Global warming - how else can these signs be explained?

stickyfiddle

Fretwired said:

stickyfiddle said:

At this point, climate change deniers can seriously just fuck off.

Great comment - don't agree with me then I'm shutting down the debate. When I was at school in the 60's we were heading for an ice age. Scientists with lots of figures and charts. The only voice you now hear in the press is the 'man made climate' lobby. Man probably is affecting the climate, but there are other factors.

Pop over to NASA and they're beginning to understand the effect the Sun and it cycles are having on our climate. NASA has installed an instrument on the International Space Station to monitor radiation from the Sun and under its cycles.

“Knowing the Sun’s behaviour and knowing how Earth’s atmosphere responds to the Sun is even more important now because of all the different factors that affect climate change. We need to understand how all of these interact on Earth’s system,” - NASA.

Of course you only quoted the bit that personally offended you :P 

The point is that we shouldn’t take the risk that “it’s just the sun causing it” while we still think we have a chance of minimising the problem but doing nothing because a handful of rich guys like V8 engines and cheap coal power plants. 

I’m not trying to shut down the discussion - quite the opposite - but at this point we’ve had 40+ years of discussion and by all accounts from those actually studying it, we’re at a turning point which may the last opportunity we have to make serious reductions and have them actually make an impact on the outcome. Maybe they’re wrong and it won’t stop the warning, but the worst case is we won’t be wasting oil for power (itself a valuable, finite, raw material for other things), and we’ll have access to cleaner, cheaper energy which will just make everyone’s life better anyway. 

The major players are already taking big steps - India and China are rapidly turning away from fossil fuels and towards solar & wind. But we have a media in the west who seems to think it’s ok to present an argument from 2 sides as if both sides are equally valid, when in fact one side is almost entirely correct and the other side thinks it knows better based on no real evidence, and won’t listen.

TheMarlin

darthed1981 said:

Fretwired said:

When I was at school in the 60's we were heading for an ice age. Scientists with lots of figures and charts. The only voice you now hear in the press is the 'man made climate' lobby. Man probably is affecting the climate, but there are other factors.

Well we can only do things about the man-made factors, so why not focus on those?

I've never sat in a meeting where someone has said "right we have a problem, some factors we can mitigate, some we can't so let's do fuck all"

That might have been what they did, to be fair, but it's rarely what is said in a sane context.

Tell me, exactly what can you do? 

Fretwired

darthed1981 said:

Well we can only do things about the man-made factors, so why not focus on those?

I've never sat in a meeting where someone has said "right we have a problem, some factors we can mitigate, some we can't so let's do fuck all"

That might have been what they did, to be fair, but it's rarely what is said in a sane context.

Because it depends on what is having the biggest impact. The Antarctica ice cap is melting .. must be climate change - but hang on scientists have just found a large active volcano under Antarctica which is generating a lot of heat and must be contributing to the melt.

"While rising temperatures in the polar oceans are still by far the biggest contributor to Antarctic melting, volcanoes buried deep beneath the ice are a 'wild card' that are likely also playing a role."

What role does the Sun play? The oceans?

But let's say climate change is 100 per cent man made. Going to give up your car? Forget electric cars as they are a complete non-starter (pardon the pun). Whilst we'd get lower CO2 and air pollutant emissions from electric cars there would be an increase in emissions  from the expanded electricity production sector - there will also be an increase in sulphur dioxide. The EU doesn't believe it's possible to generate enough clean electricity to power the demand for electric cars. So it's carbon-based energy production for the foreseeable future. Our cities are not designed for electric vehicles - how could you recharge a car in the average suburban street?

Want to save the planet? Give up your car and use public transport (it would need massive government investment).

And what about all your gadgets from guitar amps, to PC's to smart TV's etc. Bin them and cut your electricity consumption.

