The Great Global Warming Swindle - C4 (I think)

[Gobbledigook]

Is anyone watching? It's very interesting.

i don't know what time. someone posted earlier in the thread about it.

Well then I'm not sure I care what the programme says about why global warming is happening; if the bottomline message, that we need to reduce GHG emissions or face the consequences, hasn't changd, it's not saying anythign of interest, really, is it?

Really, peanut butter? So you're not interested in what the most likely cause of it is so it can be debated how best to go about doing something - if in fact anything can be done?

had a look at teh listings and it's on at 10pm on Monday

The program is gravely dishonest, but what can you expect when a program about science is made by arts grads.
Imagine if you got Stephen Hawking to direct a documentary about the relative merit of impressionist painters. You'd get crap.
But at least (unlike C4) he wouldn't edit people so that they appeared to be talking about a different subject to the one they actually were.

Citing Al Gore is really scary. He's rabidly dishonest, far beyond the call of political life.
He claimed to have both invented the Internet, and that "Love Story" was based upon his life. He has publicly referred to "facts as a kind of pollution.
That CO2 is a greenhouse gas is very basic physics. Indeed if it were not for the greenhouse effect the Earth would be so cold that not only would every drop of water freeze, but the CO2 itself would freezer out of the atmosphere.
We know for a fact that Co2 is going up.

All by itself, that means something is going to happen.
The mean solar flux does vary over time, and there are spikes on a huge scale.
But we're at least a century away from being able to affect the Sun, more probably 2 or 3.

Methane is nasty stuff, and there are some relatively low probability but highly scary possibilities if is goes bad. Scary as in the loss of mammalian life, not just a few coastlines.

I know a lot number of pukka atmospheric physicists, and none doubt that Co2 is bad shit that will screw us over big time.
But they disapprove of my absolutely fool proof method of getting female greens to scream with anger.
I get them to do the maths of what happens if the USA abolishes all 4WD and SUVS tomorrow.
The answer is bugger all.
I then invite them to consider what happens if America stops driving cars.
Another really small number.
Then I go for the jackpot of killing everyone in America and asking them how much time that buys us.
I occasionally find amusement in getting them to scream abuse at the relatively well understood process we call "multiplication".
Fact is that no energy conservation scheme, not matter how ambitious is going to get us through this without severe pain and risk.

I agree PPB - it's the acaremongering that I dislike too. The funny thing is, I used to be annoyed at dh for his "denial" of global waroming. But having looked into the science more - and checked out the reasons for some of the secptics doubts about the possible casues of the current global warming, I've changed my mind and now agree with him.

And isn't it a shame that no-one seems to think that we can promote environmental causes - that we should use the earth's resources thoughfully and considerately WITHOUT having to use the threat of the Sword of Damocles (Aka global warming casued by man) over our head.

Gore is mostly right, but that's by accident.

Burning carbon has long been a mugs game. Even without climate change, there is a lot of crap generated in it's burning, and we even get exposed to a lot more radiation from coal combustion than from nuclear energy.

We are going to run out of it, and that won't be nice.
Sadly, as we see in the most recent EU initiatives, the multi-national response is both wrong and too small. Indeed, it's so wrong, it's a good thing that it is small.

Biofuels are an insane idea with current technology. We need at least 20 years of work in genetic modification to get there, and even if we do, it's going to be hard to grow this stuff in Europe due to climate, and the fact that European Greens have a superstious dread of GM.

Europe is a highly engineered environment (though not always well engineered). Most things that could be used for hydro electric already have been.

Germany which is still the largest economy and population has simply no options for long term energy.
With a powerful Green party, biofuels will never be viable, it has almost no coast so wind and wave are even less economic than for Britain, and nuclear energy there is about as popular as rabies.
It is pathetically depedanant upon oil from loony Arab countries and gas from scary Russia.
That's why Merkel is pushing for an energy policy. She won't get it, but she's a smart cookie and knows that Germany is in deep shit.
France isn't. It has one of the best nuclear programmes in the world, and since it has alomst the best education system in the world, has few Greens most of whom are vastly less stupid and ignorant than British or American ones.
Britain is going downhill. The only good thing about Blair is that he realises it's the only game in town. If it were not for all the many other reasons for his party to despise him, they'd lynch him for that. Cameron wants to look "Green" and seems to neither know nor care that wind,wave and hydro couldn't run Britain above peasant survival levels.

so can someone sum it up for me - do carbon emissons contribute to global warming?

