Do you believe in global warming?

[hunkermunker]

Well, do you?

And what do you think is:

a. the reason for it?

b. the effect it will have on the planet?

I have a reason I'm asking, btw.

I do believe that the planet is being messed up by pollution of various kinds, but not sure if the current "warming" stuff is because of that, or just cyclical. (I'm a fence-sitting kind of gal )

YES.

a) the fact that our carbon emissions have shot up since the industrial revolution but gone into overdrive in the last 30 years.

b) the north atlantic conveyer thingy is going to stop and there will be an ice age but before then loads and loads more extreme weather and rise in sea levels leading to flooding and drought and just general crap. we will see the latter, our kids are going to have to find a way of surviving the former

Thanks, PF.

I'm not expecting this to be a long thread, I have to say

I'm reading a book atm that is challenging ideas I've "known" forever. Tis a bit disconcerting and interesting.

i know there is an argument for cyclical...but it is being touted by people that are linked to those that have a huge financial interest in keeping our gas guzzling ways going.

most respected scientists in the field are fully behind the notion that global warming is at point where if something drastic doesn't happen in the next five/ten years or so it will be too late...

So what does the book say, HM, who is the author and what's their agenda? It would be lovely to think that global warming doesn't exist so we can carry on just as we are but I suspect that's denial. Scares the crap out of me, tbh. There seems to be a significant scientific consensus that it does exist with the odd objection from
nutters funded by the petro-chemical industry.

Even those people who say 'oh, it's cyclical, the Earth has always done stuff like this' don't seem to have come up with a plan for what the fuck we can do to survive the impact, whatever the darn cause.

It's State Of Fear by Michael Crichton

And yes, I know it's fiction.

But...the science is there.

edam, you sound soooo much more authoritative than me when we say the same thing!

I'll tell you when I've seen Al Gore's film.

Yes.

a) overpopulation - human

b) too many ways to list, but it's going to be fucked up. i think it's making the enviroment condusive to a very broad-reaching form of pestilence a la Spanish Flu.

Let's face it, nature acts on overpopulation.

Oh yes, that book

was writing a diatribe but got bored so linking to this instead

do kind of agree with his more fundemental premise about governments using fear to manipulate the people though.

I haven't read that book, but read things about it instead ... not convinced, to put it mildly.

The New Yorker keeps doing big pieces on global warming of late, and I really do believe them.

The science is too strong to refute it. But we will all keep on merrily consuming without a thought for our children's children.

Anyone who doesn't 'believe in' global warming is in denial. We can't keep chucking pollutants into the atmostphere in ever increasing amounts whilst devastating the worlds forests and expect everything to stay the same.

Yes I do. Why was it warm as summer yesterday when it's nearly november, and why looking over the fields were nearly all the trees still in full green leaf? That isn't normal. It isn't business as usual. It was too hot to sleep last night. I hate it - TBH the really hot weather early this summer felt like true Apocalypse stuff to me. I kept getting panicky visions of floods - we live only just above sea level. I keep hoping that it's experts getting their knickers in a twise about nowt but I am very afraid that it isn't.

They were discussing the Stern(e?) report on 5 Live this morning and there was still some idiot saying that GW wasn't a proven phoenomenon! How many scientists have to agree for some people to accept that it's a fact and it's happening? My Dad was talking about this 30 years ago - OK he had an axe to grind as a nuclear engineer but it still made sense. He encouraged me to read Gaia when I was in my teens. Can't beleive that it's taken this long for people to take it seriously.

I'm quite seriously scared but so many people seem to be blase. If the govt can make otherwise rational people sh*t scared of a supposed terrorist threat why can't they manage to give us all a healthy fear of what we are all doing to our environment.

I find the very real prospect of an envionmental 'flip' (a la Day After Tomorrow) very worrying. The is not something that would happen over decades or even years.. but literally overnight as in the film. Have a read of this And Thom Hartmann's book The Last Hours Of Ancient Sunlight is also compulisive reading.. but actually offers hope as well... if only the people with the power would wake up, smell the coffee and stop ignoring the obvious because all they care about is the economy. The economy will be end up being the least of their worries if they persist in ignoring the environment!!

Yes,as I work outside all year round,it is obvious to me that things are changing.We need to do something about it now,for the sake of future generations.

However,weather is cyclical & I am a little cynical of anything that the government tell me,normally as it leads to excuses for higher taxes ect.

I really enjoyed State of Fear as a fun book, but it doesn't take away from the fact that global warming is happening. There is huge evidence that it is going on, as Joelallie says, and it is not just cyclical. Temperatures go up and down, but carbon dioxide levels, which create a blanket around our world, warming it steadily, are higher than they have been for 650 million years. There's an amazing graph which shows it bubbling around at low levels until the last 200 years and then it just shoots up as industrialisation happens. The graph is like a giant tick as CO2 levels just shoot up and up in almost a vertical line.

I am not an expert by the way, though I am a secretary in a University department which does reports on climate change. I've been scared for years but at last lots of people are starting to talk about it and to look again at the evidence. Really recommend Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth (an American politician saying that America has got it wrong) if you want to know more.

PS People living in Africa tend not to doubt that climate change is going to affect them hugely. We may be protected from the worst effects in this country, but they won't be. I'd love my kids to be able to visit parts of the world which I have seen and loved, but fear that they won't be able to.

of course global warming is a genuine phenomenon.People who deny this do so at their peril.
The reasons? well, I am no scientist but even I know that carbon emissions are extremely high and that the environment overall is being ravaged by the general plundering of natural resourses in a way which is based on greed and profit as opposed to need.
The effects on the planet ? we are already seeing the effects.

a. the reason for it - global capitalisation

b. the effect it will have on the planet - meltdown

Well it's quite warm today..

I think its a cover for peak oil.

When I was a kid in Aberdeen I remember running my fingers down thick, bobbly ice on the inside of the window. It was at least a quarter of an inch thick so I couldn't see out of the window.

Now, even if we didn't have central heating, that would just never happen these days and we're only talking about 30 years ago.