Are you as convinced about climate change, as the government is?

[10ClarionSt]

This week-end, Baroness Young said that water bills would have to rise if the country is to be safeguarded against the increasing effects of climate change. That's it then. Climate change is the cause of all the flooding in the Midlands. The government said so. It must be true eh? Not only that, we see all these little ads on the TV inbetween programmes about saving energy. All funded by a government who are trying to brainwash everyone with this climate change business. We never see anyone putting the opposite side of the argument, which is just as strong in my opinion. This government loves to legislate for emotional topics that it doesn't like. And the propaganda works if you keep ramming it down everyones' throats. What caused all the massive floods 60 years ago in the same area? Climate change? Flood plains weren't built on at that time were they?

[andy-hughes]

Climate change is a nice neat bandwaggon for everyone to jump opn - but it is based on seriously spurious scientific evidence.

Even given that 'climate change' is happening - which is open to some tall questions - I personally will not be 'monitoring my carbon footprint' (God, who makes up this tripe?) while China are comissioning coal-fed power stations at the rate of one a week, and Dubyah seems intent on pretending that polution is just too un-American for him to stop playing soliders and deal with.

[jake-the-peg]

Climate change is certain - if you don't believe it you better have a damn good explanation of where all the glaciers went, and how a bloke in a trawler can do the North-West passage in 14 days!

Human cause? frankly this is too complex for most of us to properly understand the data and picking a few pieces of research out and forming an opinion is like trying to learn brain surgury from readers digest. The list of Organisations backing it though is impressive and the main reason I believe it.

However what gets me is the huge bandwagon jumping - going on holiday - plant a tree ( ever heard of carbon neutral? ) - bit of bad weather? Oh it's climate change!

It brings the whole issue into disrepute

[jno]

the floods 60 years ago came at the end of a hard winter; the ground was still frozen so the water couldn't soak away as it might have at this time of year. Building on floodplains doesn't cause floods (unless they're completely concreted over); but if you do build there, and there's a flood, you'll get wet.

The met office confirms that we've had the wettest early summer since records began, which was more than 200 years ago. Nasa reckons the planet is the hottest it's been for a million years, which seems like more than just cyclical change to me. But maybe you think Nasa are all unscientific idiots and their moon landings were faked?

[Gromit]

There is climate change. There has always been climate change. The climate is not a stable, regular mechanism that is easy to predict, it is a complex constantly varying set of forces that we are only just beginning to understand.

I am unconvinced at the moment. Man is undoubtedly having some impact but there are processes and cycles at work which we haven't quite figured out properly and a lot of the climate change is natural.

When we talk of records being broken it sounds alarming but you have to remember that reliable records have only been kept for 200 years or so which is an incredibly short time in history of the Earth's climate.

There is also the argument that the Environmentalist religion acts like other religions and interpretates the data to suit their beliefs.

And scientist are not always right. Remember the Millennium Bug? Planes were going to drop out of the sky, nuclear power stations were going go bananas, videos were going to record the wrong channel at the wrong time, traffic lights would go doolally. ...And nothing happened. The Scientists were wrong and vast amounts of money was wasted.

[Gromit]

INTERESTING WEATHER FACTOID:

Between 1780 and 1830, July was the wettest month of the year in the UK; it has since become much drier, so that now it is among the driest months of the year. Indeed, summer in general has become much drier since 1970.

[jno]

I'm not so sure about the millennium bug, Gromit. I had a friend who worked on a computer system in New Zealand, where a lot of computer experts waiting to see what happened because it was the first big country to hit the millennium. They reported no big problems.

Not so, said my friend, her company's system went completely doolally at midnight. They hastily got online to head office in Germany, where the IT people managed to fix it remotely after a few hours. But they didn't report it to the various millennium commissions because, understandably, they didn't want the world to think they had unreliable computers. She told me later she knew of other companies in the same boat.

In other words: the millennium did cause computer problems, but nobody has the faintest idea how many or how big. In that light, it seems that the drive to anticipate and avert problems was quite likely time and money well spent.

