h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11462

OK, so climate change seems to be my hobbyhorse at the moment, but I intend to deliver a knockout punch to any attempt to use this august enterprise as a soapbox for contrarian views. I'm tending to regard climate change denial as almost as much of an enormity (in its original sense) as Holocaust denial. The only difference is that one has happened, the other hasn't, yet.

Your zeal is to be admired.

And the establishment will remain safe and cosy so long as we the lumpenproletariat remain distracted from the inter alia economic domesday which lies not far beyond the peak-oil horizon ...

Did you see that really nasty spat I had in PR a month or two ago? I got the outcome I desired, which was that the opinion piece full of tendentious drivel got withdrawn. I also expect that the person who posted it, whom I have met, will never speak to me again. But since, when I met him, he hardly condescended to speak to me in the first place, it's no great loss.

This is interesting:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2083947,00.html

What irks me about this debate (in the UK, at least) is that it's always framed in the context of the 1970's. Back then, the only kind of nuclear reactor was a thermal neutron reactor, that produced loads of waste and required reprocessing. Sellafield became an open radioactive sewer as a result and there was a lot of fear of weapons-grade material being sprited away for defence purposes. However, there are such things as fast reactors. These *don't* require reprocessing, make their own fuel and burn *everything*, including virtually all the waste. There would be no need to sequester waste in vast caverns as the waste has a half life of decades rather than millennia. Yet our own Dounreay fast reactor was shut down mainly because of Green alarmism.

This debate cannot be conducted in terms of absolutes.

I’ll have to declare that I am something of a sceptic. Not of global warming in itself, but that our emissions are the root cause of it. I am no scientist so the following is a point of view from what I glean from newspapers and TV. Not the best sources perhaps, but the only one I have that’s easily available. It is I suspect, that of the ordinary Joe in the street, if the ordinary Joe thinks about it at all.

A program transmitted some weeks ago, made, I thought, a fairly cogent point. Its main thrust was that GW is not driven by carbon emissions but is a result of cycles of the Sun’s heat output. It’s evidence was that the historical record shows that increases in atmospheric carbon. as evidenced in ice core samples, takes place after a warm period. One thing which never seems to be mentioned however is what the measure of output by the Sun actually is.

I'm also really not sure why there is this pre-occupation with carbon emissions when, as I understand it, other gasses such as methane are far more pernicious and longer lasting, and yet there is very little by way of campaigns to limit that. Is it because carbon emissions is the 'easy' target?

For me the problem is that I simply don’t trust the ‘Green lobby’. I seem to recall their calculation (Was it Greenpeace?) that estimated rises of 120 feet in sea level when the Arctic ice melted. The impression I get is that they are seen to be hand in hand with the anti capitalisation faction and are using GW as another way of getting at commercialisation.

Neither am I an advocate of profligate waste, I certainly do my bit in the recycling drive, but unfortunately it does seem sometimes to be a waste of time. It seems to me that government of whatever colour are not really as serious about GW as they would have us believe. They really seem to me to be paying only lip service to the green lobby for votes while using GW as an excuse for taxation. Using low energy light bulbs and planting trees seems ludicrous when any view from space will show whole cities lit up like Christmas trees throughout the night. Surely this would be a good place to begin fighting against carbon emissions? If the situation is as serious as they make out it would not be beyond their wit to legislate to limit and reduce consumption, or am I being too cynical if I thought that that would cost too many votes.

I think government has a long way to go to get hearts and minds behind a meaningful campaign to reduce emissions.

Sorry! Rant over.
DK

If it's the sun that's causing climate change as you appear to suggest then can you tell me why the climate change is taking place faster than at any time in the last 600,000 years (according to scientific tests on ice-core samples / Al Gore film)?
The danger is that the sea-currents may be affected due to perma-frost melt in places like Siberia. The water released there may dilute the sea in the North Atlantic and bring the Gulf Stream, and therefore the whole world ocean conveyor to a sluggish standstill. There are already some early signs of problems with the Gulf Stream.

But you don't have to be a scientist. Just look at those old sepia postcards of Alpine explorers standing proudly on glaciers, that are no longer there. And at animal migration patterns in your own back yard.

It's clear that something very unusual is happening even by millenia standards. What's causing it and/or Who's causing it? What can be done about it?

OK:, let's look at the issues in order of contentiousness:
First, the argument about whether the Sun is responsible. The answer is very simple: No. During its history the Sun has been growing steadily brighter yet the Earth was warmer *in the past*. Why? Because there was a lot more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And there is *no* correlation between fluctuations in solar activity and temperature rise. Read this if you don't believe me:
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11650

Second, the reason why CO2 is targeted over methane is becuase much more of it is produced than methane and the latter has a very short half-life in the Earth's atmosphere, being essentially oxidisable. CO2 will hang around until it is actively removed by a carbon sink such as a forest or the ocean. We are producing it faster than it can be removed, and therefore we are in a hole and haven't stopped digging.

