I have been toying with the idea of writing this post for some time. I am well aware that discussions about climate change can generate a lot of heat and not much light (pun intended), but this is a question that has been bugging me for quite a while. So I am willing to withstand the brickbats in order to harvest the wisdom of the crowd.
I have witnessed conversations which involve one person saying that global warming isn’t happening at all, on saying it is happening and it is all down to human action and another saying it is happening and it is all down to increased sun activity. I stood by and just listened.
Let’s start at what I believe I know. When I learned about the dinosaurs I was told that they were the dominant life form on Earth for over 150 million years, which is a period that makes the humans’ time on Earth negligibly short. They were reptiles and therefore cold blooded and depended on significantly higher air temperatures than we have now in order to survive.
As our distance from the Sun hasn’t significantly changed, so it is reasonable to assume that there is an expected average temperature that a planet should expect when it is 150 million KM from the Sun. Venus is a bit closer and a bit hotter and Mars a bit further and a bit colder.
This leads me to the big question, how hot is the Earth supposed to be? On average?
For 150 million years until about 65 million years ago it was much hotter than it is now, over the fairly recent past it has been much cooler than it is now, but which is closer to the average mean temperature for the whole history of the planet. If the mean is a higher temperature than we are currently experiencing, could recent global warming be at least partially explained by reversion to the mean?
Thoughts please!
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Technically, we are currently in the middle of an interglacial period of an ice-age.
It is presumed by most scientists that the higher average temperatures coincided with higher average CO2 levels - but that surface volcano's were also far more active in the past, which caused the higher CO2 levels and in turn caused the required feedback loop for the higher temperatures.
Hence, higher CO2 levels results indirectly in higher temperatures.
The question then is if the current rise in CO2 levels is man made, should we do anything about it.
The key thing with preventing climate change is not that we are "saving the planet", as the planet will carry on quite happily regardless of temperature. What we are really trying to do is to arrest evolution at a fixed moment in time.
We don't want polar bears to die out, etc., and for them to survive, then the planets average temperatures have to remain within a safe range.
The same applies to us humans - can we live on a planet several degrees hotter than it is today?
The most densely populated, and agriculturally productive areas of the planet will be flooded, and while humans are unlikely to die out completely, we can expect the population size to shrink to that of several hundred years ago as the planet ceases to be able to support the current population size.
As economists have shown, smaller populations tend to regress in technology development as the size of the market no longer supports highly specialised production and research.
Within a few hundred years, the climate would return to a lower temperature as the man-made influence dies out simply due to the abandonment of an industrial society.
Also, the second wave of humanity development would be along lines that are less carbon intensive thanks to our current decision to use up much of the easily accessible oil and gas supplies.
A future society is likely to develop non-carbon technologies as it would lack the ability to tap deep oil reserves in the early phases of its development.
So, climate change could be devastating, but is unlikely to be terminal and in the long term would be likely to be a mere blip in humanity's existence.
The question is - do you want to accept the price that might be paid in exchange for the "solution"?
The ‘Green Mafia’ use the myth of ‘global warming’ – conveniently called ‘climate change’ when we have a particularly cold spell like last winter – are always out in force trying to pick our pockets of the last few pennies we have left after thirteen years of Labour mismanagement. Well thank heavens for Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, who recently wrote a book showing that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction – a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact.
And the Professor places the ‘Green Mafia’ firmly in their place with one fantastic and withering put down “They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work”. Top stuff!
I am always absolutely amazed by the lack of any objectivity in the climate change community. Surely, for something as important as this could potentially be, we need a rational and objective discussion. However, we all know that politicians, the media and the liberal chattering classes are wholly unobjective when it comes to hyping up this type of scare story. And yes, unfashionable as it may be to say it, many scientists are not objective either. A popular alarmist cause is one that gets lots of funding – which directly or indirectly pays their wages.
Instead of the usual knee-jerk reactions by media, scientists and politicians shouldn’t we be sure of the real facts and causes before committing billions of pounds to combating something that has not been clearly identified. That is insanity and a waste of time, energy and money that could be better spent elsewhere. Don’t expect the facts to be forthcoming though – governments use ‘global warming’ as an excuse for greater taxation, regulation and protectionism; energy companies and investors make a fortune from scams like carbon trading; charitable bodies like Greenpeace depend for their funding on public anxiety and environmental correspondents need constantly to talk up the threat to justify their jobs.
Let the facts speak for themselves – but first let’s get the facts and not rely solely on those with a vested interest in fleecing us!
Global warming or a global con?
'Climate change' by the way is a quite ridiculous phrase, as the climate changes all the time, it always has done and always will do.
Global warming is the doomster's favourite subject these days and a veritable industry has sprung up on the back of it, with governments and local authorities - amongst many, many others - quick to jump on the bandwagon once they realised that there was big money to be made, as they could get away with ever increasing taxes in the name of "being more green".
