Norman. I was watching this morning the BBC breakfast news coverage of the
global warming topic. Their news man Bill Turnbull was talking live from
Kew gardens and then supposedly linked to a colleague in the Maldives. The
whole tone of his report was "when sea levels rise" "in fifty years from now
the sea would be over my head" and so on. In fact there wasn't one piece of
objective evidence that the sea had risen at all. As far as I can ascertain
sea levels for that area in the Indian Ocean have shown no appreciable rise
in twenty years. I am prepared to be contradicted though. Back to the news
item, I was expecting the journalist to be showing evidence of how far the
sea level had risen but there was nothing but this bold statement that it
will rise by as much as aprrox 6ft in fifty years!




"Norman Lynagh" wrote in message
...
News24 have been running a lot of programming on climate change today.
I've only seen some snippets but I haven't been very impressed by some
of what the "experts" have been saying. For example, one of this
country's leading scientists in the subject has just said that the
amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased by 40 percent
since the industrial revolution. I have no idea what the true figure is
but, bearing in mind that the main greenhouse gas by volume is water
vapour, that figure of a 40 percent increase must surely be wrong. He
was probably referring to gases other than water vapour but that's not
what he said and it does make a big difference.

My main gripe is that most of the "experts" are being very positive
about what "will" happen, even down to quite precise regional detail.
There's not a lot of uncertainty being expressed. The theme seems to be
that "our models show that this will happen and we are confident that
our models are accurate". If only it were that simple :-(

Norman.
(delete "thisbit" twice to e-mail)
--
Norman Lynagh Weather Consultancy
Chalfont St Giles
England