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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.


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.


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


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

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?

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.

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.... ahh - edit: no I haven't.....

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.

And don't be fooled by media and political hype.........the earth has been much warmer in the past - and all without factories and airoplanes and cars.............

To be fair, at the time, we didn't have the population explosion we do now, and it wasn't going to cause us half as much damage as it will now.

But it was warmer in the past, without humans adding to the mix so how did it manage to get to that point without our CO2 emissions?
Interestingly from the programme link, it provides evidence that a rise of CO2 is a symptom of a warming climate and not a cause.

It is both. CO2 is proven to have the warming effect in tests, but it is also dissolved in oceans and frozen in arctic ice. As the oceans get warmer, they can retain less of it, so it escapes and adds to the effect. As the arctic melts, it also releases CO2.

But it isn't the cause of warming. According to the evidence the rise in CO2 emissions has approx an 800 year lag... ie the co2 doesn't lead the temperature rise, the temperature rise leads the co2. Which I might add your own argument would suggest as well.
Human co2 emissions are insignificant compared with all the other sources of co2.
Mount st Helens, everyday, pumps twice as much pollution into the atmosphere as all of Washington state factories combined . Mount Etna produces 100 times as much sulphur dioxide as mt St Helens.. Why then are humans the sole cause of this so called global warming?
And still it as been much warmer in the past than it is today which cannot be blamed on human interference.

Your Washington State thing is a statistic. I don't hold with such statistics.

It takes considerable less than 800 years for CO2 to reach the atmosphere. From there, it absorbs radiation from the Earth within, well, under a minute, and re-radiates it in a similar amount of time. It takes less that 24 hours for each particle to have an effect.

Sulphur dioxide is not a greenhouse gas.

It has been much warmer, but another worrying fact is that the amount of CO2 being released is currently increasing, and on a steep curve. Though the Earth may have been hotter in the past, it will very soon be reaching new highs if not dealt with.

And finally, let us say there is a 50/50 chance as to who is right. If we assume you are right, we will do not much. If you are right, that will be fine. If you are not, we will all be severely disabled.
However, if I am right, we will deal with it. Then, if it transpires you were right after all, all will be well because we will have done no harm. If it turns out I am right, all will be well because it's been dealt with.

I'm an environmentalist but I have to say, the whole solar system is warming, moons that were ice around saturn are melting and now have liquid methane oceans.

There are very serious environmental issues like all the toxic sludge corporations are allowed to dump in the ocean, GM foods contaminating natural ecosystems, deforrestation, the economic growth obsession, checmicals killing all the soil bu unsustainable farming, nuclear proliferation, etc. etc. etc.

They hardly get a mention compared to "Global Warming" which is no even caused by carbon emissions (see this documentary: http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=...warming+swindle )


I think it's a smoke screen (if you'll pardon the pun)

That is one document. The extent of my knowledge, such that it is, was gathered from about 20, and the general consensus was that global warming is everything I said it is.

NASA, The European Space Agency, The Japanese Space Agency and all the major universities have reported last year that the sun hit its biggest cycle in the last 11 and a half years and it didn't cool down, it's just increasing its emissions. The sun does this, they've only been registering and they've only been registering and metering it for 100 years.

One UN report says that climate change is 6% due to humans. I've not seen it but it sounds a lot more realistic.

Do these reports of the sun's emmissions contain comparisons to CO2? I don't dispute that the sun is getting hotter (it is at its hottest in 8,000 years), but it is entirely possible, and, apparently, generally agreed that this contributes little towards global warming.

"Generally agreed"???? Then why are so many scientists disputing that fact???

By generally agreed, I mean there appears to be a majority in that direction. 1,000 scientists could despute it, but if 10,000 more agreed with it, then I would consider that generally agreed. And I said apparently. This means from what I can tell. I have not, of course, asked each individual scientist in the field of climate change and related subjects.

to be honest I think we need to be more worried about emissions that contribute to acid rain than CO2 emissions,

the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increases world food production (plants take in more, so does plankton in the sea which fish then feed on, etc. etc.) water vapour is a more problematic greenhouse gas than CO2 (if they really do have an affect)



To say the heat of the sun doesn't affect the heat of this planet is complete anathema.

I think we should be worried about anything that is going to make beggars of us all, personally!

That would be why I didn't say that the heat of the sun doesn't affect the heat of the planet, then...

There are several things that can assist in world food production (and death of plants by heat is not amongst them) that are easy, cheap and don't kill us at the same time.

No it isn't a statistic.. Mt St Helens activity is measured by the US geological survey. In the current (warming) climate, almost every factory in the west is aware of their emissions



I don't believe that to be true. It as been hotter...A full 2 degrees hotter in Northern Europe... You are falling into the "Hottest day ever" trap.. Who are we to define "ever" and "new highs" when we have no comprehension of the time scales involved



Scientists have disagreed with the global warming theory only to find their names linked with documents supporting the theory. Indeed the threat of legal action was looming if names were not removed from said documents. To quote "The greenhouse effect is seen as a religion and if you don't agree, you are a heretic."



But we are harming people..Firstly we are going to be taxing people for not being green. Quite how taxing a man who has to drive to work at 4 am because there is no other way to get to work, is going to help our planet eludes me.
Preventing developing countries from moving on and making a better life for their people isn't going to benefit developing nations in the slightest. Nations who's life expectancy is 40 years old because they don't enjoy everything we in the west have at our disposal. We are busy telling these countries that they can't use coal or gas to fire power stations because it's not green. They can't use nuclear power because they might just make a bomb, and the west would really frown on that.... We are busy telling them that they will have to use wind wave and solar energy to get by whilst we sit at home watching sky with the central heating on.
I don't think there is anything wrong with being more planet friendly.... But all this world is going to end stuff isn't the way forward and is scare mongering