Climate Change?, Is it for real Options

[onmageetar]

I notice people have touched on the subject already but do we all believe that the current mass hysteria is actually justified....?

We are all led to believe that the majority of world scientists support the fact that the current warming trend of the planet is caused by us.
We are told that the Earth is warming faster than ever before. But how do we define "ever before"? Some scientists say since records began, a mere 300 - 400 years. Some say in the last 5000 years. The earth is 4.5 billion years old! What is 300, 400, 5000 years compared to that?
Around the year 1200 northern Europe was a full 2°C warmer than it is now. What would we attribute that to? we certainly can't blame human emissions.

The Earth has been warming up and cooling down all on it's own since day 1. Certainly I don't think there is anything wrong with trying to live a little more planet friendly. But I think the Harbingers of doom are promoting paranoia.

[Pixie*Porsche]

Whats happening to the planet it purely natural, we couldn't stop it even if we wanted to, it's a natural progression and a load of Scientists have even admitted to it. This has been one of the main discussions at my car club.

Don't worry about it, it's natural you only need to worry about the gavernment using a natural process as an excuse to tax even more, on petrol etc.

[petrat]

You may well be right. I don't have enough knowledge to know. I think that we should stop wasting the earth's natural resources though. So many of us are incredibly wasteful of things and a little more thought from everyone would make a big difference to so many things. I was not a wartime baby but I was reared by parents who had lived through rationing and we were brought up to take care of our belongings and to mend and make do far more than children are today.

[uberzoldat]

The earth has always had changing climate. Take ice ages for example. I do think we should be careful just how much of the earth's resources we consume though, and what effects we are having on the earth, but I don't think that climate change is 100% down to us, like what certain politicians would have us believe. Taxing us further to use cars etc, that's really selfless of them, how kind of them to be thinking of the planet like that (IMG:style_emoticons/default/dry.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

[bobifier]

To be fair, CO2 has exactly the effect that your scaremongers say it does, and each molecule of it released will heat the Earth up just a tiny bit more, which means that to an extent, warming is caused by our emmissions.

Yes, the Earth has always changed, but never as steeply, and never to the extremes that it does now.

Indeed, if the Earth and it's environment are changing to increase the prospects of global warming, we should only be more careful, since we will be doing more damage. Just because it has always changed, doesn't mean to say that we are not changing it more.

[uberzoldat]

I don't disagree that we are certainly contributing to the speeding up of what will naturally eventually happen anyway. The weather has been changing quite dramatically in the last 5-10 years. Just thinking about the extremes we've been having all over the world recently are a potent reminder.

I am concerned of the effect we are having on the climate, and think we are all responsible for trying to cut our 'carbon footprint' but it just really gets me that governments everywhere are using it as an excuse to extort more money from people rather than wanting to genuinely help the situation. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/mad.gif)

[superpyroman]

surely, even if it is us, the theory of determinism states that we can't really do anything about it.

[anacrusis]

Whatever the proportion of the contributions from natural fluctuations and ourselves, it simply doesn't make sense to foul up our only home. City-dwellers have higher rates of heart disease and respiratory disease, and recent research places the blame on air pollution - my cardiologist brother-in-law is doing his research in this area, so I'm not just talking out of my hat. Traffic levels in Edinburgh have gone up some five times since I started studying medicine in the 1980s, and this has had effects on health here. I use a car to do my job - as a GP working in an area where there is considerable violence, I reckon there might even be a little justification for that - but Edinburgh's buses are good, and the greenways in the city make the bus the quicker option for short shopping trips into town. Cycling is terrifying at times - drivers overtake bikes just before turning left into side streets, they park on cycle lanes and overtake so close the wing mirrors almost clip cyclists; sure, there are also idiot cyclists who cycle on pavements or who don't use proper lights at night, so they need educating too...

As far as energy resources go - the fact that fossil fuels are going to run out is another reason why we must look into renewables. Just because the administrations undoubtedly use the green discussion as a way of raising revenues (then used to blow people and buildings to smithereens elsewhere, chucking even more pollutants into the atmosphere in the process...), does not mean that we should dismiss the whole issue - it still needs consideration, not discounting in an "I'm all right, stuff everyone else" sort of way.

[Noodelz]

The fact that the Earth has been changing its temperature ever since the beginning is, while true, irrelevant. If the world heats up then the polar ice caps will melt and this means that many places will get flooded. There will be chaos as scientists try to figure out new weather patterns and our lives will be made much worse than it is now. Yes, part of this may be due to natural causes but you cannot doubt that the sudden changes are more to do with pollutants than Mother Nature. I believe that there is still time because global dimming is acting like a natural defender against global warming but I fear it will not last much longer. We need to cut down the use of fossil fuels drastically and look for alternatives right now. The world would not be destroyed but it will be changed and I don’t know if it’s for the better.