And how about rationing the internet? Researchers at the University of Lancaster think the internet should be slowed down and rationed. The reason for the frightening suggestion is that massive data-collection efforts from billions of projected-to-be-commissioned IoT (internet of Things) sensors threaten to suck up so much power that carbon emissions will be impossible to tame and global warming will escalate, they say.

IoT sensors will be so attractive, and so much data will be accumulated, that the internet will continue to grow until something stops it, the researchers contend. “Unwatched and unabated” data pipe-hogging background security patches are an example of something that will continue to dominate, as will selfish background cloud activities.

Getting to an end game of billions of sensors would not only be bad for the environment, but its culmination could result in running out of power for other things, the researchers say. And they say mankind should start addressing the problem immediately.

Currently the internet makes up a paltry 5 percent of worldwide electricity use, the students claim. But it’s growing rapidly. In fact, it’s growing at rate that’s faster (7 percent) than the overall global electricity consumption of 3 percent.

Want to save the planet? Switch off your internet.

Although aviation is a relatively small industry, it has a disproportionately large impact on the climate system. It accounts for four to nine per cent of the total climate change impact of human activity.

But at a time when we urgently need to reduce our impact, greenhouse gas emissions from aviation continue to grow. For example, since 1990, CO2 emissions from international aviation have increased 83 per cent. The aviation industry is expanding rapidly in part due to regulatory and taxing policies that do not reflect the true environmental costs of flying. “Cheap” fares may turn out to be costly in terms of climate change.

Want to save the planet? Stop flying. Campaign to abolish cheap fares and short haul flights.

Google stopped its R&D in renewable energy. In 2007 Google launched an ambitious project, known as RE<C, to develop renewable energy technologies that would generate electricity cheaper than coal-powered plants. Thereby, Google wanted to considerably reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and thus prevent catastrophic climate change. In 2011 the company decided that RE<C was not on track to meet its target and shut down the project. The Google team came to the conclusion that:

"Even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach."

 Google’s best-case scenario, which was based on the most optimistic forecast for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, because of continued use of fossil fuels and existing critical concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which will continue to warm the planet even if we shut down every fossil-fueled power plant. NASA agrees.

In other words, two major points of the Google’s conclusion are:

• Today’s renewable energy technologies couldn’t tackle the world climate change;
• Even if the world totally switches to renewable energy, it won’t be sufficient to solve the problem.

There are projects on the go which aim to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere and reuse it. Global Thermostat has been developing innovative tech to capture carbon. Climeworks is a Swiss-based tech company that is developing a way to extract CO2 from ambient air. There is little interest from governments in this tech.

So where do we go? I'm for having a reasoned debate rather than just virtue signally and telling people to fuck off.

What have you done today to reduce your carbon footprint?

stickyfiddle

Fretwired said:

darthed1981 said:

Well we can only do things about the man-made factors, so why not focus on those?

I've never sat in a meeting where someone has said "right we have a problem, some factors we can mitigate, some we can't so let's do fuck all"

That might have been what they did, to be fair, but it's rarely what is said in a sane context.

Because it depends on what is having the biggest impact. The Antarctica ice cap is melting .. must be climate change - but hang on scientists have just found a large active volcano under Antarctica which is generating a lot of heat and must be contributing to the melt.

"While rising temperatures in the polar oceans are still by far the biggest contributor to Antarctic melting, volcanoes buried deep beneath the ice are a 'wild card' that are likely also playing a role."

What role does the Sun play? The oceans?

But let's say climate change is 100 per cent man made. Going to give up your car? Forget electric cars as they are a complete non-starter (pardon the pun). Whilst we'd get lower CO2 and air pollutant emissions from electric cars there would be an increase in emissions  from the expanded electricity production sector - there will also be an increase in sulphur dioxide. The EU doesn't believe it's possible to generate enough clean electricity to power the demand for electric cars. So it's carbon-based energy production for the foreseeable future. Our cities are not designed for electric vehicles - how could you recharge a car in the average suburban street?

Want to save the planet? Give up your car and use public transport (it would need massive government investment).

