'Is global warming happening?' Poll discussion/results

andrewward2001

Amazing we're expected to believe climatologists when they say what the average temperature will be in 30+ years' time when they can't even get the local weather right more than 2 or 3 days in advance.
Someone please explain why average temperatures were higher 500 years ago than they are now. Thank you.

caffeinehit

What I struggle with here is the implication by people like westernpromise that I'm a dullard and a pawn of the fascist state for placing any weight whatsoever on mainstream scientific opinion on climate change.

I'm perfectly well aware that some scientists are motivated more by research budgets than by truth-seeking but as someone has already said, where's the money here? Anyone with a plausible theory that provides an alternative to MMGW is instantly showered with funding by various 'institutes' funded by oil/gas/motor interests.

Equally, I know that governments want to find issues to scare their citizens. But if you're a government, what do you pick - something that's going to require voters to give up their cars and holidays and hate you forever, or something like terrorism that will allow you to make more laws and recruit more police to your heart's content without upsetting Middle England?

I believe that climate change is a huge threat because it seems to me that despite the huge vested interests trying to maintain the status quo, the people whose job it is to understand the science are very frightened. But I really, really hope I'm wrong.

Judith_Proctor

If you read documents like the Stern Report and the IPCC report, there is no longer any doubt that the climate is changing and that humanity is the main cause.

Yes, there is natural variation, but the small steady changes caused by man are added on top of that natural variation and are damaging.

A simple example is the effect of sea surface temperatures on the violence of hurricanes. Some really bad hurricanes would happen anyway. However, warmer seas mean that we will get more bad ones.

You can't point to any individual hurricane and say "That was caused by global warming", but if you get more hurricanes than usual for a decade (and the increase correlates to sea surface temperatures), then you can say "Some of these would not have happened without global warming".

The real tragedy of climate change is that those responsible (the affluent) will be in the best position to survive the damage. The poor, especially in Africa, will die. (Do you really see any of the rich countries opening their borders to climate change refugees?)

nej

Is the Earth warming up? Probably. It has been heating and cooling for centuries. The Medieval Warm Period had far higher than normal temperatures, and was followed by the Little Ice Age, which we are still coming out of now - hence the upward trend.

No-one has ever answered these questions to my satisfaction:

1 - How did the last Ice Age end, if man is the cause of global warming?
2 - How come C02 levels have been shown to increase AFTER temperature increases, not before-hand?
3 - How come NASA have proved that Mars is warming also?
4 - Would the Earth have now entered a period of complete temperature stability if man had not come along?

And many more... the problem is, Global Warming IS money. In taxes. Nobody dares object to a "green" tax because it's to save the planet, right? Like Red Ken's higher congestion charges for higher-polluting cars, and increased road tax for the same. Any scientist getting a budget to research the subject is not likely to say "Nope, it's all fine. Don't give me any more money" Neither are the official bodies like the IPPC. They secure their own future by continuing the myth. I don't blame them, they want to keep their income!

And to those who think that doing these small things, like changing to energy saving lightbulbs will help, then you are sadly deluded... The UK currently uses 2% of the world's power, and as a percentage this is decreasing. Within ten years or so, it's likely to only be 1% as the likes of China and India have huge increases. So if we scrap all of our cars, shut down all of our power stations and go back to living in caves it will make absolutely no difference in global terms. If the temperature was going to increase by, say, 5C over the next 50 years, take away our 1% and it'll increase by 4.95C instead, which will get rounded up to 5C anyway.

So feel smug in your Prius, but don't mind me laughing at you.

youreds

I don't want to get drawn into the discussion too much, it's a bit like politics no-one will change their personal views from this discussion.

Anyway, for an interesting take on GW, I recommend you go to your library & get State of Fear by Michael Crichton. A well researched novel with plenty of facts thrown in about GW, & a real page turner.

No doubt there'll be people posting links saying what a load of twaddle it is, but I won't get involved in any of that...

westernpromise

Foggy_Day wrote: »

westernpromise wrote: »

The issue with this poll is that it conflates several quite separate views on global warming into "No, I don't believe it is happening". As such, it has already accepted the Chicken Littles' position even though it is precisely this that the sceptics object to. .

Member westernpromise gives a nice summary of some of the arguments and positions but begins strangely by accusing the questioner of conflation and of already having accepted "Chicken Little's position". What was the motivation for this? Perhaps I am missing something.
Foggy Day

My point is that only 3 possible answers are provided - yes, no, and don't know - whereas there are in fact many nuances to the 'no' position. By phrasing the poll in this way, the questioner has already capitulated to the Chicken Littles' agenda of lumping all its opponents' positions into one extreme and rarely-held view - that no warming is going on. This is exactly like saying anyone who didn't vote Labour in 2005 is pro-BNP because BNP voters didn't vote Labour; it is an attempt to discredit by misassociation.

