I agree with Jeremy Clarkson - climate change is rather boring

[ABetaDad]

I have never met Jeremy Clarkson but I feel a kinship to him. We were born within a few miles of each other, we both lived in the Cotswolds, we wear jeans are middle aged blokes and even tried to buy the same house once. I also agree with him in this article that the evidence for climate change is rather slim and it is "all rather boring".

As for the young women dumping manure on his drive ... well you tell me he is wrong in his opinion of them and on climate change.

Now before you all go foaming at the mouth. I have not driven a car in 20 years, took one flight this year and work from home. I just think the waffle about climate change is nonsense - very few people or indeed any Govt have the slightest intent in doing anything about it in their personal lives and are raher bored with the whole thing.

Restrainedrabbit - I was a lecturer (university) and researcher specialising in energy policy, but I'm too bored to bother to explain and signpost all the scientific research routinely ignored by the climate change lobby that casts doubt on it being man-made...

I left the field when a climate change researcher asked me in a public lecture if I wanted to kill my children. That is the level of the debate we are at.

LolaAnn - totally agree with everything you say. If any researcher dares to say anything that contradicts the accepted line that 'climate change is man made' and you get no grant.

Sorry that link was for you ABetaDad

ABD In fairness to us moderate climate change researchers, we are not all raging fundamentalists who ask whether we wish to kill our children or not. I for one like to present all sides of the arguments to my students and let them make their own minds up, likewise when I undertake my own research projects I do consider material from various quarters. I would love for someone to come along and say that this is just part of an ongoing cycle that is not man-made then we could all relax and not fret about the future however to sweepingly say that no aspect of environmental change is man-made is quite clearly wrong.

Clearly I am not aware of your credentials but would be very interested in seeing any relevant reports and articles that you feel support your argument then I could use them in my next lecture personally I think Jeremy Clarkson is, for example, a twat and my hackles immediately go up when anyone agrees with him on any matter.

I think it is very difficult to get funding for anything these days that sits outside a box and goes against mainstream thinking, in my experience IHEs are desperate to maintain a particular image and are reluctant to support research that tarnishes the 'brand' (I speak from bitter experience here having watched a highly talented researcher fight to be able to research paedophilia).

Quite Riven, I think it is a sad sign of the materialistic society that we live in that we think it is ok to over-consume scarce resources and bugger everyone else

In this instance I refer everyone to the Tragedy of the Commons by Harkin.

The planet changes. Humans will adapt or we will die. Even if it is man-made it is still natural, humans are not outside of nature.

I think the Matrix movie summed it up well, we are like a virus, we consume everything we can and when it runs out we move and start again. This is a great survival strategy as a species but can suck for individuals at the bottom of the pile.

People who know about these things, why is that we don't put solar panels on the roofs of new build houses? Is it not very economical or does it just not provide enough energy to heat houses sufficiently well?

Or is it just that nobody has made sure that builders have to do this? Surely the more energy we can produce without fossil fuels the better.

Slightly off topic I suppose but I do wonder why we don't do the 'easy' things rather than just scaring people with facts and figures.

I personally feel a bit 'yeah, yeah, whatever' when I hear statistics about how the ice cap is melting and sea levels are rising because I can't make an impact big enough to change that. It would be better and more convincing is somebody came up with A Plan that we could all have a stake in.

At the moment it is too high level - almost continents battling it out with continents.

That doesn't mean I don't care but I am not interested in facts and figures - that is the boring bit - just tell me what I can do about it over and above what I already do.

I think it's boring. Lots of things are boring. It doesn't make them unimportant. It's just infantile to refuse to acknowledge an argument because it's dull.

Anyway, if we are all going to do our bit, it means totally refusing to buy things which haven't been made locally, from sustainable materials, using minimally-polluting processes. My laptop here would be an absolute no-no for starters.

Just a point on the 'depletionist' arguement. This has been around since the oil crises of the 1970s that we ar egoing to run out of energy. It is falacy that as now become bolted on to the climate change issue. Again designed to induce panic in the general populus and make us compliant to Govt control and taxes.

Natural gas is the most plentiful fuel on the planet but stil massively under utilised. It mostly consists of methane gas produced by the natural process of rotting plant matter. It is ubiquitous - found in every part of the planet - and will eventually replace oil and coal as the primary fuel and well before oil and coal run out. Human kid has never depleted a fuel before it found an alternate source. The reason for that is simple. Once it begins to run out, any fuel becomes expensive and an alternate fuel becomes economic to use.

Natural gas is transportable as liquid by large ships and can be easily distributed by pipeline and burned by highly efficient gas turbines to produce electricity as well as in modified engines and of course boilers.

