A simple question to everyone.
I think it's very important - so much so that if we should be taxed on anything at all it ought to be on pollution rather than on families, pensions and savings - which is what David Cameron is proposing.
I have the impression that the environment is not an important issue at all to many on here. But how would YOU answer my question?

My biggest gripe with the environment is that I can't get away from whingeing people. Seriously. Whingers have probably done more damage to my health and well-being that any air, light, noise, whatever pollution.

It's important. Yes.

But if it was THAT important to me then I would vote for the Green Party. I think all political parties should endeavour to fight pollution and make the environment a top priority - but with a balanced and sensible approach.

I guess we'll find out at the ballot box just how far down green issues come

personally I'd put it near the bottom and I can think of a load of things more important to me than meeting Kyoto targets


and if it's going to cost me money .... sorry but no

as it stands at the moment. I'll be voting Labour

Agree Astro

This QoL document has shown how ignorant the green lobby is over what is needed.

I wonder if you've read it Votedave, I've got through most of it.

The whole environmentalist stance is way over the top and right off target.

Bring the UK's population back to 50 Million and we would do more for the environment than all the taxes put together.

I'm not sure about voting for Brown, but he's got his feet more firmly on the ground than DC.

I'll probably abstain or go Ukip.
But I'm not voting for anyone who is going to work to the agenda set out in the QoL, that is the route to economic disaster and reducing the UK population to penury.

Its a charter for bureaucrats red tape and taxation.

If we damage our environment, we damage ourselves. It's as simple as that. Damaging the environment is a form of self-abuse.

I agree DaveG.

We have to deal with the ecological damage man is doing to the environment.

But the QoL isn't the way. Its a charter for bureaucracy red tape and meaningless taxation.

For me it is totally unacceptable.

By the way have you read it?

the environment has been subject to radical change for thousands and thousands of years

it's only been industrialised for the last 180 years

what was the self-abuse our ancestors did to cause catastrophic climate change?



link


link

It is just because it is important to me that I am so anti the CO2 lobby. I believe that they have become so obsessed with their view that they are failing to validate their data against reality rather than computer models. When that fails they are using the most unbelievable justifications as to cause and effect that can only be supported by the most convoluted thinking based on subjective parameters of the same computer modelling. It is incidentally a topic that I really do understand very well having started on a valve based analogue computer if any of you even remember what one of those is.

Industrialisation has been at a pretty high level for two hundred years and with some horrifying levels of pollution if the reports of the time are credible. Just read the description of Ironbridge at the turn of the last century.

Global warming occurred soon after clean up time if you have to beleieve in man's influence. We switched to gas and low sulphur coal. We cleaned up and created smokeless zones. Eastern European industry collapsed. Those pressing for it believed it would remove the global cooling caused by the pollution but argued at the time it was only removing man's influence and that was minimal anyway and a good thing in many ways as well.

If they were right and no one has tried to prove otherwise then everything proposed by the CO2 lobby is making things worse. Do we really want twice as noisy aircraft? Do we really want pedal cars? Do we really want every front garden as a recycling centre?
These are all our environment but now, not in fifty years based on theories that have never really been questioned by qualified well funded disbelievers, discounting those funded by oil companies who aren't believed anyway.



No but I knew one of the team that developed the technique so I understand both its uses and how to abuse the results from it. The conclusions do both given the data.

You should all be grateful that the computer models used to design your computer hardware used considerably higher standards than displayed by the environmental scientists. I would estimate a MTBF of about ten seconds if they had been of the same standard.

Votedave, I wish I'd spotted this post earlier. The answer from me is that I consider the environment to be extremely important. I think there is so much environmental damage, particularly low-level with litter, carrier bags and the like. I also worry about phone masts and I'm very angry that this Labour government is ending analogue TV broadcasting just so they can sell these huge powerful transmitters to be used as mass phone masts for mobile phone companies.