[jake-the-peg]

Now you've rattle my chain Grommit!

Millenium Bug!

I work in Computer engineering specifically QA and I and thousands of others like me slaved away during the last years of the 90's finding and fixing millenium bugs in software.

Many of us worked the millenium weekend when everyone else was out getting drunk or hiding in their basements or asking where the "river of fire" was.

So please don't come on telling us how "scientists got it wrong" they got it right and I have the overtime to prove it.

It was the likes of the Daily Mail that reported the impending end of civilisation!

[LeMarchand]

A year or two ago I would have said that Climate Change was very real and mainly down to human pollution etc; now, I'm not so sure.

"It's the wettest/hottest/coldest since records began" - 200 years is nothing in geological terms.

"A lot of respected organisations support the theory" - a lot of respected organisations used to encourage smoking.

Even given that the climate is changing, how do we know it is down to humans? Maybe I've watched too many conspiracy thrillers, but it does seem a way to distract the public from other things.

[jake-the-peg]

Please name the respected organisations that encouraged smoking

[Gromit]

The US spent an estimated 300 billion US dollars on preparedness for the Millenium Bug, so as there was no problems, that must have been money well spent.

I too know people who worked on the Millenniun bug problem. Some semi retired on the proceeds.

Similar to the climate change argument, I think there was a problem but it was greatly overstated.

[jno]

LeMarchand, 200 years isn't much, I agree, but it's all we've got. I don't know if there's any way to measure past rainfall. But temperature can be reckoned, and Nasa's figures cover a million years, which certainly isn't 'nothing'. A million years ago the planet would have been younger and hotter [like myself], just as in another million years it will be cooler. So current warming goes way against long-term trend.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10159-gl obal-warming-nears-a-millionyear-high.html

[jno]

Gromit, I think you're falling into a non-sequitur argument here.

I feared what was going to happen.
I took action to avert it.
It didn't happen.
Therefore <my action was wasted.

Just as logical a conclusion would be:

Therefore my action was successful.

Neither conclusion is definitively provable but the first one sounds at least as convincing to me.

[Gromit]

Er, jno, the link says the hottest for 12,000 years.

200 years might not be much data, but 1 million years is only slightly better when viewed on the scale that he Earth is 4500 Million years old.

[Gromit]

Hey, I have found some research that brings the 1million years figure back to 400 years.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2006-0 6-22-global-warming_x.htm?csp=34

Says hottest for 400 years and possiblly 2000 years.

Contradictory fellows this scientists.

[rabbitygirl]

I have since thrown the paper but in the Times on Sat or Sun someone in authority said, re recent floods, 'it wasn't really a flood as such but we were overwhelmed with a large amount of water' It made me laugh anyway.

I agree with my son who says quite simply, and along Gromits lines, no one really knows how hot or cold we were thousands or millions of years ago. We could still be recovering from the ice age and just getting our 'normal' temperatures and weather back. A couple of years ago a scientist stepped forward to say its too late for man to prevent whats happening and we might as well all go out and buy a gaz guzzling sports car and roar around in it and enjoy ourselves. I suspect the other scientists rounded on him and shut him in a cupboard somewhere.

[LeMarchand]

Please name the respected organisations that encouraged smoking

I could have sworn that I'd seen ads where the US Surgeon General advocated smoking, but (alas) can't find them. Maybe "they" have removed them from the net ;o) . That said, up until the 50s, doctors would be quite happy recommending smoking to "relax" - though this may have had quite a lot to do with sponsorship from tobacco companies. Alas, there are probably no genuine endorsements on these ads: http://lane.stanford.edu/tobacco/index.html and the "survey" quoted here is no doubt bogus: http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_ id=23846 but very few people would have asked questions at the time. Is the same happening now? (I knew I should have gone with "many respected organisations supported the Nazi party"!)

As for how many years the records run for, it's slightly irrelevant - we still don't know how our records compare to what would naturally occur if there were no civilisation.