Forget wind turbines (and other enewables), except in very remote locations, or nuclear. Natural gas is the energy source of the future. Requires no subsidy to make it economically viable and is not going to run out. Do not believe the scare story we are dependent on Russia either as it can be bought from a large number of countries. The issue is that we have only recently developed a significant import and regasification capacity to allow us to buy gas from around the world, hence we were temporarily vulnerable to supply disruptions in Europe.

The North Sea was our previous supply source and that is running out and naturally the market is now looking for new sources of supply and making the investment to bring it into the country. If we replaced all coal fired electricity generation with natural gas the amount of CO2 (as well as NOx and Sox) we emit would fall dramatically.

Now that is practical energy policy that also happens to reduce pollution and just might help deal with climate change in an economically sensible way.

Most UK climate change proponents will not hear of the idea of using natural gas but instead want to impose a ruinously expensive and totally unreliabe wind powered electricty generation system on us all - in the name of saving the planet from a potential future climate change impact that is so far unproven. Utter madness.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if they banned non-essential use of computers to save the planet?

The message would hit home if they did that!

Riven sorry but LOL on your arctic ice comment. That has to be one of the medias biggest "Fake" global warming stories so far...

Quoted from Earth News, a PRO Climate Change website
"But Eisenman and colleague John Wettlaufer of Yale University found that the thermodynamics of sea ice made the situation reversible, providing that there was sufficient ice around during the rest of the year. In their model, the ice-albedo feedback accelerated the rate of sea ice loss but did not cause a tipping point in the transition between an ocean containing sea ice all year round and a seasonally ice-free state."

Love the way everyone reads something in the extremely biased newspapers and accepts it straight away without thinking or researching themselves.

Riven "You have to assume the politicians and civil servants and energy companies and scientists aren't all idiots...."

You do?!

Can anyone explain why the third world is expected to/does suffer the effects if climate change more intensely? I'm sure it's a very dim question, but I'm not sure I understand the science behind it.

My goodness, this thread is flat-earth tastic.

Love the way you are sneering at the silly lay people who don't understand the real issues, unlike you LolaAnn, who is obviously ever so smart.

And by the way, the only thing JC is an 'authority' on is getting shedloads of cash from the BBC.

Can anyone explain why the third world is expected to/does suffer the effects if climate change more intensely? I'm sure it's a very dim question, but I'm not sure I understand the science behind it.

i guess the argment is that if anyone gets saved, it'll be the wealthy.

but what you often see on tv, is the implication that extreme weather events that are worst for the poor, ar down to 'climate change' something decidedly outside any evidence.

'flat-earth'???? people always knew the earth wasround. watch QI. If complex sytems like the global climate were as obvious as the world being round - the weatherman would never be wrong!

It is annoying that every time some extreme weather event happens anywhere in the world some climate change guru jumps up on the news and starts talking about the likelihood of more extreme events happening due to climate change. Extreme weather happens people!

Unfortunatley news media nowadays want spokespersons who are prepared to dramatise everything into crisis proportions and climate change is a convenient totem.

Saying flat-earth tastic is easier and snappier than typing 'head-in-the-sand tastic'(well, marginally).

I'm not a a militant climate changer or anything of that ilk.

The way I see it is - how can increasing consumption of finite resources not have an effect on the planet and our environment? I mean, recycling etc, maybe it's just a teeny-tiny dent but surely every little helps?

motheringfrights - I'd guess the reason is economic rather than scientific. Countries like Bangladesh (for example) do not have the wealth and/or resources to cope with natural diasters.

I think that anthropogenic global warming is over-rated.

I am not saying that none of it is due to our activity, but that it is minimal compared to the natural cycle of the sun.

It is unfortunate that (poor) low level places are affected, but at the same time, there are environmental benefits to other places.

Does anyone enjoy that our British climate is allegedly getting warmer? Who wants a cold summer (even though we have had one the last 3 years)?

Hear hear Janos "Every little helps" as they say!

Thank you restrainedrabbit

I think, fundamentally, the earth will survive whatever we throw at it. It's been around for ooooh billions of years.

We won't though, and that's kind of the point isn't it? We have to live in it. Aren't we all acting like a bunch of really obnoxious houseguests.

Sorry last sentence should have a question mark at the end otherwise it makes no sense.

Thank you Janos and EAP. I'd assumed that the impact would be worse in third world countries due to living conditions already being so much worse plus a lack of resources and infrastructure. However, a couple of things I've read recently seemed to imply that extreme weather events will be worse in third world countries as a result of climate change. I wondered if I was missing something, or if it's a case of inaccurate reporting being repeated and going unchecked.