"Gavin Staples" wrote in message
Now thats an enlightened view:-(

It was meant tongue in cheek, I don't hold him personally responsible.

wrote in message
oups.com...
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. 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'.

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 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.

Well global warming is virtually a fact, and AGW although not proven beyond
all doubt, is a pretty well established theory.

However, I don't think that even if all countries in the world signed up to
Kyoto it would make much difference, due to the underpinning of the world
economy on growth. And they certainly won't sign up to it or anything like
it.

As a species we will just have to adapt to the changes that will become
increasingly apparent over the next 50 years. That's going to be extremely
hard. Massive refugee movements are certain.

Possibly increasing scarcity of fossil fuels will result in such high energy
prices that saving energy will be important in its own right, and the push
for alternative technologies will at last become a major priority. I would
see that as being a far more likely way of cutting growth in CO2 emissions
than any treaty that could be agreed.

I see a lot of the environmentalists hand-wringing as a waste of time, only
resulting in politicians paying lip-service to reducing carbon emissions. As
the OP said, it doesn't really matter how much people are told they are
ruining the planet and must live greener lifestyles, in practice they simply
won't.

- MJP

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

wrote:

wrote in message
oups.com...
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.

I find it hard to discuss climate change with a country who will not conform
to the Kyoto treaty.

Well that's all right then, because you were being invited to discuss the
question by a single individual, you see, not a country.
--
Ian

"JPG" wrote in message
oups.com...

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. 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'.

For the American Christian right, science in general produces a number
of inconvenient truths, not least Darwin's Theory of Evolution by
Natural Selection. Of course this is "inconvenient" because it is
contrary to a literal reading of Genesis to which, according to recent
statistics, more than half the population of the US subscribe.

Karen Armstrong in the Guardian wrote a very good piece on the
anti-science attitude of Bush and his neocon cronies yesterday. The
article is he

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...833794,00.html

What I found particularly scary from her article was this passage,
particularly the last sentence:

"The fundamentalists' rejection of science is deeply linked to their
apocalyptic vision. Even the relatively sober ID theorists segue easily
into Rapture-speak. "Great shakings and darkness are descending on
Planet Earth," says the ID philosopher Paul Nelson, "but they will be
overshadowed by even more amazing displays of God's power and light.
Ever the long-term strategist, YHVH is raising up a mighty army of
cutting-edge Jewish End-time warriors." They all condemn the attempt to
reform social ills. When applied socially, evolutionary theory "leads
straight to all the woes of modern life", says the leading ID ideologue
Philip Johnson: homosexuality, state-backed healthcare, divorce,
single-parenthood, socialism and abortion. All this, of course, is
highly agreeable to the Bush administration, which is itself
selectively leery of science. It has, for example, persistently ignored
scientists' warnings about global warming. Why bother to implement the
Kyoto treaty if the world is about to end? Indeed, some fundamentalists
see environmental damage as a positive development, because it will
hasten the apocalypse."

Of course, Karen Armstrong is putting her own, left-biased slant on it,
but I would think most people can see many, very scary truths in it.

If most Americans can deny a scientific theory (TOE) that is 150 years
old and has been accepted by nearly all scientists, most churches and
all other western nations, and it is backed up by evidence in the form
of fossils, common descent and genetics amongst others, then they will
have little problem denying a theory (AGW) that has considerably less
evidence and provenance - particularly as they see it threatening their
standard of living and individual wealth.

Martin


Oh and you think India , China, Pakistan, the Middle east and so on are
going to be fantastic green stewards of mother earth? Grow up.

"Les Crossan" wrote in
message news
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.

I'm in the minority in this NG as I'm a manmade GW sceptic. However a
country that starts a war to satisfy its own greed for oil, gives aid to
Lebanon and weapons to Israel, sends prisoners abroad to have confessions
tortured out of them, has oil companies naming supertankers after
Condoleeza Rice, has a president who listens to a lunatic Christian
extreme right lobby group to the detriment of everybody else and produces
all these dreadful cop chase TV programmes must have something seriously
wrong with its national psyche.

The USA - a country that doesn't believe in the United Nations and didn't
ratify Kyoto. Hail Bush, hail Exxon.

--
Les Crossan,
Wallsend, Tyne & Wear
54.95N 1.5W
Home of the Wallsend StormCam and the Backup USW FAQ -
www.uksevereweather.org.uk


Les isn't this "greed for oil" a tad over cooked?'

