They had snow the other day in Buenos Aires.
Texas has had one of the wettest June’s on record with Marble Falls getting 18″ of rain overnight!
Australia is suffering from a drought for the last five years which is threatening to destroy 40% of its agricultural output.
The UK has had one of the wettest June’s on record with some people in Hull still unable to return to their homes.
And despite the weather here in Ireland of late, it seems that according to the Met Office, temperatures in Ireland have been gradually climbing for the last 27 years!
And some people still deny that climate change is occurring? Incredible.
For the record, your final link there is misleading. That TV show was not denying that climate change was occurring, but suggesting that climate change is a ‘natural’ part of our planet’s cycle.
What John Kelly said.
The Great Global Warming Swindle, if you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth a watch; this isn’t an endorsement of the content, but it is well made. I daresay that the odd copy has made it to YouTube, or Google Video. The claims in the documentary about the role of the Sun and cosmic rays in global warming have themselves been challenged: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6290228.stm
Regarding that last link to the Channel 4 site; they don’t seem to be denying that climate change is happening – only arguing that we don’t have much to do with it.
“The film brings together the arguments of leading scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus that carbon dioxide released by human industrial activity is the cause of rising global temperatures today.”
The bottom line is this, when they are wrong, they are wrong, we have everything to do with it. And their ultimate point of the film was that we need to exploit the petroleum reserves in Africa.
I daresay the point was not that WE need to exploit petroleum reserves in Africa, but that Africans themselves should not be prevented from doing so.
As others have said – people aren’t denying climate change is occurring, they are questioning the fact that it is caused by carbon emissions and what not. A trip to Ceide Fields will let you know that several thousand years ago Ireland had a tropical climate. A lot of the debate stems around the fact that there is data to go either way. Big corporations fund research to prove it isn’t caused by pollution, whereas liberal interest groups fund studies to show that it is caused by us. They go around and around, but until a completely independent study is done I’m not convinced one way or another. And lets face it – the chance of someone with absolutely nothing to gain but satisfying a curiosity is hardly likely to put up millions to fund said objective study.
Well to be fair to the “non-believers” of Climate Change, the Climate tends to have fluctuations in a pattern and people argue it could be a Natural Change.
However the obvious statement is whether or not we are currently experiencing the effects of Climate Change due to Global Warming, the fact is that sooner or later we will have to realise that pumping so much emissions into the Sky will eventually lead to problems.
If that’s Now or in 50 year’s to come is irrelevant in my view. As a Intelligent Species we should be making efforts to preserve our surroundings and not questioning whether a Flood in Hull is a sign of Global Warming gone too far or whether we can push it a bit more.
I haven’t seen the channel 4 documentary in question (don’t have a tv right now) but according to New Scientist, measurements of the sun’s activity over the past twenty years prove that climate change has nothing to do with the sun’s natural cycle. The sun has actually got cooler in the last 20 years. In other words, the cause of global warming is human. It has nothing to do with a ‘natural’ part of our planet’s cycle.
“The upshot is that somewhere between 1985 and 1987 all the solar factors that could have affected climate have been going in the wrong direction. If they were really a big factor we would have cooling by now,” Lockwood told New Scientist.
The link is here http://tinyurl.com/ynmkuq
thebigman87 makes the best point.
I don’t think anyone here will convince anyone else of anything, and we certainly won’t solve ‘the big debate’.
But for my money I’d rather reduce the crap we pump into our own living environment whether or not it’s responsible for global warming.
Stephen, which wealthy African nation has the money to exploit their resources? Perhaps they could take out a loan from someone?
The fact that African states lack the means with which to exploit their own petrochemical and coal reserves does not support your earlier assertion that the Great Global Warming Swindle advocated the exploitation of said resources by someone other than the Africans themselves. I put it (the film) on again a while ago and am satisfied that it does not.
In any case, it would not be unreasonable for a stable (e.g. non-kleptocratic) African state to take out a loan to finance the exploitation of those resources if a) they reckoned (and could convince a reliable lender) that the return on the investment would exceed the total cost of the loan and b) the global systems of trade, finance and, latterly, Western environmental awareness, were not biased against such a transaction.
Climate change is definitely happening but then again it has always happened throughout the history of the planet. Ever since Pangea split up there was bound to be more examples of flooding purely because of more coastlines and ever since coastal erosion and construction on natural flood plains along with diversion of rivers, etc happened it was only ever going to get worse. Also isn’t it Winter in Argentina at the moment, Southern hemisphere and all that? They could do with a bit of snow. 😉 Regarding the graph, while temperatures are on the increase for the past few decades it’s interesting to see that they have never climbed as far as they have dropped if you ignored the 15 year mean and all statistical derivations should always be ignored as they are engineered to make a point. I reckon if I took a standard deviation from that graph, at a glance, it would probably indicate a no change (minimum spread) if not a slight negative bias. I doubt that anyone was forecasting another ice-age back in 1890 or 1920. Sure the ground temperatures are heating up and so on but we’ve also rid lots of the natural coolant from the ground, tapped underground rivers, reclaimed flood lands and everything else that would cool the planet’s surface. This global warming is a lot more manageable than many people might think IMHO.
Am I the only one who thinks we need to leave this to the experts? There is a lot less debate about all this than many people think. The media like to appear balanced, and in so doing they mess up. They portray the odd cooook as being of equal importance and credibility to the vast majority of scientists in the field. There are of course still some debates. However, they are not about whether or not there is warming, or even whether or not we are causing it. That is agreed on. The debate is on just how bad things are and just how much we need to cut back to save ourselves.
People need to do more research before they believe things. That channel 4 documentary was a disgrace. The ‘science’ in it has been shown to be wrong. To be honest the only way I could describe it was as an out and out lie. In order to attract audiences C4 intentionally miss-represented reality. They presented a discredited scientist and his falsified views as valid science. That is wrong.
Don’t blindy believe things, take the time to look into them more. Also, personally I want the world leaders to air on the side of caution. Lets take action based on the worst-case scenarios not the best-case ones, we owe that to our children and our children’s children etc..
I hope I am not pointing out the obvious, but it is actually the middle of the winter in BA. Snow is unusual, but is certainly not unheard-of.
Antoin, absolutely it is not unheard of. The last time there was snow in BA was 1919.
In Michigan, we’re seeing the warmest summer in a long time, with unusually strong storms for us. I posted photos of the weirdest roll clouds I’ve ever seen (they spawned water spouts in Marquette MI) on my BLOG yesterday.
In west Clare (where I’ve been for 2 weeks) it was global cooling: I can’t remember such a cool summer holiday…
The environmentalists want you to think that the world is ending. There’s no doubt that there is “natural” climate changes.
It wasn’t too many years ago (1970’s) that these environmentalists were screaming about “global cooling”. They wanted to put a tarp over the north pole to melt the ice! Google search it, it’s funny.