I've stayed out of this thread up till now for fear of what I might find, but at last I couldn't resist. It was as bad as I feared... man is not a rational animal but a rationalising animal.

I'm going to post once, then I'm getting out of here and staying out, or I'll go mad.

Some simple facts (I'd call them "inconvenient truths," but the flames would be beyond the moderators' control.)

Forty years ago when I was an "ecologist" (as they called environmentalists back then), the theory of global warming was already worked out and the predictions of what would happen had been made. Those predictions have come true, for forty years now. Most scientists would call that proof.

It's not about complicated computer models: the theory is simple arithmetic. The complicated models are to work out what the simple arithmetic for the planet means in detail, country by country and year by year. In the same way that doctors can do a quick X-ray to tell you you've got cancer, then need more tests to tell you exactly when and how you'll get sick and what treatment is best: but if you think all those tests mean they're not sure about the cancer, you're fooling yourself.

The data is not hidden or suppressed or secret. Weather stations all over the world publish their results and have done for a century or more, and the results are collected in many places, and anyone who cares can collate the results and do the math. Nobody is hiding it or faking it. Unless you want to believe that all the meteorologists all over the world, not to mention all the geographers and oceanographers and climatologists and ecologists and NASA, are united in a vast conspiracy to lead us into the hands of communism... in which case, just keep your tinfoil hat on and wait for the UFOs to save us.

And finally (sigh) no, there is no possibility, zero, zilch, nada, that efforts to cut CO2 emissions might lower it to the point where plants grow less. Plants did just fine before humans started burning fossil fuels, and they will do just fine when we finally give up doing it, because humans and animals will still go on breathing. Well, most of them. There is a real possibility that a lot of humans will stop breathing if we screw up the climate badly enough, but that won't bother the plants.

Now I'm off, before the replies make me give up discussion altogether, to get back to my project to move to a self-sufficient farm on high ground in Sweden. Because if this, Gaia forgive us, is an intelligent group talking, then it's painfully clear that nothing will be done till the sea is lapping over the streets of New York, by which time it will be far, far too late.