And what about all your gadgets from guitar amps, to PC's to smart TV's etc. Bin them and cut your electricity consumption.

And how about rationing the internet? Researchers at the University of Lancaster think the internet should be slowed down and rationed. The reason for the frightening suggestion is that massive data-collection efforts from billions of projected-to-be-commissioned IoT (internet of Things) sensors threaten to suck up so much power that carbon emissions will be impossible to tame and global warming will escalate, they say.

IoT sensors will be so attractive, and so much data will be accumulated, that the internet will continue to grow until something stops it, the researchers contend. “Unwatched and unabated” data pipe-hogging background security patches are an example of something that will continue to dominate, as will selfish background cloud activities.

Getting to an end game of billions of sensors would not only be bad for the environment, but its culmination could result in running out of power for other things, the researchers say. And they say mankind should start addressing the problem immediately.

Currently the internet makes up a paltry 5 percent of worldwide electricity use, the students claim. But it’s growing rapidly. In fact, it’s growing at rate that’s faster (7 percent) than the overall global electricity consumption of 3 percent.

Want to save the planet? Switch off your internet.

Although aviation is a relatively small industry, it has a disproportionately large impact on the climate system. It accounts for four to nine per cent of the total climate change impact of human activity.

But at a time when we urgently need to reduce our impact, greenhouse gas emissions from aviation continue to grow. For example, since 1990, CO2 emissions from international aviation have increased 83 per cent. The aviation industry is expanding rapidly in part due to regulatory and taxing policies that do not reflect the true environmental costs of flying. “Cheap” fares may turn out to be costly in terms of climate change.

Want to save the planet? Stop flying. Campaign to abolish cheap fares and short haul flights.

Google stopped its R&D in renewable energy. In 2007 Google launched an ambitious project, known as RE<C, to develop renewable energy technologies that would generate electricity cheaper than coal-powered plants. Thereby, Google wanted to considerably reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and thus prevent catastrophic climate change. In 2011 the company decided that RE<C was not on track to meet its target and shut down the project. The Google team came to the conclusion that:

"Even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach."

 Google’s best-case scenario, which was based on the most optimistic forecast for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, because of continued use of fossil fuels and existing critical concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which will continue to warm the planet even if we shut down every fossil-fueled power plant. NASA agrees.

In other words, two major points of the Google’s conclusion are:

• Today’s renewable energy technologies couldn’t tackle the world climate change;
• Even if the world totally switches to renewable energy, it won’t be sufficient to solve the problem.

There are projects on the go which aim to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere and reuse it. Global Thermostat has been developing innovative tech to capture carbon. Climeworks is a Swiss-based tech company that is developing a way to extract CO2 from ambient air. There is little interest from governments in this tech.

So where do we go? I'm for having a reasoned debate rather than just virtue signally and telling people to fuck off.

What have you done today to reduce your carbon footprint?

I did about 4 hours work (on my weekend, no less), in the power and water sector, focusing on building new renewables projects. You?

ICBM

I read an analogy a long time ago which I think is quite good.

Imagine you're driving a car on a long, straight road. In the distance there's what looks like a bend, and as it comes closer you start to realise it's quite a sharp bend. You look at the speedometer and notice that the car is speeding up - not much yet, but it's getting to the point where you're not sure if you will get around the bend. Then you look out of the side window and see that the road might actually be going downhill, and you ask yourself whether the car is speeding up because of that, or whether you've got your foot down too hard on the accelerator.

What do you do - do you keep your foot on the accelerator and hope you get round the bend anyway, given that if you don't you will crash, or do you take your foot off the pedal a bit until you've slowed down enough that you think you might be able to get around the bend, even if you're not certain whether it's the hill that might be making you speed up?

