Worth having a listen to what Susan Hill has to say about it, too.

You only need to look at the recent data on global temperatures (as measured by anyone but GISS), sea level and anectodal evidence from places like Anchorage to see that the AGW hypothesis is totally flawed.

The Thames used to freeze over in past centuries. In mediavel times, England grew grapes and was very warm - the golden age!

I'm sure all our carbon emmissions are not good,but I'm not so sure that we're all about to die because of it - I think there's a lot of money to be made from frightening people, and a lot of potential 'control' to be had both politically and from the media.

The loss of fuel availability is far more worrying to me. The usage of emerging industrial countries is only going to become more immense and I'm very very frightened about the possibility of future wars over oil - the fact that US may go bombing Iran over this is, frankly, far more real and scary.

If you are getting freaked out it is because someone is trying to panic you into doing something that you would not do if you had a chance to think it over, which in itself is a good reason to discount those sources. It has not gotten warmer for the last decade or so, as far as the reliable (sattelite based) temperature measuremets go. The onlym one who says it's getting warmer is Hansen and GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Science) who, strangely, do not use sattelites, but ground based stations that are deeply flawed. Check out www.wattsupwith.com that and www.climateaudit.org for common sense and good data.

No real climate change to worry about in the first place.

I think the root of your panic is that you are beginning to figure that out.

A few off the cuff thoughts:

1. There is in fact little doubt that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas. The question is, though, how much effect does it have in ppm quantities when mixed into a complex climate system. In fact, the catastrophic outcome of climate models does not result from the assumptions of CO2 being a greenhouse gas, but from a second, unrelated theory that the earth's climate is dominated by significant positive feedback. Without this positive feedback, none of the models produce catastrophic forecasts. And there is no good scientific evidence for such large positive feedbacks, and certainly not that there is any sort of tipping point in climate. Long-term stable natural systems are simple not dominated by positive feedbacks and tipping points.

2. The world has demonstrably not warmed over the last 10 years, so how can global warming be accelerating (source: Hadley, UAH, RSS)

3. When the world warmed in the 80's and 90's, it was during the top of the PDO and solar cycles. Some of the warming may be from CO2, but much from natural sources.

4. Historic climate reconstructions are simply indefensibly awful science and statistics. People who try to defend, for example, Mann's work are embarrassing themselves. All evidence is that the last 1000 years has seen a lot of variability in temperatures, and the inflection in the hockey stick curve occurs right at a data source splice (between trees and thermometers) which would make most real (ie non-climate) scientists suspicious.

5. If we extrapolate past warming and match it to CO2 growth, and then extrapolate that historic experience forward, we get a degree or less of warming over the next century, hardly catastrophic.

6. Al Gore now has several billion dollars of investments he controls tied to the assumption that the government will take aggressive action on CO2. Billions will be lost by he and his investors if the government does not pursue such a program. Remember that when skeptics get accused of being funded with $10,000 grants from Exxon.

Rob, you may be interested in something called transition towns which appears to be a group of people trying to do something about the very issues you've raised here. I only discovered them yesterday (my town has a local branch) so can't say good or bad about them as I'm still looking into it myself. They have a website www.transitiontowns.org
Hope that's useful!

Yes, the earth is warming up and sea levels are rising - it has been since the end of the last Ice Age, bar a few blips caused by volcanic activity.

Why is is warming up?
Well there's the rub.
Is it man made?
Actually, man made pollution has kept the earth a few degrees cooler than would be expected by now, due to particulates (eg, aircraft contrails) in the atmosphere screening the solar radiation - it's called global dimming.

Where should the world's resources be targetted?
On Global Warming Measures?
Or, on anti-pollution measures and
conservation of the earth's scarce resources?
Personally I'd go with the latter.

Untold destruction is being caused to tropical rainforests which are being cleared to plant palm oil plants so the oil can be sold on the hyper-inflated bioenergy markets. Now where's the sense in that?

There's several issues here.

1. Is man responsible for most of the warming?

2. Is adaption or mitigation the solution?

3. Is the media providing fair coverage?

Others have commented on (1) already so I'll leave that to one side.