However, is this just a huge con? The hard-line doomsters would say not - probably calling for me to sacrificially slain for daring to question them - but then reason was never the forte of these people. They have an intolerance of dissent or reasoned debate that borders on madness and operate the most oppressive and intolerant form of political correctness around today, even though the vast majority of them have no specialist knowledge to contribute on the subject – ‘an inconvenient truth’ that Al Gore spectacularly fails to mention.
The media, of course, love scare stories and so have jumped on the bandwagon, adding to the hype. This is the greatest scare story of them all – the threat to the planet and the media will inevitably attempt to make the most of it in an attempt to attract new readers.
More worrying, however, is the fact that otherwise sensible people are being duped / shocked into believing that catastrophic global warming is occurring by the apocalyptic hyperbole that the doomsters are employing on the subject. And therein lies the problem - as the science is extremely obscure, they cannot readily be proved wrong.
However.....................if we look closely at the facts, the doomsters argument starts to flounder. In any one year, most CO2 production is not related to human beings. In fact less than 5% of the carbon moving through the atmosphere stems directly from human sources - and this is mainly from burning fossil fuels and deforestation. The vast majority of carbon flowing through the atmosphere has natural sources.
A warming trend began about 400 years ago, during the Little Ice Age, and this has continued. Ground based temperature stations indicate that the planet has warmed between 0.3 and 0.6 degrees centigrade since about 1850, with about half of this warming occurring since World War II. Against that, temperatures taken from weather balloons and satellites over the last 20years show a cooling trend.
Similarly ambiguous is the indirect evidence from rainfall, glaciers, sea levels and weather variability - for example, in the 1970s, after two decades of unusually cold weather, there was a scare about global cooling, with many eminent scientists warning us that we were facing a new ice age – and disaster.
Earth temperatures today are probably at about their 3000 year average. We have known periods of warming before - the Dark Ages and the Medieval Period (about 850 to 1350) for example saw quite a sharp increase in temperature of 2.5 degrees centigrade. Although there was some costal flooding, there was also improvement in agricultural productivity, trade and life expectancy. It was when the climate cooled again that agriculture failed and diseases spread.
So, the next time you see someone spouting some apocalyptic hyperbole about 'global warming' or 'climate change', take it all with a pinch of salt. Mother Nature is only doing what she's always done since earth was created.
Ask yourself this – is this so called global warming being unnecessarily hyped up by those who wish to manage our day to day lives, those who wish for a new licence to intrude and interfere in our everyday lives and to regulate us in everything we do? After all, no one would dare argue with the great cause of saving the planet from the alleged horrors of global warming...........would they?
I wonder if anybody can provide details of the impact of all the atmospheric and surface testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s-1980s?
They are the equivalent in terms of fall out to a nuclear war, and have lead to significant amounts of particulate matter in the atmosphere. What effect, if any, would these have on global warming? And more to the point what impact are we likely to see because we have stopped testing nuclear weapons?
There is no question in my mind that CO2 is linked with global warming, but I'm not sure we are seeing the full picture.
On a related issue, why should we feel good about recycling when most of the glass ends up in road construction rather than new glass? And is it better for the environment to recycle plastics or send them to SELCHP to be turned into electricity and heat (not that they have got the heat bit working)?
equivalent in terms of fall out to a nuclear war
Nonsense.
would these have on global warming?
None
what impact are we likely to see
None
There is no question in my mind
Well that figures.
Plenty of common sense and good science in the other comments above, though.
equivalent in terms of fall out to a nuclear war
Nonsense.
There have been 500 atmospheric nuclear tests, mainly in the 1950s and 1960s.
Predictions of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter>'nuclear winter'</a> are based on anything from 100 nuclear weapons being exploded (at the same time).
So, all the atmospheric nuclear tests are possibly equivalent to five nuclear wars spread across the global and across at least 20 years.
<i>would these have on global warming?</i>
Scientist do predict that a small nuclear war would significantly change (lower) temperatures over a large area. Other research agrees with your conclusion that the effects of nuclear weapons testing would have a negligible effect on global climate and this seems to make sense. However, I have difficulty matching the two different predictions of 'negligible effect' of nuclear testing but profound climatic effect of nuclear war. But I'm sure it is just me and there is no worth to my suggestion. Certainly your highly scientific monosyllabic approach has helped me no end.
That was exactly my point - although, as you rightly say, rather monosyllabic in its implementation. That's because these debating points are rehashed so many times that the flowery language begins to drop off and the 20th-plus iteration gets the blunt version.
The effect of doing something over time is not the same as a concentrated burst of the same thing. You absorb a lot of natural background radiation over the course of your life without effect. Absorb that very same amount in the space of 10 secs and you are likely to mutate into Ed Balls. That's why as an ex-radiologist I had to have my long term exposure monitored continuously.
The same with dust. Ten big volcanoes going off tomorrow would cause significant long term weather effects and temp with the blocking of sunlight etc. One volcano every year for ten years just gets you a few unexpected stayover weekends at Heathrow.
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