Another poster wondered who gains from claiming the Earth is warming if it's not. Good question.

Al Gore gains, for one. He owns a company (http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54528) that sells carbon credits. His movie is a commercial for his company's products, nothing more.

Who else gains? Well, the research scientists gain. If they research climate and come up with the "right" answers, they continue to receive funding. Come up with the wrong answers, and they don't. Please, let's not hear any guff about scientists being impartial. They aren't. Lysenko (http://skepdic.com/lysenko.html) was a scientist. Andrew Wakefield (http://briandeer.com/mmr/andrew-wakefield.htm) is a scientist. Dr. Mengele (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele) was a scientist. Cyril Burt (http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr196/parrington.htm) was a scientist. Hwang Woo-Suk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-Suk) was a scientist. There have always been crooked scientists; there still are.

Anyone else gain from this? Well, yes. Authoritarian quasi-police states gain. Controlling emissions is the perfect Trojan horse for putting bugs into everybody's car, ostensibly to charge us for driving, but in reality to keep us under surveillance. The reason the EU is duplicating America's GPS system with its own Galileo system is because the American system doesn't support this, while the EU's will, so the EU can spy on us. Climate change is also the hidden agenda behind HIPs. Home sellers are being forced to pay for a snooper to guess their energy consumption, but eventually of course this can be used to tax us more selectively.

Who else gains? Well, international socialism gains. The effect of all these top-down climate change taxes (and let's not kid ourselves that "Kyoto" is any more than a way of gathering tax) is to transfer money from the west to the third world (none of which is required to make any emissions reductions under Kyoto anyway).

The Stern report was not independent and his economics are based on deception and omission ("...a wholly implausible set of simulations...Its procedures are neither thorough nor transparent, and appear designed to persuade the reader that sensitivity analysis leaves intact the Review’s alarmist projections"; http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/WE-STERN.pdf).

As for Bojangles' concerns about "the Ice cap melting", "sustained record high temperatures", "the build up of rain, flooding and freak weather systems", and what not, none of these things are actually happening. The ice caps are not melting and in fact Antarctica is getting colder (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1785). The global temperature has not increased since 1998 (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/). The climate change models predict wetter winters and drier summers for the UK, so flooding in July undermines global warming rather than supporting it. There has been no change in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, etc. The US hurricane cycle is driven by a phenomenon called the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/amo_faq.php), which causes the frequency of hurricanes to vary on a 40 / 25 / 40 / 25-year cycle. We are coming to the end of a warm phase, and there will now be a marked decline in hurricane frequency which will last for about 45 years. Katrina was in 2005. No major hurricane came ashore at all in 2006 or 2007.

My underlying challenge is a meta-challenge, if you like. If the science was really that robust, the Chicken Littles would not need to recruit such dishonesty to support their cause. So, regardless of the merits of any individual piece of supposed evidence, the intellectual dishonesty of a lot of it undermines the rest.

Practically every day we are presented with some new lie to support the claims of man-made global warming. A government minister blamed the Gloucestershire floods on global warming, when in fact the models predict drier summers for the UK. The real cause of the floods, of course, was that Gordon Brown cut the flood precautions budget.

I feel entitled to assume that the advocates of carbon offsetting and whatnot are putting forward their best arguments. If their best arguments are lies and misrepresentations, with a clearly discernible ulterior agenda, then obviously I'm going to disbelieve them.

samnaaron

I have not got a problem with the theory about global warming. My complaint is why has it only now become a big focus for the G8 summit? my geuss is that they see that the use of the term global warming has become a new buzz word for "get more taxes out of em" in a freindly way!.

why else would America now seem to be coming round to the idea. They have always done what ever they wanted. But raising taxes to stem the global warming theory just seems to easy.

If we really are that concerned why don't the govenment insist that we all change our cars to bio fuels, they could even afford to give us the £1500 required or at least cancel the VAT on such conversions.

we all have to do our part I know, I just wish they would put the money where their mouths are.

aaron:mad:

mike_paterson

There is some very interetsing information at http://www.weatheraction.com/ and a particularly interesting letter to David Milibrand and Sir David King at http://www.weatheraction.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=37

I would recommend that anybody interested in climate change should read this.

This whole issue is important because if we get it wrong we suffer.

If some people are right and Co2 emmissions are responsible for climate change than trillions of pounds will be spent tackling the 'problem' and we will hopefully stop global warming.

If however they are wrong, then the trillions spent will have been wasted.

The cost to pursue this path is not just financial, it will result in physical hardship for most people around the world , but especiallly in the third world.

I strongly believe that we do not know enough yet to make this decision, and that a hair-trigger response before the facts are known will be hugely damaging.

If the Scientists that spend their lives looking at the myriad components that make oue world work cannot agree whether what is happening is natural, whether it is man-made, what the cause is etc. etc., then it would seem ridiculous to rush headlong in pursuit of the solution.