We know both mitigation and adaption will have costs for us. The former in terms of foregoing wealth creation. The question is which solution is better? Unfortunately this part of the debate seems to have died the death. Even Bjorn Lomberg who believes in global warming is called a denialist because he wants us to use our wealth to adapt and solve other problems.

The other issue is media coverage. There is little doubt that vast majority of media outlets buy into AGW to a greater or lesser extent. They are quite willing to run stories and comment pieces criticising the doubters or claiming oil company funding. That may be deserved. However, when the alarmists speak, nearly everything is accepted without question. Thus Katrina is caused by AGW has become received wisdom despite the fact that the science doesn't support such a position. The Northwest Passage has never been navigated in history except the last X odd times. Even blatantly nonsense stories such as blaming the death of the Loch Ness monster on AGW are run without shame.

The question you should ask yourself regarding the media is this. The IPCC are described as representing the consensus science. They predict a century sea level rise of 18 to 59 cm. Several AGW believers claim the sea will rise 20ft or more. Do the media either dismiss 20ft plus rise predictions or perhaps caveat them to say under what condition or time frame such a rise will occur - ie point out the lack of imminence. If not, then you have to ask why those who deny the "consensus view" on one side are privileged whilst those on the other are eviscerated.

I half-agree with Sarah. The climate of the Earth has changed by itself a number of times in the last 2000 years, and humans have survived. I have doubts that we can so drastically affect the planet so as to make it uninhabitable in less than a decade.

On the other hand, bees are dying off, and there's evidence that we already have affected the atmosphere some. I'm on the fence. I just wish we could stop causing damage in obvious ways, like killing coral reefs and lumbering the rainforest.

I'm a physicist, and I've been looking at the climate change science for a few years.

First, you have to put the change in context. Temperatures vary about 100C from equator to poles, more than 20C summer to winter, 10C day to night, and locally up to 10C random variation depending on what the current weather is. You have to average it over continent-sized areas to even detect it. Anything less than 2C is lost in the noise, and unless you live in the African deserts, there are places people live several degrees warmer than where you live now. People often go there on holiday, because it's so nice.

The basic calculation of the effect of CO2, on its own and all other things held equal, is relatively simple. It gives about 1.1C temperature rise every time CO2 levels double. Since we've raised CO2 about 40% over the last century, we'd expect about half that. And if we raise it another 40% over the next century, we'd get another half a degree. Compared to natural background noise, this is too small to measure.

However, other things don't stay equal. There are things called feedbacks, which can amplify or damp down the effect. This is where the actual argument with the sceptics is. The most important of these are to do with water, in the form of humidity and clouds. Water vapour (humidity) is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, and is responsible for the bulk of the greenhouse effect. One of the claimed feedback effects is that CO2-driven warming will evaporate more water, boosting the water-based warming. At the same time, this moistening of the atmosphere will increase the rate at which heat rises by convection, cooling the surface. (This is the same mechanism by which sweat cools you.) And it also will affect the way clouds form, which have a major effect but which nobody understands yet. There are a whole bunch of others, but I'll ignore them to keep this short.

We cannot, at present, measure these feedbacks accurately. Some of the estimates we have are contradicted by observation. For example, the transport of heat by evaporation should give a comparative hot-spot in the upper atmosphere in the tropics - but it isn't there. The oceans ought to be warming and absorbing a lot of the heat, but the latest measurements say they're cooling. A lot of other stuff seems to work out fine, but not all of it quite fits.

So some people say these feedbacks ought to treble the effect of CO2, and others say those feedbacks aren't observed, and that observations say the feedbacks are much smaller. The truth is, we know the theory's wrong but we're not sure where or how badly or if it's important, and the observations have up to now been too uncertain to tell us. We simply don't know.

And there are a bunch of other effects we're only just starting to investigate. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation, the Arctic Oscillation, and an intriguing but as yet unproven solar cycle correlation.

In any case, even if we get more warming, the more alarmist predictions of consequences aren't backed up by science. Just to take one example, the sea level rise projected by the IPCC for the next century is about a foot, two at most. That's about the same as last century. All the rest is media and politicians taking things out of context to construct a scare.

Sorry that's a bit long, but you did ask.

I think the sunspots theories are very interesting.

Piers Corbyn has some interesting things to say on this matter too - worth googling.

