we have all been 'had' re global warming

[howmuchdidyousay]

To think its the biggest conspiracy theory of all time ?

It wil not run out. Gas is ubiquitous all over the planet in vast quantity and far more plentiful than oil and constantly replaced by rotting vegetation.

Indeed burning methane, which is the major component of natural gas, rather than releasing it to the atmosphere would reduce the green house gas effect further as methane is a much more potent greehouse gas than CO2.

Policy - sorry you are right I meant papers and some of the links I have are on another computer - I am just interested in how the evidence from papers is being used and what political decisions have been taken without considering the consequences of such interventions.

Your quote is talking about 'probability' not actual concrete facts.

If you look at some of the temperature graphs on the Nasa website (Goddard Institute for space studies)you can draw your own conclusions - especially the actual rise in temperature over the last 250 years.

The Earth has been warmer - it has also been colder. Check out information on what's happening in the Antartic and try and link that with global warming - sure the penisula is melting but what about further in - you may be pleasantly surprised.

I have no objection to recycling, reducing pollution levels, even safeguarding our resources. I refer back to poverty being a bigger concern alongside rising populations.

I can't remember the title of the book, but Michael Crichton wrote a brilliant story about how govt's and commercial enterprise need to keep 'the people' under control through fear. After the finish of the cold war, global warming was a great new threat.(He validated his argument that all that is being said is not entirely true) Interestingly, last time I was in the US most people I spoke to had not heard about or seen Al Gore's film.

I think that 'Personaly, I dont think it matters if people think it's a conspiracy or not- the problems with landfill, depleting natural resources , namely oil and gas and overpopulation should make us stop using those resources as fast as we are,' sums it up for me

I don't know enough about globalwarming to decide; they debated it in ethics class at Uni and voted against it so when I dared to mention it all I got was a telling off for not ging with the vote ()

However, we have limited resources and most of the ways we can save tally with general global warmingy prevention stuff anyway, and I want my kids to grow up with a few resources / bit of green left so I think along those lines

I keep being told that humanity will find a solution to finite resources and I shouldn't bother, but I like my solutions concrete thanks

Yes it's bollocks.
Loved Mr Rollmop's post.

Not wasting stuff and recycling is still common sense

Having read the whole thread I find it slightly bemusing that those that 'believe' in the GW conspiracy theory feel the need to give out abuse to those that are more sceptical.

I don't think one person on this thread has said that we don't need to change our behaviour/respect our planet/stop using up finite resources etc etc yet that is what is assumed when you say you are not on board with the whole Global Warming theory!

The problem for me is that Climate Change has become a blanket term for anything 'green'. Everything is all muddled up, when the different issues should be kept separate so that they can be tackled appropriatedly and effectively.

The Global Warming theory says that the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the warmer global average temperatures. What the antropogenic theory says is that man is responsible for all of the excess (no one knows what is the right amount, 330ppm?) CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels, whose C was stored 300 million years ago. They use neat graphs of global temperature vs CO2 concn, and a quick glance shows a strong correlation. What the graphs can't tell you is whether the higher temperatures cause higher CO2, or whether the CO2 causes the higher temperature.

Separate (possibly) from the GW issue, is the amount of our fossil fuel reserves. We need fossil fuels at this moment in time. Our lifestyles are totally dependent. What we need to do is to conserve finite resources in order to make them last longer. This will give us time to develop technologies to tap into reserves that are currently uneconomic to extract, and to develop completely new technologies.

Alternative technologies unfortunately are just not as effective as fossil fuels for generating electricity, with the exception of hydro, which is geographically limited. It will take a long time before any of these are economic. Every method of generating electricity has its advantages and disadvantages - there is no magic bullet.

The whole green debate leads gullible people to make poor decisions. Their hearts are in the right place, but their heads haven't thought through the science.

While we're talking about this, one of my hugest bug-bears is bloody wrapping (not rapping ). Virtually 90% of my recycling is completely unnecessary stuff that our food comes wrapped in - polystyrene meat trays, plastic fruit boxes, plastic milk bottles, plastic bags. All of these things are made from oil, recycling them all takes energy when really we didn't need them in the first place. Tax the supermarkets I say, and bring back glass bottles which get washed and used again rather than broken down and made again.
Rant over!

On the main point of this thread, whether or not climate change is bunkum or not, I don't see any harm in living a responsible life conserving resources. At the risk of sounding pompous it is our duty surely.

You need some packaging to protect the goods. If you inadequately package, then food gets compromised and then has to be thrown away.

As for plastics, I think too much is made from, "it comes from oil".

Oil is a mixture of hydrocarbons, of which only the small molecules are useful for fuels. They have to take large molecules and crack them into smaller, more useful ones. When they do this, they are left with byproducts (alkenes) which are then used in the polymer industry, as well as for general chemical feedstocks.

Nice to know fivesetsofschoolfees, but surely you agree that a lot of food packaging is unnecessary. I doubt our grapes need little zip up bags, or apples specially moulded covers. I'm sure a certain amount of protection is necessary for the supermarkets to transport their goods, but a lot of it isn't.

Interesting point about packaging. The reason we need so much packaging is because food is being transported so far before it reaches the consumer and needs that mch packaging to protect it on its very long journey.

When I was a kid we had a butcher in the village. My Dad took hs lambs to the local market, the butcher in our village bought them, killed them and sold them at the front of his shop and peopel from the village and round about bought the meat.