You'd have to be a complete idiot to do the first, wouldn't you? But that's essentially what human-cause climate change "sceptics" are suggesting... keep your foot down and if we crash, it's not our fault. And climate change deniers just say the speedometer is faulty. Who would you want driving if you're a passenger?

darthed1981

Fretwired said:

Because it depends on what is having the biggest impact. The Antarctica ice cap is melting .. must be climate change - but hang on scientists have just found a large active volcano under Antarctica which is generating a lot of heat and must be contributing to the melt.

But that has already been decided, there is a scientific consensus from people far more qualified than you and I.

A bit of Googling is not expertise.

So why not go with what the qualified people say and act accordingly?

p90fool

Garthy said:.

5) C02 is easy to measure and tax.

It is, but it also keeps industry churning out its "new, improved" products and keeps people in jobs, which is counterproductive when you consider the environmental cost of making a new car compared to keeping one which is 5% less efficient on the road. 

I think to deny the overwhelming evidence that we are affecting the climate is akin to being a Flat-Earther, but what pisses me off is governments always going for the soft targets. 

Even Greenpeace have admitted that the ship which brings Volvo cars to the UK puts out more carbon emissions in that single journey than ALL 200 cars on board will over their entire combined lifetimes, but who gets hammered time and time again with emissions taxes?

Yup, motorists. 

Fretwired

ICBM said:

I read an analogy a long time ago which I think is quite good.

Imagine you're driving a car on a long, straight road. In the distance there's what looks like a bend, and as it comes closer you start to realise it's quite a sharp bend. You look at the speedometer and notice that the car is speeding up - not much yet, but it's getting to the point where you're not sure if you will get around the bend. Then you look out of the side window and see that the road might actually be going downhill, and you ask yourself whether the car is speeding up because of that, or whether you've got your foot down too hard on the accelerator.

What do you do - do you keep your foot on the accelerator and hope you get round the bend anyway, given that if you don't you will crash, or do you take your foot off the pedal a bit until you've slowed down enough that you think you might be able to get around the bend, even if you're not certain whether it's the hill that might be making you speed up?

You'd have to be a complete idiot to do the first, wouldn't you? But that's essentially what human-cause climate change "sceptics" are suggesting... keep your foot down and if we crash, it's not our fault. And climate change deniers just say the speedometer is faulty. Who would you want driving if you're a passenger?

I'm not a climate change denier. I just see a lot of virtue signalling and not much action. And governments are the worst - they raise taxes on carbon but don't invest the money wisely. The UK doesn't even have a workable national power strategy.

The only way climate change will be slowed down is to change  behaviour. I see no evidence of this happening. For example, air travel is expanding and getting cheaper ... madness.

prowla

Well, one thing is changing use of transport - the Interwebs; international conference calls, remote working, content delivery, cloud computing, etc. replace things you previously needed to travel for.

As for the causes of global warming & climate change, I don't know, but I don't buy into the "an expert said it", either way.

On to the measures being taken, the recognition of plastic pollution is a good thing, though maybe not specifically a contributor to global warming.

Cars-wise & transport in general, they are a lot less dirty now than they were in the past and the fossil fuels age is coming towards its end.

Fretwired

stickyfiddle said:

I did about 4 hours work (on my weekend, no less), in the power and water sector, focusing on building new renewables projects. You?

Four hours ... wow. The planet is saved.

What have I done?

My wife and I have slashed our carbon footprint. How?

We don't fly anywhere - haven't taken a flight in 10 years. We take public transport (train) if we have to travel a long distance.

We hardly drive. Last month I drove 25 miles. I pretty much walk everywhere (OK it helps if you work from home).

Where possible we buy locally produced seasonal food and have cut down on fish and meat (not sure I could give it up completely to be honest).

We grow our own - we have apple trees, tomatoes, blackberries, blueberries, herbs and other veg.

Installed LED lights and reduced our dependence on gadgets (for example we don't watch TV during the week).

Turned our boiler down so we use a lot less gas these days. Just wear a jumper.

Drink tap water rather than bottled.

We have installed a slimline fridge in place of the large one we used to have ...

Our energy bills have plummeted ...

Still use PCs and iPads and hang out on the internet so far from perfect.

