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
enlightening to me.

Outside of America there is a global scientific consensus that global
warming is real, measurable and likely to be a very serious problem in
the future. And even inside the US there is a scientific consensus but
the current US adminstration gags its scientists.

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/env...dministra.html

One of Bushes lying cronies was fired as a result
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conten...y/311/5763/917

In the UK the issue was first brought to the attention of the
Conservative (right wing) Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and so there
are no significant differences here across the main political parties
(unlike in the US where it is heavily politicised).

I simplify slightly because the raving nutters of the extreme left and
right are typically anti-GW (the former because they reckon it did away
with their core vote of coal miners and the latter because it stops
them from unfettered market freedom and environmental destruction).

Here, in contrast to Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient
Truth', there seems to be a strong anti-opinion held by a sizeaable
minority that global warming is either hype and/or a conspiracy put on
by the left, allegorized in Michael Crichton's novel 'State of Fear'.

Crichtons novel is a work of pure fiction to reassure a stupid
population that it will all be OK. From the ROW point of view we need
nature to deal more obvious warming events onto major US population
centres - collapse of the power grid in New York under the current heat
wave would go a long way towards focussing minds. But I expect it will
take regular Cat 5 hurricane hits on Orlando, Houston and New Orleans
for at least a decade before you can get the current US administration
to admit there might just be a problem.

Our own supine Prime Minister Blair could not stop licking GWB's boots
for long enough to join Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in
criticising the Bush administrations myopic approach to the problem. UK
oil companies like BP have a lot of sensible stuff to say about GW and
improving energy efficiency (US ones flatly deny there is a problem).
eg

http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?...ntId=702 0302

My own opinion is that there is strong evidence, both direct and
inferred, that the Earth as a whole is warmiing, particularly in the
Northern Hemisphere. That there are climatic fluctuations should not be
surprising since it would be naive to think that the Earth is a static
organism. What I would like to know is exactly how much are humans
contributing to climate change

It has been measured and roughly half the change in the past century
can be accounted for by changes in solar flux but the other half (which
occurred mostly in the past 3 decades) can only be accounted for by
greenhouse gas forcing (satellite data rules out changes in solar
input). Baliunas & Soon (both GW skeptics) have published scientific
papers that roughly agree with these figures.

and if so, how - even if I'm skeptical
that much would be done about it even if it was shown beyond a shadow
of a doubt that people's activities were the primary cause of global
warming . After all, we've been warned about and shown the dire
consequences of pollution and deforestation but for the sake of
supposed progress nothing really changes and in fact, environmental
degradation seems to be accelerating.

Fuel efficeincy is not taken seriously in the US. Cars still do only
20mpg if you are lucky (same as in 1920) and a fair proportion of SUVs
do much less. In Europe and Japan the average petrol saloon does more
than twice that and some a lot higher.

I see US greens as a part of the problem because they have allowed
themselves to be painted into a corner as proposing hair shirts, back
to the stone age living in benders. There is a substantial middle
ground that avoids profligate over consumption.

The longer we put off making no regrets energy efficiency measures by
pretending there is no problem the worse it will be when we finally
have to slam on the brakes (there is a heck of a lot of inertia in the
climate system - it will get hotter for a long time after we stop
increasing the CO2 concentration).

Regards,
Martin Brown