I care about the environment as a whole,, but find it getting more and more complicated.... How are we supposed to agree when it seem scientist don't.... A few years ago all the talk was directly about the ozone layer being damaged,,,, by carbon monoxide and such,,,,, caused by the destruction of the Amazon rain forest etc. It seemed put that right and the ozone layer would repair itself,,, and danger over....

Now very quickly the problem has moved on in leaps and bounds... I am not suggesting global warming is not happening, but could we be attacking it with poss unecessary hardship ? and rushing into what we think is to blame? without truly knowing what the cure is,, i.e. the blame game...

i agree with roverdc and 21parque and am seriously starting to question the governments position on this.

i care about waste control more than the co2 debate which i think is far from agreed, just because the governments of the world have frozen scientists funding unless it suits their needs doesn't mean it is the truth.

look at these examples of the governments contradictory attitude to the environment.

co2 is causing climate change - tax has increased on petrol in the name of climate change but the govt don't promote hybrid cars etc

govt now want to charge US for throwing rubbish out (more taxes) but do nothing to stop businesses from producing unneeded packaging, they also put it on the supermarkets to reduce usage of carrier bags when ireland have clearly shown us the way forward that a tax actually works on bags.

govt uses the co2 debate to put more tax on flights and increasing congestion charges yet again do not promote alternatives

there are more than this but i'm done typing for now

21parque:

I think you are mixing up several unrelated ideas here. The damage to the ozone layer is caused mainly by chemicals called halocarbons, such as the CFCs that used to be used in fridges and aerosol cans. A global treaty called the Montreal Protocol called in 1989 for the banning of these chemicals, and as a result they have been largely phased out and the ozone layer is beginning to stabilize, although it's going to take many years for the damage to be reversed because the offending chemicals take a long time to decay in the upper atmosphere.

Carbon monoxide has nothing whatever to do with either ozone depletion or climate change. Mankind's contribution to climate change comes mainly from carbon dioxide, which is released by (among other things) burning down rainforests, but has no direct effect on the ozone layer.

There are subtle connections between ozone depletion and global warming, but they are essentially separate problems.


We can deal with GW without causing significant "hardship", provided we get on with it without further delay. The trivial "hardship" we may suffer in making the necessary move to a low-carbon economy will be negligible in comparison with the global catastrophe which might result if we fail to take strong and immediate action. We cannot risk waiting for all the remaining uncertainties in the science to be resolved before we act, or it may be too late.

mrposhman:

The media do give that impression, but the reality is that there is very little disagreement in the scientific community about the role of CO2 in global warming.

I believe the reverse is true. It is the media and those politicians with an interest in carbon trading that claim to believe unquestioningly and so only the scientists supporting the proposition get funding or publicity but since we are looking for different things from our notion of proof lets just agree we won't ever do so. But please stop using contemptible approaches like dismissing ones opponent as straw man. To me AGW is just a load of hot air and you can't prove otherwise. More immediate and important issues are at stake.

We are to be fined by the EU for producing waste but this year alone I have thrown out at least two cubic metres of equipment that would have been repairable but for EU safety directives that demand the control units were sealed to meet CE certification and therefore had to be replaced not repaired.

We are told to stop using plastic carrier bags and less than an hour later the same council spokesman tells us that fortnightly bin collections are OK if we double wrap everything to prevent the smells. So it's all right if we buy bags to double wrap everything but getting them to carry the the in shopping first isn't?

True hybrid cars are beyond current economic production technology because batteries are not sufficiently advanced. My hobby horse of short distance traffic jam, engine off electric drive for two miles or so is achievable for very little cost and would help battery development by bringing demand for traction batteries into the mainstream of motor production. Use the tax already raised to subsidise this or any proven better value idea and not divert it to 'social' subsidies.

Let the government show it can produce joined up thinking on existing current environmental issues before extending its stupidity into other obscure and unproven environmental ones please.