You know recently the were some articles doing the rounds saying the
deforestation and burning wood as fuel of the last two thousands years was
the start of AGW!! Well please excuse our ancestors for trying to survive
and put the world in the fantastic position it is today. There has always
been war, famine, plague and pestilence. More people now live longer and
better than at any other time in history. What we all seemingly take for
granted today could not have happened any other way.

By the way alternative renewable sources of energy have been used the last
thousands years; windmills and watermills and you know what? they were crap.
Without the industrial age we wouldn't all be sitting on computers hating
ourselves.

Lawrence Jenkins wrote:
"Les Crossan" wrote
in message news
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.

I'm in the minority in this NG as I'm a manmade GW sceptic. However a
country that starts a war to satisfy its own greed for oil, gives
aid to Lebanon and weapons to Israel, sends prisoners abroad to have
confessions tortured out of them, has oil companies naming
supertankers after Condoleeza Rice, has a president who listens to a
lunatic Christian extreme right lobby group to the detriment of
everybody else and produces all these dreadful cop chase TV
programmes must have something seriously wrong with its national
psyche.

The USA - a country that doesn't believe in the United Nations and
didn't ratify Kyoto. Hail Bush, hail Exxon.

--
Les Crossan,
Wallsend, Tyne & Wear
54.95N 1.5W
Home of the Wallsend StormCam and the Backup USW FAQ -
www.uksevereweather.org.uk


Les isn't this "greed for oil" a tad over cooked?'

You know recently the were some articles doing the rounds saying the
deforestation and burning wood as fuel of the last two thousands
years was the start of AGW!! Well please excuse our ancestors for
trying to survive and put the world in the fantastic position it is
today. There has always been war, famine, plague and pestilence.
More people now live longer and better than at any other time in
history. What we all seemingly take for granted today could not have
happened any other way.

By the way alternative renewable sources of energy have been used the
last thousands years; windmills and watermills and you know what?
they were crap. Without the industrial age we wouldn't all be sitting
on computers hating ourselves.

Ok Lawrence, but at the start of the industrial age, they were still in use.

300 or so years on, surely we have the technology to make these tools for
collecting the renewable energy sources more efficient?
--
Rob Overfield
Hull
http://talkingtoomuchagain.blogspot.com

"Big AL" wrote in message
...

"Gavin Staples" wrote in message
Now thats an enlightened view:-(

It was meant tongue in cheek, I don't hold him personally responsible.
Please use the tongue-in-cheek emoticon (: ~()~
in future and spare us having to divine your meaning
in plain text.

Alan

"Alan Murphy" wrote in message
...

"Big AL" wrote in message
...

"Gavin Staples" wrote in message
Now thats an enlightened view:-(

It was meant tongue in cheek, I don't hold him personally responsible.
Please use the tongue-in-cheek emoticon (: ~()~
in future and spare us having to divine your meaning
in plain text.

Alan
Or write as you mean not as you think.
Joe

"Lawrence Jenkins" wrote in message
...

"Les Crossan" wrote in
message news
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.

I'm in the minority in this NG as I'm a manmade GW sceptic. However a
country that starts a war to satisfy its own greed for oil, gives aid to
Lebanon and weapons to Israel, sends prisoners abroad to have confessions
tortured out of them, has oil companies naming supertankers after
Condoleeza Rice, has a president who listens to a lunatic Christian
extreme right lobby group to the detriment of everybody else and produces
all these dreadful cop chase TV programmes must have something seriously
wrong with its national psyche.

The USA - a country that doesn't believe in the United Nations and didn't
ratify Kyoto. Hail Bush, hail Exxon.

--
Les Crossan,
Wallsend, Tyne & Wear
54.95N 1.5W
Home of the Wallsend StormCam and the Backup USW FAQ -
www.uksevereweather.org.uk


Les isn't this "greed for oil" a tad over cooked?'

You know recently the were some articles doing the rounds saying the
deforestation and burning wood as fuel of the last two thousands years was
the start of AGW!! Well please excuse our ancestors for trying to
survive and put the world in the fantastic position it is today. There
has always been war, famine, plague and pestilence. More people now live
longer and better than at any other time in history. What we all seemingly
take for granted today could not have happened any other way.

By the way alternative renewable sources of energy have been used the last
thousands years; windmills and watermills and you know what? they were
crap. Without the industrial age we wouldn't all be sitting on computers
hating ourselves.
Well said that man.
Joe