Unfortunately the world governments (who own the IPCC Scientists) do seem to be playing with the statistics to support their plans, rather than waiting for the full detail and making a proper well-judged response.

Feel free to call me a sceptic, but there is every reason for all of us to be sceptical, and I believe that it is critical that we all look to challenge the governments to supply all of the data and not just the bits that fit with what they want us to believe.

feesh

I don't understand why this has become such a political issue.

I'm a scientist. I used to work in the Ecological Processes team of a University research group, and all my colleagues were pretty cynical about 'climate change'. When I had been a student at that Uni we were taught in a very balanced way and there was not much evidence at the time either way as to whether or not climate change was going to happen. Most scientists are pretty cynical - it takes more than one research paper to prove any kind of phenomenon.

But one by one I saw them all start to change their views, including my ex who was doing a PhD in North Sea zooplankton populations.

By studying the continuous plankton recorder readings for the past few decades it became pretty apparent that (what we perceive as) tiny temperature increases in the North Sea were having serious impacts on planktonic survival and growth rates. When we got together, his PhD was not 'about' climate change and he was one of the most cynical people I'd ever met when it came to climate change. By the end of his PhD, he was very concerned about it.

It's going to start showing in fish stocks.

That's just one example, there are more.

Since Uni I've become a lot more aware of our impacts on the environment, and I went to work for an NGO afterwards where we lobbied hard to get governments to sit up and take note of the research (as unfortunately Universities are not that great at communicating to the wider population).

Finally we have got what we wanted, and it's taken decades of lobbying to make governments accept things.

They don't 'look for' excuses to put taxes up - the environmental movement has been lobbying for them to do it.

My concern now is that everyone is so focused on climate change that they are forgetting the other environmental issues such as nitrification, chemical pollution, deforestation and loss of soils.

If anyone denies that climate change is happening, I have to question what their background is and how much they really understand about science, although I accept that the scientific community is partly to blame because it is so hard for the public to get access to published, peer-reviewed research.

mrstabby_2

nej wrote: »

Is the Earth warming up? Probably. It has been heating and cooling for centuries. The Medieval Warm Period had far higher than normal temperatures, and was followed by the Little Ice Age, which we are still coming out of now - hence the upward trend.

No-one has ever answered these questions to my satisfaction:

1 - How did the last Ice Age end, if man is the cause of global warming?
2 - How come C02 levels have been shown to increase AFTER temperature increases, not before-hand?
3 - How come NASA have proved that Mars is warming also?
4 - Would the Earth have now entered a period of complete temperature stability if man had not come along?

And many more... the problem is, Global Warming IS money. In taxes. Nobody dares object to a "green" tax because it's to save the planet, right? Like Red Ken's higher congestion charges for higher-polluting cars, and increased road tax for the same. Any scientist getting a budget to research the subject is not likely to say "Nope, it's all fine. Don't give me any more money" Neither are the official bodies like the IPPC. They secure their own future by continuing the myth. I don't blame them, they want to keep their income!

And to those who think that doing these small things, like changing to energy saving lightbulbs will help, then you are sadly deluded... The UK currently uses 2% of the world's power, and as a percentage this is decreasing. Within ten years or so, it's likely to only be 1% as the likes of China and India have huge increases. So if we scrap all of our cars, shut down all of our power stations and go back to living in caves it will make absolutely no difference in global terms. If the temperature was going to increase by, say, 5C over the next 50 years, take away our 1% and it'll increase by 4.95C instead, which will get rounded up to 5C anyway.

So feel smug in your Prius, but don't mind me laughing at you.

1)The Medieval warm period describes the north atlantic, so it cannot be used in a global context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

2)Is explained very well here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores

3)Ice ages come and go naturally. There are many natural temperature cycles going in and out of each other. The existence of these natural cycles is not mutually exclusive to mankind having an influence on them. We are exacerbating the current warming, which is inexplicable unless human emissions are factored in.
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/007.htm

4)As for mars warming, in what context is that? What is the proportion in warming? See my point before; fluctuations in solar activity don't mean that we can't be influencing the climate.

In fact, most of your problems with global warming can be resolved here
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462
and here http://www.realclimate.org
Be very wary of opinion pieces and articles that do not cite references.

Unless I'm misinterpreting your post, your suggestion that scientists are lying just to keep funds pouring in is nothing more than a conspiracy theory. One could just as easily get funding from oil companies etc to write an anti-global warming paper. The data, however, all points to global warming. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

Unless we in the UK are bothered to make an effort, do you think we'll be in any position to discuss the issue with China/India/the rest of the world? China have in the past few years signed multi-billion pound contracts with UK contractors to build eco-cities. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1635188,00.html
By being more energy efficient we will encourage other places to do so as well, simply because it's more economic.