The media make money out of sensation and hyperbole, and they also have an odd idea of what constitutes "balance" in the context of a discussion of two opposing scientific views only one of which has a significant amount of evidence supporting it. Consequently the more extreme views from each side get a disproportionate amount of publicity, the views of both sides are exaggerated, misquoted and taken out of context, and the public are left with the impression that there is much more disagreement on the core science of climate change than there really is. You only have to look at the way the recent court case about Gore's movie was (and continues to be) reported - "High Court Judge finds nine scientific errors in Gore film", whereas a more sober and considerably more accurate headline would have read "High Court Judge says Gore film is broadly accurate, claimant fails to halt distribution to schools". The inevitable result is the almost complete lack of concerted global action that we now see in response to the threat of climate change. There's a thoughtful article about this here. (And please Roverdc, don't just go through it and cherry-pick the sentences that suit your world-view - I present it as a view of the difficulties faced by journalists, not as a stimulus for further pro/anti AGW wrangling.)


If you are referring to my recent remarks on the "Errors in Al Gore's film" thread, then your comment above is another example! I didn't do any such thing, I simply referred to a couple of your arguments as straw men. Rebutting an assertion that your argument is a "straw man" is very easy, all you have to do is show that the position you have attributed to those you criticise really is their position. If you think you can do this, with specific reference to the two comments I called straw men, then please head back over to the Gore thread and present your evidence!

I do not have to present any evidence when I say that the evidence you are giving is inadequate if you just look at the references you give. Your idea of cherry picking is my idea of pointing out the inconsistancies in the evidence you are using to justify actions that are destructive and costly to those who can ill afford to see what little the government has left them wasted on yet more blinkered and ill considered or overtly corrupt futility.

Your idea of a balanced viewpoint appears to be to ignore any weaknesses like the fact that man's net output is compared with nature's gross one underestimated by an unknown factor but definitely underestimated as every ignored factor decreases man's relative contribution.

Unless the information is at least believed to be an accurate and balanced portrayal it is immoral to use it even in persuance of a case you believe in. No further discussion is warranted on this point by anyone with an ounce of integrity.

As we are in agriculture I guess we listen to this global warming debate more than most as our lives are so closely affected. I am not convinced. It has been warmer in the last few years it is noticable that plants are about three weeks earlier than twenty years ago. However I think this is cyclical. Our family have farmed for hundreds of years and we have a book with records going back a thousand years. It is quite obvious that this has always been the case. Grapes were grown in the north at one time,the rivers froze for months at others. I think humans probably have little impact compared with nature, such as CO2 emmissions from volcanoes etc. Global warming is the new religion and many have joined, those who question are treated as heretics and sinning must be punished. I think it is a tax raising issue and if we accept this theory then we will pay without question, what more could politicians ask for. Who was that politician the other day on TV banging on about the enviroment when the Tv camera moved down to his doorstep, there were dozens of bottles of water all shipped at the expense of the enviroment!. I am very suspicious of those who preach so loudly for as in religion they rarely practise what they preach

Herein lies the difficulty.. no one really knows.

I believe we should, whatever the truth about GW, start doing a lot more to reduce the polluting ways of our lives up to now.

The most important one of those is the provision of sustainable and non fossil fuel based energy.

Lizabeth has gone to great lengths to point out that WindFarms are only a partial solution and a very expensive and far from ideal one at that.

Everyone seems scared of the N debate

Tidal barrages and free standing tidal flow turbines are also a possibility but there is a massive amount of research and development yet to do to realize these goals.

averagevoter:

Me too. Farmers are among those who should be most concerned about GW, since it is us (and especially our counterparts in more susceptible regions like Africa) who could suffer the worst impact on our livelihoods. Much of our land is less than five metres above mean sea level and is not far from a major tidal river, so it would not take a lot of sea-level rise to put us out of business.


Do those records clearly show previous occasions in the past 1000 years when the changes you are now noticing have happened before?


Yes we know that temperatures have gone up and down in the past, but there is no strong evidence that either temperature or CO2 concentration have gone up this fast before, and it certainly hasn't done so in the past 2000 years. There is good evidence that CO2 is now higher than at any time in the past half-million years, and that global temperatures are warmer than they have been for at least 1000 years.


