Global Warming Mad

[suffolkw]

Does anyone agree with me that the country has gone global warming mad. And that anything that happens (i.e freak weather fornomenoms) are always put down to global warming. What about the great flood we had where canvey island was drowned, they never said that was global warming but they would now.

I think we have gone completely bonkers

And personally i think we are still coming out of the ice age.

James!



Visit The place for the weather and lightning data for Suffolk in the UK!

[Earth Hart]

Originally Posted by suffolkw

Does anyone agree with me that the country has gone global warming mad. And that anything that happens (i.e freak weather fornomenoms) are always put down to global warming. What about the great flood we had where canvey island was drowned, they never said that was global warming but they would now.

I think we have gone completely bonkers

And personally i think we are still coming out of the ice age.

James!

We are in what is called an inter-glacial period but because of what we are chucking out into the atmosphere we are speeding up the process of warming.

The thing to remember James, is that in the '50s no one knew about GW & CC. It wasn't until the early '70s that people started asking questions about such things as CO2 emissions, CFCs & the like.

As for being GW mad, I don't know. It depends on whether we act on what we know about the problem. If we don't act, then YES, WE ARE MAD.

[Owl-Light]

Hi James

In answer to your question I offer a little yes and a great big NO!

Like anything the press can get their teeth into the shock/hoprror aspects are a great seller with the masses. A rational determined response is the the way to go, not the sensationalist driven responses that derive from the mass media and which are all forgotten when the press reports the next MP's indescretion.

Global warming is no joke and its getting to a stage where the process is slipping beyond our ability to halt or reverse it. The action we're taking in the West is too little and too slow, even though it is regularly in the news these days. Worse is the impact of up and coming countries like China. As they continue to develop I dread to think of the environmental concequences, your children will have to deal with.

We're in trouble mate not two ways about that. As EH says doing nothing about it is the real madness.

[matt_xyz]

you have to remove the media hype, but global warming is a very worrying problem. You can never claim an individual event is a result of warming but have to look at long term trends. At the long term trends all suggest one thing....

Matt

[Paul mabbott]

I think the original question was about the tendency of the press and 'people on the street' to put *every* weather event down to 'global warming'. There are no events that happen now that didn't happen 100 or 500 years ago, so they are *not* due to climate change. What *is* related to climate change is the increased frequency of storms, droughts &c. and their changed distribution.
I don't mind everything being attributed to climate change since it means that most people will take no notice of climate-change deniers ..... for the wrong reasons but what the heck!

[speckled wood]

The problem with global warming is that even if it is a "don't know" as long as it remains a "don't know" we cannot and should not be taking the chance. In a perfect world without CO2 emmissions and effects there is still the factor that we are using (and worse still wasting) fossil fuels like there is no tommorrow when they are a finite resource. It we all used this finate resource responsibly, drove sensible cars, walked or used pushbikes for short most journeys. were more frugal with heating, used power saving lighting ect then the problem would be further away into the future and we would have more time to resolve potential problems.

Many real problems are here already, landfills sites filled with pointless waste, people still refusing to recycle (often for reasons little more than percieved "civil rights issues"), swathes of countryside destroyed to provide bypasses that are often out of scale (a look at the dual carriageway section of the A500 in South Cheshire will show you a road for which a single carraige way would have been more than adequate).

The danger with the global warming "panic" is that of "crying wolf", the danger might be real but become buried under the hype, and when the real danger is found ignored because of so called "scare-mongering.

[Paul mabbott]

I agree. On one point, landfill is not a climate problem directly *except* that it is filled with things that should not have been manufactured in the first place! However, people see landfill as a problem per se therefore if they object to landfill ultimately we will have to stop manufacturing stuff **before** it becomes waste ...
Cheers, Paul

Originally Posted by speckled wood

The problem with global warming is that even if it is a "don't know" as long as it remains a "don't know" we cannot and should not be taking the chance. In a perfect world without CO2 emmissions and effects there is still the factor that we are using (and worse still wasting) fossil fuels like there is no tommorrow when they are a finite resource. It we all used this finate resource responsibly, drove sensible cars, walked or used pushbikes for short most journeys. were more frugal with heating, used power saving lighting ect then the problem would be further away into the future and we would have more time to resolve potential problems.

Many real problems are here already, landfills sites filled with pointless waste, people still refusing to recycle (often for reasons little more than percieved "civil rights issues"), swathes of countryside destroyed to provide bypasses that are often out of scale (a look at the dual carriageway section of the A500 in South Cheshire will show you a road for which a single carraige way would have been more than adequate).

The danger with the global warming "panic" is that of "crying wolf", the danger might be real but become buried under the hype, and when the real danger is found ignored because of so called "scare-mongering.

[Owl-Light]

The causes of anything in life can rarely be pinned down to just one thing in isolation. Everything is part of a long chain of events and influences that combine in various proportions to create an event in any moment in time. That too leads on to something else. There is always a knock on effect if you like.

The human species has had a significant influence on climate change since the early days of deforestation of the Wildwood, but until now the planet has been able to rebalance itself. The Gaia hypothesis is an interesting take on the process. There are so very many of us now and we're consuming everything at such speed and in such quantities that natural balancing systems can no longe keep up. Unless... the cause of the distruction itself is dealt with and that means the human species doesn't it?

[Earth Hart]

Originally Posted by Sheryl LaBouchardiere

The causes of anything in life can rarely be pinned down to just one thing in isolation. Everything is part of a long chain of events and influences that combine in various proportions to create an event in any moment in time. That too leads on to something else. There is always a knock on effect if you like.

The human species has had a significant influence on climate change since the early days of deforestation of the Wildwood, but until now the planet has been able to rebalance itself. The Gaia hypothesis is an interesting take on the process. There are so very many of us now and we're consuming everything at such speed and in such quantities that natural balancing systems can no longe keep up. Unless... the cause of the distruction itself is dealt with and that means the human species doesn't it?

Glad you've come across Jim Lovelock, you should read his new book "The Revenge of Gaia". It puts things into perscective. Then again, you should read his earier works to bring you up to speed.

[speckled wood]

The moral is that the Earth can give us an awful lot, but we are expecting and taking too much.