There's a whole group of us doing this without shouting from the rooftops. As the strap line goes every little helps.

Fretwired

darthed1981 said:

Fretwired said:

Because it depends on what is having the biggest impact. The Antarctica ice cap is melting .. must be climate change - but hang on scientists have just found a large active volcano under Antarctica which is generating a lot of heat and must be contributing to the melt.

But that has already been decided, there is a scientific consensus from people far more qualified than you and I.

A bit of Googling is not expertise.

So why not go with what the qualified people say and act accordingly?

Please don't selectively quote me ... you should have included the rest ...

"While rising temperatures in the polar oceans are still by far the biggest contributor to Antarctic melting, volcanoes buried deep beneath the ice are a 'wild card' that are likely also playing a role."

This quote comes from climate scientists .. I didn't just make it up.

ICBM

Fretwired said:

I'm not a climate change denier. I just see a lot of virtue signalling and not much action. And governments are the worst - they raise taxes on carbon but don't invest the money wisely. The UK doesn't even have a workable national power strategy.

The only way climate change will be slowed down is to change  behaviour. I see no evidence of this happening. For example, air travel is expanding and getting cheaper ... madness.

I agree.

You'll probably laugh, but I'll mention it because this is a guitar forum... I have decided I will probably never buy another valve amp. It's not the only reason, and I know in the grand scheme of things it's a vanishingly small proportion of excess energy use, but valve amps are more wasteful than they need to be to do the job. They're slightly more energy-intensive to build than solid-state amps too, due to the extra transformer (or two, depending on design). As with many things there are some counter-arguments - valve amps are louder in relation to their power consumption so you can use a less powerful one, and if well-made will probably outlast less repairable solid-state ones, but overall I think it would probably be good to move away from this technology.

If the same thinking was applied to a lot more areas of life it would probably add up to a useful difference, and there are some where it's much more definite than that. I've also decided never to buy another incandescent light bulb (apart from special applications where there's no alternative) or CFL and switch to LED - but not all at once, only when the old bulbs fail. If everyone did that - many already are - it will make a significant difference.

If everyone simply drove slightly more slowly with less acceleration and braking then total fuel consumption would fall quite significantly for no real penalty - it doesn't even increase average journey time much because that's more limited by traffic than top speed. This actually happened when fuel prices peaked a few years ago, and although they're now back up to the same level, people have got used to it and have gone back to driving too fast.

stickyfiddle

Fretwired said:

stickyfiddle said:

I did about 4 hours work (on my weekend, no less), in the power and water sector, focusing on building new renewables projects. You?

Four hours ... wow. The planet is saved.

What have I done?

My wife and I have slashed our carbon footprint. How?

We don't fly anywhere - haven't taken a flight in 10 years. We take public transport (train) if we have to travel a long distance.

We hardly drive. Last month I drove 25 miles. I pretty much walk everywhere (OK it helps if you work from home).

Where possible we buy locally produced seasonal food and have cut down on fish and meat (not sure I could give it up completely to be honest).

We grow our own - we have apple trees, tomatoes, blackberries, blueberries, herbs and other veg.

Installed LED lights and reduced our dependence on gadgets (for example we don't watch TV during the week).

Turned our boiler down so we use a lot less gas these days. Just wear a jumper.

Drink tap water rather than bottled.

We have installed a slimline fridge in place of the large one we used to have ...

Our energy bills have plummeted ...

Still use PCs and iPads and hang out on the internet so far from perfect.

There's a whole group of us doing this without shouting from the rooftops. As the strap line goes every little helps.

Sorry, I didn’t mention the other 70 hours I worked this week towards the same aim. 

Your efforts are impressive on a ground level, but it also needs a vast majority get behind it - lobby politicians, making actual choices that encourage corporates to take action on a large scale. 

But I dont really understand how we’re arguing about this?! 

Fretwired

ICBM said:

I agree.

