To think that we are all in denial about climate change?

[toptramp]

What's all this David Attenborough backlash about? On last week's frozen plant there was clear footage of ice breaking up. Ok- that alone can't proove that man is causing climate change but he is right imo.

It's not the fault of the polar bears or teh penguins or freak weather systems but it is man that is causeing much of the damage. Man and our pollution. I was just reading the Telegraph today and in the artice 'Attenborough stumble on melting ice' Charle's Moor writes about the last frozen planet "Beyond a vaguely uneasy feeling that climate change around the poles might be important and dangerous the programme had no message" Really? I thought the programme had a very clear message "stop burning fossil fuels" being one of them.

The problem is we don't like to admit that we might be the problem here as that would involve big changes and we don't like big changes. I just don't understand why some people can't admit taht yes man is soiling his own nest and therefore lets do something about it; lets make changes. I will be very sad when (and not if) polar bears go extinct.

tryingtoleave, on the grand scheme of human history, it's more agriculture that leads to your art/culture etc. Frees up time from hunter-gathering. Interestingly, it also seems to lead to groups fighting, because it's more important to keep your land when you've started farming. And you can feed more people, so you can have strength in numbers too.

Which touches on my next point; the 'benefits' of the 'warmer' medieval climate (approximately the same temperature as today) predate our current intensive farming set-up.
For example, if a rise of a couple of degrees turns the American Mid-West into a parched dustbowl, but thaws out some potential farming land in Canada... well, if I was Canada, I'd be looking to invest heavily in nuclear weapons at this point.

Interestingly, I read the other day that Thatcher was one of the earliest to realise the threat of climate change. I suppose for all her faults, she was at least a trained scientist...

That is nonsense boulevard. It is believed that hunter gatherers had more leisure (and a better diet) than farming communitites.

Toptramp suggested a system where everyone grew their own food. I presume she wants us to make our own clothes too - or are we allowed to have factories to make them and distribution systems to get them to us? The current industrialized system is the one where we can produce lots of food for lots of people.

And try telling girls who don't go to school because they spend all day fetching water and doing manual labour on a susbistence farm that they have time for art/culture. You are very naive.

virtual.yosemite.cc.ca.us/ottej/PDF/diamond.pdf

somebloke - yes your excellent posts pretty much sum up where I come from on this issue too.

NanAstley - I worked in academic research for a time and often came up against the 'Climate Change Lobby' of other academics who were in receipt of Govt grants. Their fully funded research meant they could spend time at conference after conference and go on TV and constantly have their point of view exposed to the public but those of us who took the opposite view that Climate Change was unproven and building windmills was an insane an economic decison were systematically starved of Govt research funds.

Also the level of vitriol I and other like minded researchers got for daring to put our view forward was intense at times. It really was very personal and very nasty. We were constantly told the 'debate is settled' and that we 'Climate Change Sceptics' were marginal extremists was another slur thrown at us.

Thankfully, the public seem to be seeing through the whole charade and have lost interest in it. With increasing doubts over the temperature data itself and some countries refusing to go along with the Kyoto Agreement at the recent meeting in Durban the whole thing has run its course in my view.

I second (third?) the somebloke is talking bollocks. Again, potentially eloquent but sadly misses the point and shows a lack of understanding of the basics of science.

I worry about my kids and the future they will inherit - carbon represents the biggest threat to them imho. Yes the world is constantly changing, but the rate of change we are heading for is slightly alarming. Together with the type of change that brings and the cost of adapting to it (not just financial cost). I don't want to have to look my kids in the eye in 50 years time (provided am still here...) and say I did nothing, sorry.

The reason countries are refusing to 'go along with it' has nothing to do with the science and everything to do with money. Things will change though, but probably too slowly for the climate, as fuel prices continue to rise.

Doom, doom, doom.......

DartsAgain wrote:

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"I'm not convinced the science has been settled at all.

I came across a recent piece of research which has been given no airing by the media at all (I'll see if I can find it again).

