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 think the Government are more concerned that we don't have enough oil and want to push alternative methods without causing panic. I don't think they care about global warming.

Spidermama, that has a lot to do with double glazing and central heating though rather than global warming I think...

Peak oil is the real issue. Our civilisation is based on it, from farming through to pharmaceuticals.

I have caterpillars (various sizes, some just hatched) on my nasturshiums (SP?) which are still in flower. I have a rose which is putting out flowers for the third time this year. All of my lavender is still flowering and yesterday in the sun I saw butterflies, bees and dragon flies. Lovely to see but it isn't right and I find it quite ominous.

We're consuming more and its running out.

It doesn't need to be that way though rebelmum. The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight it very illuminating (no pun intended!) on the subject.

Probably balance out though as we wont need to heat our homes and our summers will stretch into winter..

What do you mean shiny happy?

I think if the Gulf Stream does switch off we will be looking at seriously long cold winters in Britain and much cooler summers. We are at a very northerly latitude and only the warming Gulf Stream makes our climate so mild.

The book I linked to an excerpt from below Rebel. Thom Hartmann outlines the ways in which we need not rely on peak oil in the future.

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

Ditto "The Economist". I read a recent global warming survey in The Economist and thought 'Oh crap! Time to turn down the heating'. The Economist is a very reluctant and cynical environmentalist, an adherent of unfettered free markets and unafraid to of hold an unpopular stance on an issue. If their editorial team believe it, I believe it too.

Yes I believe that it is possible to survive without it but it would fundamentally alter how we live. It's not just a question of a windmill on your roof and a solar panel. From what I've read we couldn't possibly recreate how we live now with sustainable fuel.

Society would have to radically change. The Government are turning to nuclear though shinyhappy not ancient methods. And what happens to our overpopulated country?

It's a complete change of life, and to be quite frank it would require everyone to take a step back 300 years in terms of consumption. We're not prepared to live without our mod cons and as such our great grandchildren will be paying for it.

It's all very well saying 'I don't leave my tv on standby overnight' etc etc, and small changes do add up, but in this case it's just not enough to make a big enough impact on the changes affecting the planet. The biggest superpower in the world, America, is hooked on consumption like Pete Docherty on heroin, and no matter what little changes the rest of us make it won't make the blindest bit of difference until our friends across the pond lead the way.

Hmm, I suspect the New Yorker is more leftist etc than the Economist ... so yeah, if the Economist is saying it, odds are, it's really true.

There were some alarming stats in the Guardian on the weekend, about the total national carbon output of various nations, and how it's changed over the last 20 years or so. The US has gone up a fair bit. The UK's gone up a little. India has gone up loads. Japan has gone up a fair bit. And China has tripled its carbon output! Which is of course much bigger than pretty much everyone else's right now. (While still being quite low per capita, I'm sure.)

So yeah, even if the US gets its act together, we're still stuffed ...

There's going to be a nuclear war soon anyway so why bother...

[pessimistic, doom and gloom, armageddon, 'the end of the world is nigh' emoticon]

Bit tricky to run any mod cons without oil, they think 30 years at best but could be much less.. some experts think we might not have enough for the next 10 years...still I'm sure the Government have it all worked out.

Shall I stock up on tealights from Ikea then? £1 for 100 candles should see us through the winter

It's a fact that we have reached peak oil and global warming is an issue...(?!)

wars in our childrens lifetimes may well be over water not oil.

Peak oil is a phrase often used to describe the situation when global oil supplies reach a peak. Following this peak, oil supplies decrease and never rise again. Leading geophysicists predict that peak is either currently occuring, or will have occured by 2015. Meanwhile, demand for oil continues to increase at an extraordinairy rate.

Peak oil will force us to look at the world differently. We will have to reduce our consumption because prices will force us to and not because of attempts to be green and environmentally friendly. Fossil fuels provide us with an enormous amount of energy, and there are no equally cheap, useful and abundant alternatives. We rely primarily on fossil fuels for our food, our transportation, our heating, our lighting and all our electronic gadgetry. Because of the energy required to produce any good or service, we need energy prices to remain low in order for all other prices to remain low. With oil depletion, energy prices will rise as supply fails to keep up with rampant demand.

Following peak oil the world will enter a new phase. The globalization of production will end with global relocalization replacing it. Industrialism - whether communist or capitalist - will cease to be viable, and consumer-focused societies will become redundant. Suburbia will fail spectacularly as soaring petrol prices make the long distances required to travel between work, home and leisure unviable. The entire economy will change - many people will likely work the land as they did in the past, with 'own-work' replacing paid employment across the board.

www.peakoil.org.uk

Just checked back onto this thread. Very kind comment Sophable, could say the same to you!

Fillyjonk, thanks for the link, good to see actual scientists debunking Crichton.

Just don't buy the 'nuclear power is the answer' line. Even if we did commission new nuclear plants, won't it be too late by the time they come online?

But my main objection is that nuclear power itself is an almost equally dangerous threat to the planet. You have to keep nuclear waste safe for hundreds of thousands of years - longer than the entire history of human civilisation IIRC. The evidence of the past 50 years is that we aren't very good at that. And there are a whole lot of dangerous people out there who would love to get their hands on the byproducts of the nuclear industry in order to wipe out humanity even faster than global warming...

You need political stability for nuclear energy to be viable.