You'll probably laugh, but I'll mention it because this is a guitar forum... I have decided I will probably never buy another valve amp. It's not the only reason, and I know in the grand scheme of things it's a vanishingly small proportion of excess energy use, but valve amps are more wasteful than they need to be to do the job. They're slightly more energy-intensive to build than solid-state amps too, due to the extra transformer (or two, depending on design). As with many things there are some counter-arguments - valve amps are louder in relation to their power consumption so you can use a less powerful one, and if well-made will probably outlast less repairable solid-state ones, but overall I think it would probably be good to move away from this technology.

If the same thinking was applied to a lot more areas of life it would probably add up to a useful difference, and there are some where it's much more definite than that. I've also decided never to buy another incandescent light bulb (apart from special applications where there's no alternative) or CFL and switch to LED - but not all at once, only when the old bulbs fail. If everyone did that - many already are - it will make a significant difference.

If everyone simply drove slightly more slowly with less acceleration and braking then total fuel consumption would fall quite significantly for no real penalty - it doesn't even increase average journey time much because that's more limited by traffic than top speed. This actually happened when fuel prices peaked a few years ago, and although they're now back up to the same level, people have got used to it and have gone back to driving too fast.

Makes a lot of sense. The government should reduce the speed limit on the motorway.

There was a n EU scientific paper which suggested limiting the engine size and top speed of cars made in the EU to around 65 mph and mapping the engines for economy (reduce acceleration times etc). It could make a huge difference. Obviously it ended up in the bin as the powerful car lobby wants nothing to do with it.

Fretwired

stickyfiddle said:

Sorry, I didn’t mention the other 70 hours I worked this week towards the same aim. 

Your efforts are impressive on a ground level, but it also needs a vast majority get behind it - lobby politicians, making actual choices that encourage corporates to take action on a large scale. 

But I dont really understand how we’re arguing about this?! 

We're not arguing - I can see you're doing your bit and are onside. I only objected to your comment about climate change deniers. They need to be educated and brought round through reasoned debate not insults. Behaviours need to change. We don't want a Brexit style scenario in which there are two sides shouting insults at each other whilst nothing gets done. Brexit has shown the mess that can be achieved by a lack of planning, vision and will to succeed in sorting out a major issue that will affect millions of people. Climate change is another major problem that won't go away. The UK should do more.

roberty

TheMarlin said:

darthed1981 said:

Fretwired said:

When I was at school in the 60's we were heading for an ice age. Scientists with lots of figures and charts. The only voice you now hear in the press is the 'man made climate' lobby. Man probably is affecting the climate, but there are other factors.

Well we can only do things about the man-made factors, so why not focus on those?

I've never sat in a meeting where someone has said "right we have a problem, some factors we can mitigate, some we can't so let's do fuck all"

That might have been what they did, to be fair, but it's rarely what is said in a sane context.

Tell me, exactly what can you do? 

Livestock is the single biggest contributor. The best thing humanity can do mitigate climate change is to reduce its meat consumption, by around 90%. An uncomfortable truth

Dominic

Not just about deniers ......there are plenty of people who don't have a committed view either way or don't doubt climate change but are not prepared to let it spoil their time on this earth ,selfish or not.
Some people have exactly the same attitude to climate change......it won't affect them and their grandchildren can worry about it when the time comes .
 People are just as entitled to be selfish as they are magnanimous whether that's right or wrong.
 I read somewhere (no idea how true )that a field with a large herd of over 100 cows does more Global warming damage in one day than all the vehicles in London in one day..........If that is actually true, and .if thats the case it puts it into perspective and I wouldn't have any hesitation buying a C63 AMG MERC if I could afford it........so call me selfish.

roberty

darthed1981

Fretwired said:

darthed1981 said:

Fretwired said:

Because it depends on what is having the biggest impact. The Antarctica ice cap is melting .. must be climate change - but hang on scientists have just found a large active volcano under Antarctica which is generating a lot of heat and must be contributing to the melt.