Recent research indicates that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. However, human activity has a negligable affect on methane levels in the atmosphere - the majority originates from natural sources, ie, wetlands.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/02/060210092144.htm
If the permafrost in the Northern latitudes (Russia, Canada, etc) melts it will result in a substantial rise in methane and there's nothing humans can do about it.

"In mediavel[sic]times, England grew grapes and was very warm - the golden age!" So did Nova Scotia - which is why the Vikings called the place Vinland. Not sure what this comment is saying. Further:
"According to English Wine Producers, the marketing agency for the English wine industry, a quarter of the current acreage of vineyards in England has been planted in the past two years.(2005-2007) Nyetimber, one of the top producers in the country, has announced a planned increase in production from 70,000 to 500,000 bottles within the next six years. So whereas ‘a career in the English wine industry’ might have sounded like a joke just a few years ago, now it might just prove to be a pretty smart move." Herriot-Watt University blurb for viniculture degree.

Sorry, this bit got left off the the last post:
"One factor that has enabled this rapid shift is, of course, climate change. While many of its wider impacts are predicted to be deeply unwelcome, at Plumpton College it means that the winery can now produce “a really good red from Pinot Noir almost every year”."

There is ONE THING no seems to have noticed.

Reposted from my blog:

The government is lying to you (paranoid eyes zip left and right). If they told you the truth, two things would happen:

1) You would stop caring about the environment (which is screaming for a clean up)
2) Mass panic in the streets — theft, murder, chaos, madness.

The truth is a fickle thing and this is what I think is happening.

This post may anger a lot of people, especially the hardcore green peace folk out there, but I don’t care. This is the information age and yet not all the information is being given. I guess going green is good for big business and a nice card for the government to play during an election, but is it the answer to why the North Pole and the South Pole are moving?

Some scientists think that what is happening to the world is a natural thing and occurs every few thousand years (like 250,000). The way they get this information / ideas, is unknown — especially to me, until recently. I have been doing a little digging and a lot of learning (this started as research for a short story — now I have a throbbing headache). Like all great discoveries this was made by accident.

I’m not saying this is the answer, but it is very, very possible.

Chapter 24 of the book Doomsday by Nigel Cawthorne: Reversal of Earth’s Magnetic Field.

This is documented and is a scientific fact. Mapping the ocean floor has shown that the North Pole and South Pole flip over (switch) once every 250,000 years, but, apparently, we are 750,000 years for a flip and all the signs point to this in action. Everything slows down at first and then stops before the flip happens. Many species will become extinct. Maybe even us.

Some scientists speculate that the flip will only take a couple of weeks to happen, once it stopped. However, records of past reversals, locked in iron minerals in ancient lava beds, show some reversals have taken thousands of years. In a worse case scenario, the Earth could be without a magnetic field for a millennia.

Can you imagine how f**ked the Earth and Man and all other mammals will be. Only the cockroach will survive. The magnetic field protects us from cosmic rays, solar winds and more. Navigation is gone, compasses will point the wrong way (or just turn in circles until the flip). The cosmic rays will strike the Earth and make it inhospitable (hello new Mars) to all.

Unlike the movie The Core, a nuclear bomb would not help at all. In fact, the temperature down there would melt the bomb in a mili-second. Good on Hollywood for having an answer though.

The North Pole will become the South Pole.

The South Pole will become the North Pole.

Flip. Switch. Species die.

This is why I don’t believe in global warming. I do feel a drop in carbon emissions can only be a good thing. We need to clean up this planet. We’ve messed it up enough. Time for a spring clean.

Only today in the newspaper they claimed by the end of the century the cities will be 2 degrees warmer. All signs point to the flip in action.

Freaky possibilities.

Lee, you can stop worrying. There have not been mass extinctions every time the polar fields have switched - and as you say On Average this happens every quarter of a million years - so that's A LOT of switching. Mass extinctions are pretty rare and are usually the result of a massive meterorite impact and/or massive volcanic activity, and that happens once every hundreds of millions of years - so, probably not in our lifetime.

But, I heartily agree that the planet needs cleaning up and we need to conserve our planet's resources - I was taught that in school back in the 60's! As I said in another post, nothing happens quickly - unless you have a world war, of course, or the oil becomes too expensive making alternative energy sources economical to exploit - don't forget the UK still has it's coal reserves.