This research showed that industrialised countries absorb CO2 and developing countries transmit CO2. The researchers hadn't got to the bottom of why this is, but it is interesting nevertheless.

I know the climate is changing, it has been doing this since the planet formed. I am not convinced human activity is behind the current changes, and I find it interesting that the Russians have taken the same climate data and have decided it means we are heading into a period of cooling not warming."

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Yes there have been claims that North America is a net sink for CO2 because the vegetation absorbs more than is emitted by other means e.g. human activity.

naturalscience.com/ns/articles/comment/ns_com07.html

Whether this has been confirmed by follow-up studies I don't know.

Drawing up a balance sheet of all the sources and sinks of CO2 over the earth does seem incredibly difficult and it's not well understood. But it needs to be understood if we are to understand the effect of human activity. Certainly the earth itself emits CO2 from volcanic activity and most of this occurs under the ocean so is not easily observed or measured.

One example that had tragic consequences was the Lake Nyos disaster:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos

You mention the Russians. Russian academia has in general been highly sceptical of global warming alarmism, which they have tended to regard as an Anglo-American aberration and they were generally against having anything to do with the Kyoto Protocol. Putin did actually sign up to it eventually but purely as a bit of political horse trading. Russia ended up getting a really good dela with carbon credits.

somebloke123 is totally right. I am old enough to have grown up with dire warnings of an impending ice age!! Believe me this would be far worse than slight warming. I think there is a section of society that get their funding and raison d'etre from promoting the latest doomy fad. I just insulate my home, recycle when I can, reuse second hand stuff via eBay and charity shops, and get on with my life. I don't think we should waste resources if we don't need to as we have to leave the world to the next generations but I get the feeling that many of these eco loons would be happiest if mankind died out entirely.

Boulevard wrote:

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"Interestingly, I read the other day that Thatcher was one of the earliest to realise the threat of climate change. I suppose for all her faults, she was at least a trained scientist..."
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She did indeed express concern about climate change. The key figure here is one Sir Crispin Tickell, not a trained scientist but a career diplomat who also took an interest in environmental matters. He had Thatcher's ear and wrote speeches for her on the issue. Of course a cynic might suggest that her wish to reduce carbon emissions may have been intensified by her relationship with the coal miners ...

In the 80s and into the 90s temperatures did seem to be rising and to suggest that this was at least in part due to human activity was a plausible hypothesis. Computer models were constructed that predicted catastrophoc global warming. Go back to the 70s and for a few decades temperatures had been falling, which had led to many predicting catastrophic global cooling. Computer models were constructed that predicted a massive increase in ice extent.) This was a plausible hypothesis too.

Ultimately the test for any model is - does it fit the observations and can it successfully predict future observations.

Current climate models are not successful.

One point in particular is that the steadily increasing CO2 increases in the atmosphere don't really match the reversals in temperature trends which have occurred over the past century, and superimposed over the general rise since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850-ish. For much of the early 20th century temperatures were rising (and much of central USA did indeed become a dustbowl). Roughly from 1940 to 1970s they were falling. From then until the mid 1990s they were rising. Since then they have gone up and down a bit but not generally increased.

These reversals don't correlate well with increases in CO2 but may correlate better with the length of the sunspot cycle (though this is disputed).

I think it's funny that there's so much evidence about the damage we're doing, albeit being v complex, yet 1 tv programme where a couple of scientists said actually it's all just weather systems and nothing to do with us and any conversations at work re climate change and this tv programme was quoted as fact, people just WANT to ignore it.

If we ever do get to all renewable, non toxic energy it'll only be because the fossil fuels have run out

I think the posts on this thread prove the point that a lot of people would rather label climate change a scaremongering conspiracy theory than think "Hey, maybe all the major national scientific bodies in the world have a point - maybe we are warming up the planet." The International Energy Agency, a pretty conservative body, said that if governments implemented their current, generally weak, commitments to cut carbon then we are still on track to a 3.5C rise, and if they don't it's more like 6 degrees. Even a 2 degree 'safe' rise will have seriously bad impacts in some places, e.g. food production in Africa, and the scenarios for 4C plus are pretty horrendous.