But that has already been decided, there is a scientific consensus from people far more qualified than you and I.

A bit of Googling is not expertise.

So why not go with what the qualified people say and act accordingly?

Please don't selectively quote me ... you should have included the rest ...

"While rising temperatures in the polar oceans are still by far the biggest contributor to Antarctic melting, volcanoes buried deep beneath the ice are a 'wild card' that are likely also playing a role."

This quote comes from climate scientists .. I didn't just make it up.

Yes but thats not what I'm debating, I'm not arguing that there are not possibly other things contributing to climate change as well, it's like getting divorced and your wife saying "you shagged my sister and you leave the toilet seat up".  We can't stop up a volcano, we can reduce CO2 emissions, though it is extremely difficult.

The bit I have a problem with is the internet in general, not you specifically, going "I've googled and found this article and that article and to me the consensus is in doubt" but neither of us, and none of them, are qualified to make that judgement.

No harm in reading widely and trying to be informed and we should all do that, but the extreme of that line of logic is conspiracy theories and flat Earth, it's "anti-expert" which is incredibly damaging.

At the start of Michael Crichton's book Airframe he quotes "The most significant consequence of the information age is to give undue credence to uninformed opinion".

Don't get me wrong, I've read your posts on many topics and you are far from uninformed, but as far as I know, you (and I) are not experts on this.  The one guy who came in here who is a scientist working in climate change echoed the reaction of most scientists, it terrifies them.

Michael Crichton funnily enough wrote a very long book called "State of Fear" where he in fact argued that climate scientists sometimes are funded by organisations that have an agenda as well, and that you can easily find stats arguing against it.

However, I'll personally go with the scientific consensus.  We could do internet debating and frantically google references all day long, but we aren't qualified to make a judgement that can be compared to the consensus.

Fretwired

darthed1981 said:

Yes but thats not what I'm debating, I'm not arguing that there are not possibly other things contributing to climate change as well, it's like getting divorced and your wife saying "you shagged my sister and you leave the toilet seat up".  We can't stop up a volcano, we can reduce CO2 emissions, though it is extremely difficult.

The bit I have a problem with is the internet in general, not you specifically, going "I've googled and found this article and that article and to me the consensus is in doubt" but neither of us, and none of them, are qualified to make that judgement.

No harm in reading widely and trying to be informed and we should all do that, but the extreme of that line of logic is conspiracy theories and flat Earth, it's "anti-expert" which is incredibly damaging.

At the start of Michael Crichton's book Airframe he quotes "The most significant consequence of the information age is to give undue credence to uninformed opinion".

Don't get me wrong, I've read your posts on many topics and you are far from uninformed, but as far as I know, you (and I) are not experts on this.  The one guy who came in here who is a scientist working in climate change echoed the reaction of most scientists, it terrifies them.

Michael Crichton funnily enough wrote a very long book called "State of Fear" where he in fact argued that climate scientists sometimes are funded by organisations that have an agenda as well, and that you can easily find stats arguing against it.

However, I'll personally go with the scientific consensus.  We could do internet debating and frantically google references all day long, but we aren't qualified to make a judgement that can be compared to the consensus.

I only quote qualified sources. The quotes above are mostly from NASA, the EU (based on EU-funded science research) and qualified scientists (Lancaster University). I avoid general journalism unless they are quoting a recognised expert. If the guys at NASA say we have global warming then I believe them. Google can be a great tool that allows ordinary people like me to read what the experts really think rather than getting information filtered by vested interests and governments.

As it happens the volcano is important. What if it explodes? The ice melt could be rapid with sea levels rising. Areas of the UK could vanish under sea water - does the government have a plan for rising sea levels? How much is it affecting the melt of ice? As the ice melts the temperature of the surrounding sea water rises. Russian scientists think they can stop the ice caps meting by constructing a large device to reduce the amount of the Sun's energy that hits the poles. Madness? Who knows. As NASA says - the topic is complex and there's no easy fix.