And they still are. It turns out that vineyards are not a very good proxy for temperature - we have had them in England continuously since Roman times, including when average temperatures have been relatively low. As a farmer you must know that the microclimate can vary quite markedly even within an individual field, so on a sheltered, south-facing site vines can survive even when at a regional level the climate is unfavourable.


This is a myth. CO2 emissions from volcanoes are tiny (about 1%) compared with human emissions. Even Martin Durkin, the producer of "The Great Global Warming Swindle" which originally included this myth, has been persuaded that he was wrong and no longer claims this to be true. Other natural emissions are indeed much bigger than human ones, but they are all balanced by natural sinks.


It has certainly become that, but much of the underlying science was well understood long before the politicians got involved. The current spin that politicians put on it doesn't tell us anything about the validity of the science, but unfortunately many people are unable to distinguish between science and spin. (And some of the media don't help much in this regard).


Can't argue with that! Nobody needs bottled water in this country, it's a complete waste of resources. Apparently we even import a small proportion of it from Australia - how stupid is that?

jonjii:

We are pretty sure about the main issues, the level of uncertainty is often exaggerated.


I think we all agree on that.

[

Please provide a link to this providor as the only data I have seen is that co2 has spiked yet temperature has yet to follow this other than the general trend. From the data I have seen is that the net temperature increase over the last 100 years or so has been 0.5c following the ups and downs in the 20th century. This hardly suggests that a 6c increase (which is stated in the IPCC reports) is likely over the time limits suggested.

I would agree about volcanoes but methane itself is a much stronger gas than co2 and is largely ignored by the global warming brigade, methane is produced from power stations, people, animals, volcanoes etc. I understand that the majority of the gas expelled by a volcano is methane and nitrogen unless I am mistaken these were originally included as climate gases but both have been dispelled by the global warming brigade in place of the much more politically popular subject which is carbon.

Providor - you seem to know a lot about this subject, do you know scientists yourself or is this view that all scientists believe in the co2 debate taken from media sources? there is obviously the debate that they have been "made" to agree by their research financiers (mainly governments) to come to an agreement on this?

The records do show quite significant periodic changes and my grandmother spoke of warm and cold periods in her memory. I always wondered as a kid why Greenland was so named ,and why if Australia was as suitable for agriculture as we were told, didn't more people live there,it wasn't far for the Asians to travel,but it had never been colonisted by them. I would be the very first to say that we must do all we can to find alternative sources of fuel as it stands to reason that fossil fuels must have a limit and that we are using them up faster than they were formed,always a recipe for trouble.As these sources become scarcer there will be even more political tension.But being told that we must find new sources, the money to fund them and put ourselves ahead in the scientific research is not the same as predicting that the world is going to get hotter. I can see that some parts of the world may for a while become too dry but presumable Siberia will become more attractive.I still haven't understood why Mars is also going through a warmer phase when there is not a lot of human activity there. Because we as a family are so dependant on the weather we need to know the forecast. Met office are hopeless as far as rainfall ammounts. Temperature,wind speed and direction are good but rain !! We have found Piers Corbyn to be pretty good, so I am inclined to accept that he probably knows more than most about climate change and unlike politicians has no financial interest in gloom and doom. I am just tired of politicians TV personalities and enviromentalists continually preaching when they do nothing to cut back themselves. MP's travel expenses rocket,they take trips to the Artic plus all the camera crew to tell us the ice is melting and then to cap it all David Attenborough,the man who has done more travelling in his life than almost anyone saying we must all travel less!!

Thanks averagevoter for the Piers Corbyn tip. A quick Google unearthed this. No wonder there's so much uncertainty. Anyone remember the Gloucestershire and Yorkshire floods in late July?!

guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jul/24/greenpolitics.climatechange

mrposhman,

The temperature polt for 1850 to 2007 is here. This gives the increase for the past 100 years as about 0.8C. For a longer look back, go to page 467 of chapter 6 of the latest IPCC report. (Sorry, I don't have a link to just the graph.) This show that the current global temperature is unprecedented in the past 1300 years.