Regarding the Green lobby: I am *no* Green, but I'm an environmentalist. The Greens have a lot of spurious ideoogical baggage that I don't agree with (and I despise tree-hugging hippies anyway). They also have no respect for the role of science in helping us to come to the right decisions. I am, however, a scientist, ahnd quite a good one to boot. I am not a climatologist, but I have enough respect for the scientific method and its application by the IPCC to realise that when thousands of international scientists come to a joint conclusion backed up by cogent argument, perhaps they are onto something after all.

A good way of starting to make a real impact upon emissions is to encourage responsible energy efficiency. Energy efficiency actually saves money and makes economies more competitive, not less. Also a move from the model currently adopted by the utilities, that of trying to sell you as much energy as possible, to a service-based model where they contract to heat and light your home as efficiently as they can (and this involves replacing lightbulbs and draughtproofing where necessary) would have an undoubtedly huge impact upon energy use.

So, in answer to the questions you didn't ask, but are implicit in your 'rant':
* Global warming IS occurring
* It IS due to increased CO2 emissions
* We ARE responsible for these
* We CAN do something about the situation

OK?

Rock on Felonious. Hear him out folks; this man talks sense.

I'm glad you think so. Many have tried to dismiss me as a bigot, but nobody's been able to pick holes in my arguments - yet.

The idea that the sun is somehow responsible for the present situation is something of a red herring. It's not all that long ago that Ice Fairs were held on the River Thames - you could have a bonfire on the ice and visit market stalls and buy roast potatoes and warm your chilblains and sing Christmas carols.
The real reason we're soon going to be in big trouble is due to the greenhouse effect. The heat generated on the earth's surface and in the air is trapped because of the greenhouse effect. And the more CO2 is released into the atmosphere the worse the situation will get. This has been going on for 150 years since the start of the industrial revolution. Remember those famous smogs of London town? Well, we've moved them to China and India.
I've got energy-saving bulbs, use public transport 90% of the time, live in a land which has no chance of meeting its Kyoto target - in fact probably hasn't even tried to. Sadly I reckon it's already too late. Glaciers in the Alps and the Himalayas are receeding at an alarming rate. I think the effects cannot now be reversed or even stopped. We're all going to pay. Noah's flood was a mere trickle compared with what's coming. How do I know? Simple. Al Gore's 600,000 year runaway stats (see earlier post) that's how.

"It's not all that long ago that Ice Fairs were held on the River Thames - you could have a bonfire on the ice and visit market stalls and buy roast potatoes and warm your chilblains and sing Christmas carols."

This is unrelated to weather effects of any kind - it's due to the replacement of London Bridge which had slowed the flow down a great deal, the building of all the other bridges and the narrowing of the Thames when they built the embankments. It's now too fast-flowing to freeze.

So it's just that the Thames is flowing faster due to it being narrower? Maybe you're right. After all, t's not all that long ago, was it 1963, when we had those dramatic headlines: ICEBERGS IN MORECAMBE BAY.
Yes, there will be 'blips' but the greenhouse trend is relentless. And we're even chopping down the rainforests to help it along.

Yes I am right. There's even an entry on h2g2 that says the same thing.

FM,
Thanks for the reply to my earlier post. Apologies for not coming back sooner. I wasn't ignoring it.

OK, Points taken. Clearly I have a bit of reading to do.

DK

Good on yer, DK!

This is the sort of stuff I like to see: the opening of minds. I'm not another Hoovooloo - somebody who having found a weapon he can wield, goes around looking for victims to club senseless. I do however think that if people want to advance unsolicited opinion in a forum designed for discussing matters of fact, then they deserve any justifiable condemnation heaped upon their head.

I don't blame people for being sceptical either, but these are not 'extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence' (a non-sequitur if ever I saw one). These are reasonable claims backed up by a mountain of mundane but verifiable and convincing evidence. Their implications may be disturbing, even shocking to the congenitally complacent, but the idea that humankind could be making the climate warmer isn't exactly, that radical, is it? It's the idea that we might be obliged to *do* something about it that's so galling to the contrarians.

If I might pitch in at this point,

I have seen more compelling argument in this one page than any of the hundreds in the Forum on this issue. I still count myself as a sceptic, not least because govt is transparently manipulating this issue as a vehicle for raising taxes whilst doing absolutely nothing to pre-empt the universally predicted effects of GW, but I have certainly been given food for thought.

Sometimes it pays to be a lurker.

I was fairly fortunate in that I came to this issue without any baggage. I find the idea of one outcome no more challenging to my preconceptions about the world than the other, to be honest. Much less disturbing than if, God forbid, it were shown that people with one kind of skin colour were genetically less intelligent than those of another colour.

I have to say that I find *none* of the contrarians' arguments compelling in any way. Even they are adjusting their position: it's drifted from 'globbal warming isn't happening', through 'it's happening, but it's not down to CO2' and 'it's CO2, but we aren't responsible' through to 'we can't practically do anything about it anyway'. In fact, it's not very far now from their bedrock position, which is 'we shouldn't have to do anything about it really, because the free market rules supreme and anyway we believe in God and he won't therefore be punishing us'. Well, in nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments. There are only consequences.

Unfortunately people are being encouraged to think that planting a tree will resolve the issue - and as for 'carbon trading' Well words fail me.

Thinking that you can buy your way out is exactly what prompted the Reformation back in 1517. Money can't buy you oxygen.