From farm to plate the whole journey was 10 - 15 miles. Now people in that village buy meat frm the local supermarket and the whole journey from farm to plate might be 250 miles or more. Now that is bad in all dimensions. More stress on te animals, more packaging and as a coincidence also contributes to a lot more CO2 emissions.

I am sick to death of hearing politicans and campaigners talk about pie in the sky solutions that are incredibly costly and would crpple our economy when there are simple proven solutions that could provde a whole host of benefits at low cost.

I am no environentalist but I do not have a car, work form home, use low energy light bulbs, recenlty insulated he windows in my my house with a doble layer of blinds and curtains. I recycle and compost and grow my own veg and do a lot of things that just make sense. Thst all we need, lost of simple low cost solutions.

It seems to me that global warming vested interests are only interested in grandiose schemes that have a lot of mney sloshng about in them. I konw a bloke who is literally a millionaire from erecting wind turbines. He and his wife drive huge 4 x 4 vehicles arond town. Have homes in 4 countries that they fly between constantly. He very clearly has no other interest in the global warmng issue than making money out of it. Good on him for making money but I just think we need to look at the vested interests pushing this message and what they are personally getting out of it.

Tell that to the people of Cockermouth...

Well, I think we should all carry on using up our planet and divert all resources to investigating space travel, terraforming and hydroponics. Then we should move on to another planet and another and another, and eventually the human race will have established itself on enough planets that it won't matter what resources we use, there'll be loads for everyone.

Mwah ha ha ha

[runs off clutching model space ship and set of Iain Banks' culture novels]

Makes me laugh when they say its not been this warm or rained this much since 1904! well its not climate change thats to blame then is it

Also we have had a stone age, ice age etc why can't it just be that? The earth is just changing.

Rollipops said:
"There is no allowance made in any of the climate models for the increased absorption of CO2 by trees and marine algae. They increase their metabolic rate in response to improved growing conditions. Why is this ignored,"...(goes on to conspiracy theory how scientists are getting rich as a result of this deliberate omission)

Well now, that IS A LOAD OF BOLLUCKS.
Speaking as someone who used to (5 yrs ago) construct models of C sequestration into British trees for Defra etc. Increased atmosf. More CO2 has very complicated effects on flora; most species haven't evolved to take advantage of it, the increased growth rate would b negligible, sometimes only undesirable species would thrive while others would suffer badly, it depends a lot if all other envtl conditions are favourable (like having adequate water). If modellers are sometimes leaving feedback out it's because the evidence of what the outcomes might be is so ruddy inconsistent:

GDRC.
Sciencegogo
Guardian Jan08
18% Rainforest subsidy at best -- great, as long as it isn't all removed to create Palm plantations instead.

You'd have to newly afforest ~ +10% of the UK land area each yr to offset annual UK GHG emissions (Cannell 1999). Trees and plankton are never gonna save us.

Tell what to the people of Cockermouth, LA?

Well I'm assuming everyone's read this by now?

The favourite quote that was doing the rounds yesterday was

"I?ve just completed Mike?s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith?s to hide the decline."

Yup, Phil Jones is uniquely responsible for the Climate change conspiracy . Doesn't he look like the mastermind of a Global Conspiracy? He lives a high-flying lifestyle with houses on different continents, children in elite private schools wearing designer clothes & luxury holidays -- just like every other British academic involved in this grand deception perpetuated since the early 1980s.

Unlike all those poor oil company executives living in 3 bed semis and working 70 hour weeks for pennies. Very unfair the way honest hard-working businessman get shafted while sneaky academics get rich by sponging off the public purse, isn't it?

Calm down dear!

Global Conspiracies are far too exciting.

Merely asking a question

cat, I'm assuming that you have also seen this

'The 'sceptics' believe they have been vindicated and have presented the hockey stick graph as proof that global warming is not occurring. In doing so, they have ignored the academy's other conclusion that "surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence".

More importantly, these skeptics have not overturned the well-established basic physics of the greenhouse effect, namely that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm. They also have not managed to make melting glaciers and rising sea levels, or any other evidence of warming, disappear into thin air. But they have managed to confuse some of the public about the causes of climate change.

Over the past five years, Mann and Jones in particular have been subjected not only to legitimate scrutiny by other researchers, but also to a co-ordinated campaign of personal attacks on their reputation by 'sceptics'. If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate researchers are human, and that they speak badly in private about 'sceptics' who accuse them of fraud.'

Ah worked it out now. So if he wears a lovely cuddly academic's knitted sweater in a photo he's really an OK guy.

(to BrokenArm, will read you now PW)

Oh no, Cat, stereotypical David Lodge academic is just his cunning disguise. He's really a maniacal genius, can't U tell by his frizzy hair & the intelligent glint in his eye?

I mean, it couldn't possibly be that his emails have been edited and quoted out of context, could it? That type of thing never happens on the Internet, after all.

Thousands and thousands of comments everywhere on this story. The question for me as a non scientist is to do with reputation not science.

As far as I can see the narrative is moving inexorably to Jones' character and to what extent if any his behaviour has been unprofessional. If it can be shown he is a good guy, then his work is shown to be equally respectable. If he is a faker, his work is a fake.

Hence, expect lots more carpet bombing of Dr Phil's general tweedy academic underfunded loveliness. And "If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate researchers are human" is part of that carpet bombing.