The variation in CO2 concentration over a variety of timescales is shown here. Graph (b) shows how rapidly it's currently rising, and (d) shows that it hasn't exceeded 300ppm over the past 400,000 years, so the current value of 385ppm is unprecedented over that timescale. And it hasn't "spiked", it's still going up!


6.4C is the top of the uncertainty range for the worst-case emissions scenario. The "best estimate" for the end of this century is 1.8 to 4.0C, depending on how well we do in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. (Source - table SPM3, page 13). Don't be fooled by the fact that we've only had 0.8 degrees of warming so far - to date only 55% of the CO2 we've emitted has gone into the atmosphere, the rest has been absorbed by the oceans an the biosphere, but there are signs that this may be coming to an end and may even reverse. If that happens atmospheric CO2 will increase much faster.


Yes it is, about 25 times stronger, over a 100 year period. But there's very much less of it - currently about 1.7ppm compared with 385ppm for CO2.


Absolute rubbish! Look at pages 3 and 4 of the SPM (see link above). Look here and here.


Wrong. Almost all of the gas emitted by volcanoes is water (>60%) and CO2 (10 - 40%) Methane and nitrogen are only emitted in trace amounts. (Source).


Methane is still very much "included" - see above. Nitrogen never was a greenhouse gas, and never will be.


You have to be very careful to understand exactly what is being referred to when someone says "carbon emissions". Sometimes it means just CO2, sometimes CO2 and methane (CH4), and sometimes all the greenhouse gases expressed as their combined "CO2 equivalent" value. Most politicians and non-scientists don't have a very clear concept of the distinctions, which from a scientific point of view are extremely important.


I am not personally acquainted with any climate scientists. I learn from what climate scientists and reputable science organizations put on the web, and from reading peer-reviewed papers in science journals and articles in popular science magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American. I also read the output of the sceptical and denilaist wings of the debate, and attempt to assess its validity. I never take anything published in the mass media or spoken by a politician or a campaigning organization at face value, and I strongly recommend that you don't either. If you want to properly understand climate change, you have to get to grips with the actual science as described by the real scientists.


There is very clear evidence that the US Government has put pressure on scientists directly within its control to play down the impact of climate change, and that Bush aides have interfered with scientific reports (and are still at it). I have not so far found any clear evidence that any government has put pressure on scientists to agree with each other and/or exaggerate climate change. If you have any such evidence, I'd be very glad to see it. In fact the BBC put out this challenge in Dec 2006:


As far as I can find out, nobody was able to provide any such evidence, the BBC certainly doesn't seem to have published any. This does not of course mean that it doesn't happen, but it's very hard to find a "smoking gun" which lends credibility to the popular supposition that the "consensus" only exists because scientists are "made" to only publish results which support the mainstream view.

What is the general public to make of climate change when contradictory information appears on an almost daily basis?

I had some spare time when visiting Birmingham earlier this year and used it to see An Inconvenient Truth. It made a considerable impression on me. I then read Six Degrees by Mark Lynas which rammed home the message even more. We have been told that the debate on man-made global warming is over … the scientific community said to be in unprecedented agreement about it.

Then reports started to emerge that scientists had got important calculation data wrong. For example, NASA scientists made surprisingly fundamental errors.


Increasingly, scientific dissenters have emerged from the woodwork apparently no longer fearful they will be stepped on for rocking the consensus boat.

Now we have Dr Vincent Gray, an expert reviewer for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, condemning it in no uncertain terms.


What conclusions are we to draw?

This is all about imperfect prediction. We also have the responsible precautionary approach to think about. For my part, I believe there is ample evidence that our planet is in a mess. Pollution is a reality, so are habitat destruction and the wasting of finite resources. Future generations won’t be impressed if we continue this way.

Anything that focuses on reducing our global impact should be welcomed irrespective of what is or isn’t causing climate change.

