There was a very interesting article in yesterdays Independent newspaper on sun spots and their impact on the earth's climate.

Well worth a read:

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3223603.ece

It is also very important Brian as while it may suit some to fill us with fear of so called "man made global warming" the science would seem to point to a period of cooling. It may even, scientists suggest, point to a period of very significant cooling indeed. The Russians, who are especially interested and specialized in solar science, are planning on a period of significant cooling and have been for some years now.

While people are entitled to believe in man made warming in the same way as they may believe any grand narrative we need to be clear that the various green organisations and politicians are predicting warming doom. However, in general science is predicting no such thing. Man made global warming is a system of belief, a religion if you prefer, and not a scientific fact.

I have deep concerns that in a few years if we see significant cooling for which we are unprepared the politicians will point at the scientists and blame them for misleading us. In turn this could undermine public confidence in science and the one thing we need to make it through a period of cooling is good science and good policies based upon science.

The "Global Warming Industry" is in full swing, and no heretics will be tolerated!
If you put your "shooting Times" in the wrong bin we"ll all drown in the rising waters!
(the icecaps are melting and releasing a compound now known to be Bolonium, which causes bu%^&£it in scientists)
good shooting

One of the things that always comes to my mind when I listen to all this stuff is that the earth is so big, and it has been here so long, and has obviously changed massively over the eons. People are so small, recorded human history is such a short phenomenon, no more than 8,000 years - I can't help thinking a lot of these climate change people put far too much importance in humans and what they can or can't do. In general folks of this type seem to put a vastly exaggerated importance on people.

What Brass says is correct, anyone who puts his head over the parapet to contradict these folks, is likely to get it shot off - or be burned at the stake as some sort of later day heretic.

On the other hand, the Earth is currently massively over populated with humans who are using up the Earth's natural resources at ever increasing rates, especially in Africa and Asia ( Europe and N America seems to have reached a population equilibrium ). Nature tends to find ways to address these issues.

Every time I hear the phrase "global warming"
I want to burn a car tire, and if doing so kills the lawn of some hollywood celeb that's an environmental price I'm willing to pay

The most politically correct thing today is the "global warming" and its doomsday scenarios.
No one opposing this will be tolerated, and those who still try have been put out of business by the people who are convinced about it. These people do not tolerate any facts stating otherwise either.
Meteorologists cannot accurately model the impact of the water vapour in the atmosphere, and are not even close to find a solution to it. water vapour consists of 98% of the global greenhouse effect, and of the CO2 on the planet, humans are said to contribute 1% of the value of CO2, there are many other greenhouse gases (GHGs)too...

And.... there are lots and lots of scientific data that can not find any evidence of a runaway greenhouse scenario... In fact, the entire holocene (last 10 K years) are an anomaly in climatological terms. But, as always, scientific facts does not mean that it has to be given some kind of importance...

What claret dabbler says about the human over consumption of the natural resources, thats the center of the problem though. Humans harvest far to much in a too short time span for the earth to be able to take it in the long run.

Some thoughts, 1000 years ago, when the vikings sailed to america and founded colonies on greenland, and it was warmer than today, where were the cars to pollute the air to raise the temperature to higher than today? Next, around 1600 AD the winters were very cold and a swedish king with his army could walk across the frozen sea from germany to copenhagen in the north and nock on the door of the danish king that battled in sweden. No cars or factories around at that time either.

On the other hand, there CAN be seen a human contribution in the atmospheric mixture. No one argues about that.
Temperature records date back to 1758 if I recall correctly. All these "long" records are city based and heavily biased by secondary heating from the urban environment.
Tree ring records and ice cores date back to the last 200 000 years and gives a good temperature and precipitation comparison with the current temperature data. But, again, it is not politically correct to look into data that does not confirm the meteorological paradigm of warming and global doom...


Sincerely
Daniel

Daniel,

we can imagine now how it felt in the Middle Ages or under communist regimes where all wh questioned the real faith and party line were excluded from debate or worse.

Like you very well say, there MIGHT be a connection between human influence and global warming. However, if these politicians and partial scientists do not admit an open and free debate, we will never find out for sure.

As an aside to this i note that Hilary Benn is going to make a statement indicating that Britain has been subjected to significant warming in the last 30 years. It is important to note that he has cherry picked his time span very carefully indeed. If he'd gone for 60 years then there would have been very little, if any, warming and if he'd gone for 10 years then there would have been cooling. It is like a man sitting in early afternoon telling us that we are doomed because the temperature has been increasing for the last 6 hours!

I believe he is also going to tell us that there is going to be more violent weather and i bet he talks about the past summer which, it was claimed, was the wettest in England and Wales ever. Actually, that was a lie. It was the wettest in England and Wales if you ignored the ones that had been wetter which is what they did. They used the rainfall data set from 1914 to the present day. We have good quality rainfall data reaching back to the mid 1700s. In the context of the full data set 2007 appears to be a wet year but far from the wettest and far from remarkable.

I was also interested to discover that the EU (that is you and me) provide half of the funding received by Friends of the Earth each year. I don't know to what degree they fund Greenpeace and others but will be interested to find out. So, next time you go to pay your tax be sure to remember that you are funding some lentil munching half wit to sit around on the dole and tell you what sort of lightbulbs you are allowed, that fox hunting is a bad thing and that shooting must be banned.

While the effect of man is there [world population has doubled in 30 years] natural forces are there also.Many more scientists are speaking out against 'Global Warming' BS of the Al Gore types ...For those that complain that the UN conferences pollute the atmosphere with aircraft flights ,the UN has proposed a solution - plant trees before you take that flight !!

quote:

Originally posted by mete:
For those that complain that the UN conferences pollute the atmosphere with aircraft flights ,the UN has proposed a solution - plant trees before you take that flight !!

I have another proposal: Cut the number of UN burocrats by 70% and their budgets by half.