The trouble with trying to argue about this stuff is there are so many false statements put about by those who try and cast doubt on the science. For example, let's just take one of somebloke's statements and look at it in more detail:

"Since then [the mid 1990s] they [temperatures] have gone up and down a bit but not generally increased.

I think it was Phil Jones, the climate scientist at UEA who scored a bit of an own goal by saying correctly that you couldn't show statistically significant warming over a few years. But of course you can't! There aren't enough data points. It would be like trying to show that smoking causes lung cancer by taking 5 smokers and 5 non smokers.

But the measurements of global temperatures keeps going up... take a look at these graphs from NASA and tell me if it looks like the temperature increase has stopped since the mid-1990s - it doesn't look like it to me! data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

Another graph here

But people repeat these myths, and other people think "Oh, sounds like the science is uncertain, we don't have worry about it too much then."

PS scroll down on the second link for the graph I'm talking about.

What baffles me, is that there wasn't all this debate about, say, CFCs. Was there? I don't remember people saying, "oh, you can't prove CFCs caused the hole in the ozone layer, it's probably part of a natural cycle, sun is good for you and we can all just wear hats if necessary".

I wonder if that's because scientists discovered acceptable substitutes pretty quickly, so we didn't have to forsake our deodorants and our fridges.

And I wonder if BP came along tomorrow with a handy liquid/gas you could burn in your car or your boiler, that emitted no greenhouse gases at all... whether we might see less resistance to the concept of climate change?

I think you're right that people were more willing to accept the science on CFCs because there was a simple solution, but interestingly there were some organisations lobbying against regulation - often the same lobby groups that were arguing against the link between tobacco and lung cancer and now arguing humans are not causing climate change...

See here

YABU and I'm with somebloke!

Data can be maniuplated into any shaped graph you want, depending on what point you are trying to prove.

"Global warming" is a very profitable idea which is making a lot of people very rich. I do not have specific examples to back that statement up but know it to be true, you will just have to take my word for it!

I was at uni in the late '90s studying under an archaeology professor whose field of specialisation was climate.

He told us we have nothing to fear from 'global warming', for the simple reason that we are currently living in an interstadial period (warm period between ice ages), and nothing mankind can do would be enough to divert Earth from its natural climatological course; ie, in another few thousand years we'll all be under ice again, no matter how many Range Rovers we take on the school run.

Yes, the parallel with the tobacco lobby maintaining successfully for years that smoking was not only not harmful, but actually good for you, is useful.

They held off the truth for a very long time, and sold a lot of ciggies while they did it.

Tamoo:

It's interesting that Guy Callendar, who was one of the first to suggest, in the mid 20th century, that increasing CO2 concentrations could lead to global warming, concluded that this was a good thing, because it might delay the next inevitable ice age.

I remember in the late 1970s attending a postgraduate lecture course on Solar and Stellar astrophysics. The professor teaching the course described to us a fairly recent theory predicting catastrophic global cooling if the Sun were to get only very slightly cooler. Ice coverage on earth would increase, leading to more radiation reflected back into space, leading to even more cooling and ice, leading to (repeat many times). A positive feedback is set up and we end up with the earth covered in ice.

But he added a note of warning: "There are few branches of the physical sciences that are even more prone than astrophysics to errors of all kinds, simplistic modelling, and wild speculation. Climatology is one of those few".

Mother Nature will do what it wants.

On somebloke's last post, cautious scepticism is always good, but the science has come on an awful long way in the last 30/40 years - the theory, observations and modelling capabilities

To be fair, current science would still suggest that you probably wouldn't have to dim the sun by /too/ many percent to initiate a snowball earth state - but that just isn't going to happen in the likely lifetime of our species.

This has been an interesting thread. My thread didn't quite take off, but I've found the discussion I was hoping for in this one