I have started to read the Conservative Blueprint for a green economy Chapter 7. Energy – Low Carbon and Credible ... and like what I have read so far – sufficient to want to study the complete document Link Here

As it says:

what better place to to start than here?

averagevoter:

But to repeat my question, do they show clear evidence that the specific changes you are seeing now (i.e. earlier spring activity) have happened before? And do they give actual weather data from which it is possible to deduce that current temperatures are not unusual, or are these "records" more anecdotal and subjective in nature?


Again, that's very subjective, and would only relate to her actual location. The actual global temperature records (see links in above post) tell us that whilst the temperature does indeed go up and down, the current trend is mainly up.


That may be an early example of political spin - Erik the Red may have mendaciously called it that to attract more settlers. It is also possible that it is an erroneous transcription of "Gruntland", which has nothing to do with colour but refers to its coastal topography. The southern part of Greenland is indeed "green" in summer, and may have been more so in Erik's time due to regional climate variation. None of which tells us very much about global temperatures. Don't know about Australia, the Aborigines have been there for a long time and they never seemed very keen on agriculture!


Yes, and if we're really lucky the melting permafrost may release vast amounts of trapped methane and make global warming a hell of a lot worse! But hey, who cares about the poor bu99ers in drought stricken Africa or inundated Bangladesh, if we can all go on holiday in sunny Siberia!


This is turning into yet another tour of the Denialist Handbook! We have only been getting any sort of detailed climate data from Mars for a few years, and it is by no means clear if what has been reported in the popular press as "global warming on Mars" is in fact "global" or just a regional phenomenon. Mars has a totally different atmosphere and orbit than Earth, and we really understand very poorly what drives its climate, so it's much too soon to infer anything about Earth's climate from what we observe on Mars.


Aren't they just! I prefer Metcheck, at least they give rainfall probabilities rather than just saying it will/won't rain, but even their rainfall forecasts are a bit hit and miss.


Corbyn is not a climate scientist, as far as I know his scientific field is astrophysics. He has never submitted his forecasting method for peer review, for which he can hardly be blamed since it would undermine his operation, but it's hard to tell if it has any scientific validity. In the one scientific study of Corbyn's work, which only looked at predictions of gales, it was found that he correctly forecast 23 gales, falsely forecast 21, and that 18 occurred which he failed to predict. Doesn't sound like a fantastic hit rate to me, but a lot of people seem to have great faith in him and he's making a good living out of it. But anyway, climate and weather are two different things, and although the underlying physics is the same, weather forecasting and climate modelling don't have much in common. So it's unwise to presume that the poor performance of long range weather forecasts means that long-term climate predictions are necessarily inaccurate. And it's equally unwise to presume that just because Corbyn says he bases his forecasts on solar activity, we can dismiss the role of man-made greenhouse gases in climate change.


But he sure as hell has a huge vested interest in promoting the role of solar activity and dismissing that of greenhouse gases, so personally I treat him with equal scepticism as the politicians and the Exxon-funded contrarian scientists.

WindWatch, could you please re-format your links, they are messing up the page format. If you hover your mouse pointer over the "URL" button at the top of the box where you compose your replies, you'll see two URL formatting options appear in the "help" line below. If you use the second one, it avoids the problem your canada.com link is causing on this thread and will enable us to read your comment properly. Thanks.

Sorry about that providor. Tried alt+w which didn’t seem to do anything – so knocked out “http” and the link worked for me. Is it for you? What am I missing?

This for good old copy and paste:
http://www.oilvoice.com/BWEA_Says_Conservative_Energy_Proposals_Would_Cripple_Wind_I/10747.htm

Windwatch, to fix your links:

1) Copy your link location.

2) Type: [ url=
(Without the space after the [ )

3) Paste in your link location after the = sign with no spaces.

4) Type: ] Link Here [ /url ]
(Again without the spaces next to the ] and [ )

This will create an embedded link with the words "Link Here" highlighted and make life much easier for everyone.

You can edit the links in previous posts to do this too.

Thanks.

Grateful thanks Graham – very clear. I’m on a learning curve here!

Why isn’t this method the default … and what does alt+w have to do with anything? Just curious.