A little off-topic but still interesting: We would all probably survive if the world went through another ice age because the average temperature would most likely be around 16°C.

[chocolatedog]

There was a brilliant programme on channel 4 very recently which said in fact the earth yes, is presently warming up but we're still nowhere as warm as we were in the middle ages. We're on the up after a mini ice-age which lasted until the beginning of this century, and a lot of scientists also maintain that in fact CO2 is not linked to warming - in fact the opposite is true - usually the CO2 levels are on the way down rather than up during warming cycles......... it was a very interesting programme. They also said that with a single volcanic eruption, more CO2 is released than all the factories of the world in one year..... (or something similar.........) And that the polar icecaps have always grown and shrunk in cycles through the years............

[onmageetar]

The fact that the Earth has been changing its temperature ever since the beginning is, while true, irrelevant.

I can't believe that argument holds any water. Of course it must be relevant. The whole of science is built on you add this to that and this happens, and from that we formulate an opinion of the possible outcome based on what happened when we did it last time. There was a period known as the Younger Dryas nearly 11,000 years ago. Temperatures then dropped by as much as 10°C , followed at the end by a rise of between 7°C and 15°C over no more than 50 years. that alone tells me that our current "catastrophic" rise in temperature is really not much in the big scale of things.

If the world heats up then the polar ice caps will melt and this means that many places will get flooded.

The predicted rise of the sea is about 3mm a year due to melting of ice caps. The main reason for a rise in the sea level is just physics. You warm something up....it expands. The old sun is very good at warming things up. And as choclatedog points out, polar ice caps have always melted and refroze. Difference now is we've got a satellite to take pictures of it and the media to put the frighteners on us.

There will be chaos as scientists try to figure out new weather patterns and our lives will be made much worse than it is now.

Chaos theory was first discovered by the meteorologist, Edward Lorenz in 1963. Even with all the technology in the sky, it is still hit and miss when predicting weather

We need to cut down the use of fossil fuels drastically and look for alternatives right now. The world would not be destroyed but it will be changed and I don’t know if it’s for the better.

Partially agree with that. We do need to cut down on fossil fuels because they are a finite resource and will run out one day. Unless we look for alternatives now it could be a hiding to nothing at some point in the future as anacrusis also points out

[Rosemary7391]

Even if we did stop emitting carbon dioxide today, it would take so long to have an effect that whatever is going to happen will have happened. I think it takes a century to have an effect? And, whatever the UK can do will pale into insignificance if we can't get everyone else to do the same. Why should we submit to draconian restictions in a futile attempt to save the planet from what may or may not be a threat, and that may or may not be anything to do with us?

[Queen Jess]

There was a brilliant programme on channel 4 very recently which said in fact the earth yes, is presently warming up but we're still nowhere as warm as we were in the middle ages. We're on the up after a mini ice-age which lasted until the beginning of this century, and a lot of scientists also maintain that in fact CO2 is not linked to warming - in fact the opposite is true - usually the CO2 levels are on the way down rather than up during warming cycles......... it was a very interesting programme. They also said that with a single volcanic eruption, more CO2 is released than all the factories of the world in one year..... (or something similar.........) And that the polar icecaps have always grown and shrunk in cycles through the years............

I saw that, and it certainly was interesting and pointed out that climate change may be attributed to the sun's activity rather than CO2, since carbon dioxide only makes up about 0.03% of the atmostphere.

[chocolatedog]

http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites...ndle/index.html

Here's the programme web address if anyone's interested in it at all.... (sorry I couldn't do a proper link - my computer's being a bit funny and wouldn't show me the codes and I've forgotten.... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sad.gif) ahh - edit: no I haven't..... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[bobifier]

There was a brilliant programme on channel 4 very recently which said in fact the earth yes, is presently warming up but we're still nowhere as warm as we were in the middle ages. We're on the up after a mini ice-age which lasted until the beginning of this century, and a lot of scientists also maintain that in fact CO2 is not linked to warming - in fact the opposite is true - usually the CO2 levels are on the way down rather than up during warming cycles......... it was a very interesting programme. They also said that with a single volcanic eruption, more CO2 is released than all the factories of the world in one year..... (or something similar.........) And that the polar icecaps have always grown and shrunk in cycles through the years............

I saw that, and it certainly was interesting and pointed out that climate change may be attributed to the sun's activity rather than CO2, since carbon dioxide only makes up about 0.03% of the atmostphere.

I did a case study on that, and got 100% for it. I discovered that the sun accounts for a minute amount of global warming, and that 0,03% is easily enough. Don't be fooled by pretty statistics.