I am not convinced by the argument that a slightly warmer world is this massive catastrophe. It's been warmer - much warmer before, both before humans arrived and after. Cold is a catastrophe. Ice ages are very scary. A bit warmer we've lived with before. People talk as if tundra is somehow wonderful in itself.

Imagine the wines we could grow .

Mmmm, olives.

Figs. Dates. Lemons. Feta cheese.

Its inteesting you say the DC because I think by turning GM into an evil they are also keeping down the developing nations.

So the better a country's education system the less Greens it has? Because - what? If you're well educated you don't turn into a Green?

oh emkana, youmust be one or those thick arty or IT types.

Um, it's not just about warmer temperatures (although heatwaves can be dangerous in themselves, remember all those elderly people who died in Paris the other year?) but also about rising sea levels. Hard to laugh those off if you happen to live in Bangladesh. Or London, for that matter.

didn't they say in the programme that the actual rising tide amount was nominal?
dunno am asking

i'm fucked anyway i live 5 mins from sea

Isn't there some stat about the Thames Barrier being designed to cope with the sort of floods that happen one in every fifty years, yet it has had to be used with increasing frequency, so now it's raised every month, or something?

And how are rises in sea levels going to be minimal given how much of the arctic ice sheet is melting?

It would be some comfort to think it wasn't all our own fault, but doesn't really help with the practical stuff. And especially dangerous if the nay-sayers are wrong but we believe them and don't bother to act.

i've got armbands -i'm alright

Oh, well that's a relief.

Seriously, my aunt grew up by the Thames before the flood barrier and said it was amazing how quickly everyone forgot that London riversides used to flood regularly, with people dying and everything.

custy

There was a brief mention of phlogiston theory on the C4 prog and talk of us being in the middle of a paradigm shift wrt the science behind global warming, which I think is right.

Good article on Spiked about the programme (it's entitled "Apocalypse my Arse" which made me smile!)

I can't believe that people wre told to call and complain. I would like to see more information on this in the future.

That statement that the warming was mostly before 1940, is a dishonest... see this discussion, with comparative graphs of real data versus what they showed on the programme , on a climate change forum. Read to the bottom, including the info about what the solar output has been in last 30 years (down when temps have been gone up).

Well DH and I are both chemists and both interested in astronomy. For hundred of years astronomers have been tracking the behaviour of sun spots and they have recorded their postulation about how the changes to sun spot activity directly correlates with changes to our weather (not sure about climate).

I was absolutely disgusted by how western environmentalists who enjoy the trappings of living in developed countries that use electricity can have the audacity to influence policy that dictates that poor countries have to use expensive and unreliable sources of energy which means that most of the people are kept in poverty..

Also, even though I enjoyed the programme and agreed with a lot of what it said, I wish they had said more about methane because this traps tens time more heat than carbon dioxide but yet everyone seems focused on the latter. Also, I wish they had quantified more the percentages of naturally occuring carbon dioxide and methane vs that produced by humans. For example, one of my bug bears is how veggies harp on about the damage to the environment by having so many cattle but they seem oblivious to the fact that methane generated in the rice fields, which are predominantly in Asia, produce as much methane as cattle. Also, the amount of methane produced by marine life and vulcanoes is far in excess of anything produced by humans.

I think the focus needs to change from saving the planet from climate disaster, which is unproven given that the models used to predict this have used erroneous data (garbage in, garbage out) and the focus should be on sustainability. Energy provision for all will be the most important issue facing us this century (imo), water will become a more valuable commodity, there will be issues with feeding a growing world population. In order to address these issues, the developed world needs to start by ceasing its exploitation of the world's resources at the expense of the poorer nations.

One thing that I hope will happen is that as we embrace sustainability, we will see the demise of rampant consumerism which afflicts mainly the west but will affect other nations as they become more developed.