It isn't

I think everything we hear is just a load of hot air intended to provide an excuse to tax our backsides off.

There's a cave where the red-ochre-covered bones of some long dead person were discovered a while ago by an archaeologist. They've recently found those bones were a lot older than they thought, which means IT WAS A LOT WARMER THAN THEY THOUGHT WHEN they actually died and their body was placed in the cave. So it seems the world was a lot warmer than it used to be and I DONT mean when dinosaurs roamed.

I found that most interesting.

WindWatch:

Yes, a tiny error was discovered in the temperature records for the US, which resulted in a shuffling of the "league table" of hottest years in the US. Previously the 1998 anomaly, at 1.24C, was 0.01C above 1934, but now 1998 has lost 0.01C (yes folks, that's a whole one hundredth of a degree!!!) and 1934 has gained 0.02C so it's now the highest. These are completely insignificant differences in the overall context of climate change and they only apply to the US anyway - the effect on the global picture is vanishingly small. But needless to say, the denialists have seized upon this non-story and spun it for all its worth. It's a perfect example of what I said earlier about the press exaggerating the degree of uncertainty in climate science. Just look at the headline of that story: "Blogger proves NASA wrong on climate change". He did nothing of the sort - he unearthed a minute error which proves absolutely nothing about NASA's understanding of climate change. The article goes on to explain the insignificance of it all, but the damage has already been done by the headline and the first few paragraphs.


Interesting article, I've followed the trail to his website and will investigate when I've got time. I'm curious to see how the IPCC responds, and if Gray and his website have any vested interest. A quick search reveals the following (unconfirmed) details:
- Gray is not a climate scientist, his research area is coal, but it's 17 years since he published a peer-reviewed article.
- He is listed as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Natural Resource Stewardship Project, a lobby organization that refuses to disclose its funding sources - their executive director claims that "a confidentiality agreement doesn't allow him to say whether energy companies are funding his group."

Hmmm.... Be sceptical, be very sceptical.


Principally that it's very difficult for lay-people to come to any sort of confident conclusion whilst we exist in this deliberate, cynical, vested-interest created fog of misinformation and confusion, and that the result is denial, inertia and apathy where there needs to be urgent action.


Me too, but it's a massive document and I haven't got very far through it yet. We already have a thread on this topic, so perhaps if you have any comments you could post them here?

By the way, you still haven't got the formatting of your links quite right! The canada.com one seems to have disappeared altogether now, and you've got a whole paragraph as an embedded link. Don't worry, a few of us have needed several attempts to get the hang of embedded links, I think Admin could probably have made the whole thing a bit more user-friendly!

It is of critical importance (to me)

That said there are other critical issues to.

But firstly the enviroment;

The temerature of earth has allways changed (yes)
But Never in millions of years has it changed at
this speed.Its a differance like roller skates verses
ferrarri.
Have we caused the change;
Well by looking at the graphs we can see this unnatural
speed in change directly corrolates with,oil and
fossil fuel consumption.
You could (accidently) use a climate change graph (temp)
in place of a fossil fuel consumption graph and still
be accuratly showing the facts.
For me this proves the link.
Also there is nothing else that fits the shoe so to speak.

Can we stop it .Yes ,but there are a few facts that need to be acknoledged .As they are already by scientists.

1)It takes 50 years for pollution to have an effect on the
climate.(it takes this long to rise up into the atmosphere
to where it effects the climate)
This means our current climate change is due to fossil fuel
use in the 1950's.
2)Change we make now with fossil fuel use will have no effect
untill the 2060's.
3)There may already be enough polution in the system to
wipe out mankind,within 50 years.
4)I remember a scientific study done in Greenwich in the
1970's which found a direct link between traffic density
and athsma in children.10 times more traffic =10 times more athsma in children.

This polution is killing us now.

