Climategate

[IAN 2411]

This evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions.

I know this is a bit picky but the USA never ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, thirty other countries did including Russia....why was that? Have the USA done that now?

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables, the scientists wrote.

I would like to think that the above is correct because if we have an earthquake here and an earthquake somewhere else....then maybe the earth moves on its axis. All theories and data are now thrown to hell.

The climate is changing it has before and it will again, I think most of what I have heard is Government hype. Both you and Thorn have said there are so many people coming up with different theories, and since they started the only thing positive that has come out of it is my Tax has gone up. My annual car test has been made harder, instead of an exhaust pipe costing £100 it will now cost me £400 for the catalectic converter, air Tax has rose and we now have, yes you’ve got it, a pollution tax. People now knock on my door not trying to sell me goods, but asking me to waste my time filling out their forms telling them what my carbon footprint is. They asked me the same questions 5 years ago and damn all has changed except I have less money to spend and those that Tax me have more.

This thread has got so technical that I am baffled at what you two are trying to prove to each other, except that you research a lot more than I do. I don’t need a boffin to state the obvious to me, or the Media, leaving everyone short with more questions than answers. Why for once don’t they come up with answers that the poor fucker on the street [me] can understand?

All the time the rain forests are burning, India, China and Russia are throwing up industrial smoke and they will be for a few years yet as developing industrial nations. Then there are the Volcanoes throwing up smoke debris and gasses; there will always be those shouting green house effect. It just seems that everything that goes wrong in the world today in natural disasters is blamed on our carbon footprint. The earth has been cooling since it was formed and it will be still cooling when all these clever brains are dead. There are natural earth quakes, tornadoes, eruptions and ice ages and now global warming. We now live in an age of great knowledge so a natural global warming has become green house gasses and a problem, don’t just blame the people for causing it, tax them.

Be well IAN 2411

[Thorne]

Ian, you're right, it is complicated. Climate is complicated. The atmosphere is unimaginably large, and there are so many different things which affect it, including the state of the ocean, which has it's own set of complex mechanisms. It's this very complexity which leads to such varying positions. No one, not even scientists, can claim to understand every part of the climate interactions. All they can do is study and model them, and get close approximations.

You are right that the Earth's core is gradually cooling, but the rate of cooling is so slow as to be insignificant over the period since the rise of homo sapiens. The same is true of most natural sources of greenhouse gases, such as volcanoes and earthquakes. These have always been there, and at approximately the same levels, so they can be treated as a constant. The biggest variable currently is mankind. We are releasing millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year, over and above the naturally occurring gases. While there is still a lot of argument over just how much we are affecting the system, it would be foolish to believe that we are not having any effects at all.

As for your taxes, sorry, I have no good advice for you, other than to monitor the government offices responsible for spending those tax dollars and trying to make sure they are doing what they're supposed to be doing. Though in this day and age that kind of thing just might get you arrested.

As an aside, I remember reading somewhere (and it's too long past my bedtime for me to try to find it now) that climate models which have been run tend to match historical climate data from as far back as they can get it right up until the start of the Industrial Age, at which point the models start diverging, predicting consistently lower global temperatures than are being found. Just one more piece of information to consider.