're paying £30 for a loaf of bread because the price of wheat has gone through the roof as crops fail whilst populations increase.

Well I think some plants might do well.

The decimation of the human race would be an excellent thing for the planet as well.

When Greenland is a beach holiday resort then I might start worrying ( Greenland was green and had cows in Viking times )

This winter , people will die of the cold in this country. Its esimated to be 27,000.
Many will die because they cant afford fuel. Fuel prices are 10-20% higher to pay for the 'green taxes'

so people will die of the cold to stop the planet getting warmer ? its total madness

Have you noticed the people being killed / made homeless in places like bangladesh due to flooding, oldmaceieio? Which are a much much larger scale than anything happening here and the increasing incidence of these disasters has been linked to global warming - made my us burning fossil fuels not by them.

Or are you one of these people who thinks one of "our" lives is worth more than one of "theirs"?

We have piles of money in this country and could afford more to help the vulnerable in our society. Our politicians choose to spend the money in other ways instead.

well said SardineQueen!

Global Warming will mean:

1. the UK gets colder and wetter.
2. poor countries suffer more than they do already. not really very civilized.

YABU.

We have piles of money in this country and could afford more to help the vulnerable in our society. Our politicians choose to spend the money in other ways instead

On things like education, health and welfare....silly politicians.

Nuclear weapons
Tax loopholes which could be closed
Letting big companies off millions in tax
Tax breaks which don't make sense eg allowing private schools to have charitable status when many don't do anything charitable whatsoever and when they do it benefits themselves
Just off the top of my head
I'm sure there are plenty more

And it is ridiculous to say that this country does not have more money to spend per capita than somewhere like Bangladesh

whatmeworry your post seems to imply that YES lives overseas should be sacrificed in great numbers to save a smaller number of people in the UK. Was that your intention?

Charity, my dear Sardine, begins at home - and I suspect any government that elected to spend vast sums not on it's own citizens in a recession would soon be voted out.

You should get yourself a copy of the governments tax expenditure 2010 and see how little is available after health, schools and welfare before grasping the moral high ground so tightly.

I'm going to start by replying to some of the earlier posts in this thread

1. All this talking about 'uncertainty'. Yes there have been changes to the global climate in the past, but that doesn't mean we can't be almost certain that this time the observed warming is caused by human-released CO2. It's not just that we have massively increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, from 275 parts per million CO2 to 392 ppm or looking at the graph showing an increase in temperature that correlates with this. There are also differences in how different layers of the atmosphere are heating up relative to each other. These show that the warming is due to the greenhouse effect not something else like more heat coming from the sun, which caused temperature changes in the past. see here

1. Suggesting that climate change has been exaggerated because there are 'vested interests' which stand to gain, when the truth is completely the opposite. The green energy / green business sector is tiny compared to the vast oil, gas and coal sector plus other energy-intensive industries like car manufacturing. These companies put a massive amount of money into trying to discredit the science of climate change, trying to make the general public think that there is a lot of doubt around it. Google Exxon Mobil or Koch Brothers and climate change.

1. The Greenland ice sheet is at least 400,000 to 800,000 years old. Greenland was slightly warmer in Viking times but not dramatically different from today. The general story is that it was early propaganda to get people to settle there but Wikipedia suggests it may alternatively be a mistranslation of another word.

whatmeworry I'm not saying that the government should spend vast sums not on its own citizens

I am pointing out that there is enough money in this country that no-one needs to die of the cold

Your idea of standing by and watching while literally millions of people are displaced and thousands upon thousands killed, children left orphaned and all teh rest of it, because "charity begins at home" makes me want to either vomit or punch someone to be honest.

So you would happily watch (eg)10,000 people overseas die to save one UK person.

Attitudes like that absolutely sum up the most despicable side of human nature that I can imagine.

Especially when the one person can be saved by a quite minor rearrangement of our (huge) budget, and that would lessen the suffering for the 10,000. But we wouldn't want to do that, would we.

It's disgraceful.

1. At the moment we're at the early stages of climate change, so we're seeing things like this warm autumn here on the 'plus side'. In Africa, though, it's meaning poor people are currently struggling even more to feed their families. For example in Malawi they are increasingly finding it hard to grow crops because of a lack of rain early in the growing season followed by heavy rain washing the crops away - not once, but season after season.

The allegedly 'safe limit' for global average temperature rise is 2C, which in itself would mean much more suffering in vulnerable regions, but we're probably not going to keep within that and are looking more like 3.5C if we try and reduce carbon emissions, but don't do it soon enough. 'Business as usual' probably means a 6C rise within this century. (These figures are from the International Energy Agency, a pretty conservative body).

PS Hea, hear SardineQueen

er "Hear hear"

Suggesting that climate change has been exaggerated because there are 'vested interests' which stand to gain, when the truth is completely the opposite.

You've missed the point.

The vested interests are those of the governments as much as industrialists. No one has actually mentioned private companies' interests.