5)It is the future of mankind we are trying to save.
(no fiscal profit in that).
Meaning capitalist governments,big buissiness will fight
this tooth and nail.Useing deseption,force,bribery,and all
and any other means,what ever it takes, to protect there profit / power.(foolishly)

6)Oil (this is official,from the European Energy Watch Group)
peaked in 2006.(we have used more than half the worlds oil)
will decline in output until 2030 when there will effectivly
be none of it available to humanity.(this is being optimistic).

7)Oil is the primary resource for economic growth and industrial growth in our lifetimes,this will end soon.

8)Oil = power = money.fact

9)When oil supplies start reaching critical lows (this decade)
Money will become useless,worthless and pointless.

10)With oils decline goes food production,(oil based fertilizers,pesticides,tractor fuel,transport fuel,ect)

This is the end of our way of life.

Mass civilian unrest,starvation,death.

Mercifully the big die off will only last a week or so
leaving survivers to fend for themselves there after.
as infrastructure,utilities,government,will collapse too.

My best guess is this will happen in 7 / 12 years time
maybe sooner.

This is based on facts;

this is going to happen;

Denial wont save you.

Humanity changes to organic veganism or dies.

sensible critisism welcome.:)

Advice;learn to live out of the system now and you will
have a better chance of surviving its collapse in the near future.

WindWatch:
In the Piers Corbyn quote you posted earlier, he says:


Well I've just had a good look at this plot of global temperature and I dammned if I can see a 22 year cycle, or indeed a clear cycle of any other periodicity. Now I come to think about this, I'm sure that in the wake of Corbyn's appearance on "The Great Global Warming Swindle" I found a good debunking of this "22-year cycle" claim, I'll see if I can dig it out again.

Found it. If you view this lecture which analyses and debunks TGGWS, fast forward to 31:30 and watch the next 7 minutes or so, you can see Corbyn staking his claim, followed by an explanation of why the correlation of temperature with solar cycle cannot be substantiated without some rather suspicious selection and manipulation of the data. Actually the whole video is worth watching if you're interested in getting a balanced picture.

Please can someone explain to me why I should place my trust in scientists funded by the government and not in ones funded by an oil company.

The oil companies supply fuel at a reasonable cost if you exclude tax and still manage to run at a profit. The government in contrast takes ever more money to provide ever less satisfactory services and runs at a loss covered by increased borrowing. It also promised no tax increases. Given its history of lies and deception compounded with incompetence this alone should raise warning bells especially when it wishes to use the case to justify yet more taxation.



That is because the rest of the world is so much more practiced at the art of suppressing information to unfortunate joe public than they are in the US. We have no freedom of information act with any teeth unlike them. It occurs here and with extreme levels of intimidation in terms of job prospects. The reason that we are now beginning to hear a bit from the opposition is that the eco lobby have stopped only persecuting those overtly objecting and now are going for those who are merely unbelievers so objectors are feeling they have nothing left to lose.



This is the point I have been trying to make for some time as looks obvious to me from the references providor has pointed to perhaps only because of my background as a computer modeller in a different field. This can unfortunately only be illustrated by 'cherry picking' as the intention most clearly has been to conceal all deficiencies and make the case look very likely instead of vaguely possible as the evidence justifies.

Oh and providor have you done a Fourier analysis of the waveform you dismiss so readily? I have not so I won't even feel in a position to say if you are right or not to dismiss it.

Sincere thanks for your efforts providor – but I can’t help remembering the quote

Lies, damn lies and statistics.
- Mark Twain

We are armpit deep in data from highly qualified people and doubt remains in the minds of many of them (and certainly us) on how much importance to attach to any particular theory resulting from it. Predictions are imperfect … and so are the people constructing them. It’s part of the human condition. Anyone who doesn’t have doubt probably doesn’t have a pulse!

I return to the simple conclusion


There are lots of ways to make it longer, but I think it’s time for a bottom line.

What words would the people reading this want to see in it?

Roverdc:

Or alternatively it could be simply because the evidence doesn't exist.


Show us the evidence for that. If you already know that you don't need FoI.


No I haven't, perhaps you could oblige? It's a while since I was doing that kind of maths, I doubt I could hack it any more.