Weather Banter - View Single Post - What is your opinion on global warming theory?

Ian · August 1st 06, 07:10 PM posted to uk.sci.weather

wrote:

Hi. I'm in the United States and interested to know what some of you
British weather enthusuasts have to say about your own perception of
global climate change. Perhaps a non-American perspective might prove

I've no technical knowledge or expertise in climatology and such, and I'm not
a tree-hugging environmentalist type, but I've become more and more convinced
over the last 10 or 15 years that Man, since the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution, has caused an initially gradual and now accelerating alteration
in the planet's atmosphere, resulting in measurable global temperature warming.
In the last few years I've heard reports of, for example, aboriginal
Alaskans' coastal villages sliding into the sea as the permanently frozen soil
melts under them, of parts of the Arctic ice cap vanishing and naturalists
finding that wildlife and plants in Greenland and other places in northern
latitudes are being affected in various odd ways.
I don't say that the changes in the upper atmosphere are responsible for
*every* weather extreme or catastrophe like hurricane Katrina; I just have a
vaguely uneasy feeling that the weather used to be more predictable and
settled before, say, 1970. Not very scientific,I admit, but as I said I'm
not a scientist or anything.
One aspect I don't often hear mentioned is the enormous increase in the
world's human population: in the early 1950s it was around two and a quarter
billion; a few years ago it was said to be almost 7 billion. Even if the bulk
of this increase is in the less civilized parts of the world,it means
lots more cooking fires, more forests being cut down, more ill-maintained
motorcycles breathing out exhaust fumes not to mention more cattle breaking
methane-rich wind. All this has got to have some effect on the atmosphere's
make-up, I'd have thought.
And with China rushing at great speed into industrialization and urbanization,
and building coal-burning power stations at the rate of one per day and having
to create new highways to cope with the expanding number of motor vehicles
I fear there will be a lot more noxious and harmful effluvia floating skyward
from that huge country before too long.... it's going to be a hot, noisy and
dirty world, folks!
--
Ian