Watched this with considerable interest, since as we debated GW previously, perhaps only three of us who took part (I was a third of those) believed that it was a farce and that we were being fed a load of, politely expressed, misinformation.
This was a programme fronted by some 13-14 highly-regarded and well-placed professors and doctors in the panoply of professions which involved the climate, from biogeography to weather forecasting (very long range and its effects on the entire globe), solar physicists, etc.
At its base core, the programme makers expressed their collective dismay at the way GW is being used as a political tool in one instance, as a neo-Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-development tool in another, and definitely as an enormously bloated, fast-growing area of phoney science, gobbling up now billions of dollars of governments' money to try to prove that the Earth is actually suffering from manmade global warming, and that CO2 is to blame.
The facts as laid out begin with a few very simple facts: CO2 is a natural gas. It is essential to, and found in, all living things. It is NOT a pollutant. It forms a tiny percentage (.054%) of the tiny percentage of gases which are called greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases are a natural and normal function of the troposphere, where they trap the Sun's warmth, not - as some might think - harmful and/or manmade horrors.
Global warming has taken place over millennia. Global cooling has done likewise. The programme reminded us of the hysteria over perceived global cooling, with clips from earnest yet doom-laden BBC films from the early 1970s, after the Earth had been through some thirty years of lowered temperatures. It also reminded us that this period - from 1940 - coincided with the biggest surge in industrialised outputs of CO2 as Japan joined in with Europe, America, and Russia in going full out with car and machine production, and that the 1950s in particular saw a huge uptake in kitchen appliances such as fridges, freezers, etc., and the airways saw a boom in air travel, while on the ground, roads were being built at the rate of knots to accommodate the big surge in family car travel. And yet... this all coincided with a period of global COOLING.
I won't go into all of the techie detail provided, other than that respected international universities and other research facilities have noted that all of the Sun's higher energy outputs - cosmic rays or 'sun spot' activities - have coincided with periods of warming on Earth.
VOLCANIC ACTIVITY (I thank you - I did mention this but was howled down by Brian at the time, who'd seen Al Gore's film) is the highest, natural, emitter of CO2. Next in line comes animal activity, rotting vegetation (autumnal changes), and the oceans. However, no matter how much CO2 they all emit, none of it is a pollutant, and from the results provided by weather balloon monitoring, there is no rise in the level of CO2 found in the greenhouse gases.
More facts: don't worry about polar bears! Prior to the Medieval Warm Period (where Chaucer describes vineyards in the north of England), there was the Holocene Maximum which lasted some 3,000 years when temperatures were much higher than now, and the bears survived these hot millennia just fine.
Ice caps: there is a normal Spring ice break-up and while we now have satellites to show us the natural and normal melting and breaking-up of polar ice caps, they also show us the freezing-up periods, too. These, though, aren't by any means hysterical enough for the media - we are told the ice caps are melting and we're probably doomed if we live near the coast. However, they do this in every warming period of the Earth, without massively flooding the world, and then they eventually slowly get back to a period of cooling and building up again. All completely natural and normal.
To encapsulate the science, rather than the hyberbole, behind global warming:
It's a natural and normal cycle of the Earth, as is global cooling.
The Earth's climate is controlled by clouds.
Clouds are controlled by cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays are controlled by the Sun.
Ergo, Sun activity (higher or lower) impacts the temperatures on the surface of the Earth. When it gets hotter and drier on Earth, it's Sun activity.
What was thrown up by the programme, and against which several of the scientists - now including Africans - was the pernicious notion that industrialised development is bad and should be regressed. Africa is rich in coal and oil, yet because it lacks inward development throughout the continent, the horrific statistics are that some 2 BILLION - ONE THIRD - of the world's people have no electricity, and FOUR MILLION children and women die early from respiratory and carcinogenic diseases related directly to indoor smoke inhalation (caused because they cook on wood fires). INDOOR SMOKE is the worst polluter. I did make a point in our discussion about millions of wood fires burning throughout Africa, India, and many other poor places in the world, but again this didn't fit with the anti-capitalist view of industrialised nations. I'm glad to see I may have missed a Uni education but not just commonsense on this subject.
So, millions of people don't enjoy clean electrical power for lighting, cooking, keeping food safe, heating in cold weather, fans or a.c. in very hot weather, and are being lectured to by the so-called 'environmentalists' that they should try solar power or wind energy instead. No, don't dig up your coal, don't develop your oilfields, they shriek, banging their little drums and waving their placards in Trafalgar Square. No, poor people, go ahead and die in your millions because of dirt and disease and squalor, while we play plaintive songs on our iPods for you. Well, the programme didn't put it quite like that - but I have.
One scientist said the romanticisation of peasant life was killing the African dream of development and entering the competitive, if not just the cleaner, healthier, world. The co-founder of Greenpeace stated this was in fact an anti-human stance - that it was saying it was okay for them to go blind, be sick, die young, rather than become fully industrialised in case they caused further (fictitious) global warming. To me, it's an interesting slant on the argument and I feel strongly it sounds a curious mix of anti-capitalist rant and a form of do-goodery which is more like neo-imperialism.
As one African said, the rich countries can afford to experiment with wind and solar power. How can Africans become industrialised - and run hospitals and operating theatres - on a solar panel? He demonstrated a local clinic where solar panels had been fitted. It could run a tiny fridge, to keep vaccines cool, OR the electric light! Pretty much on a par with the farcical home wind turbines being fitted here. Electricity in Africa would be far cheaper than expensive wind/solar energy, but so-called 'Greens' are worried sick that millions more homes running tvs, fridges, freezers, lights, will blight the world even more. And that's the really disgusting lie - it is not being blighted at all. CO2 is not damaging it, and it's not a polluting, malign influence. The lies and dissemblance are.
Of course we should all seek to see all of the world's vehicles not pouring out leaded petrol, of course we should all try to recycle as much of everything that we can, not litter, not befoul the seas, not do a lot of things which are wasteful and trashy and unnecessary. But one thing we can do right now is stop believing the pernicious lie about us causing global warming. Come the next Ice Age - maybe only a few decades away - you'll believe it.
This was a programme fronted by some 13-14 highly-regarded and well-placed professors and doctors in the panoply of professions which involved the climate, from biogeography to weather forecasting (very long range and its effects on the entire globe), solar physicists, etc.
At its base core, the programme makers expressed their collective dismay at the way GW is being used as a political tool in one instance, as a neo-Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-development tool in another, and definitely as an enormously bloated, fast-growing area of phoney science, gobbling up now billions of dollars of governments' money to try to prove that the Earth is actually suffering from manmade global warming, and that CO2 is to blame.
The facts as laid out begin with a few very simple facts: CO2 is a natural gas. It is essential to, and found in, all living things. It is NOT a pollutant. It forms a tiny percentage (.054%) of the tiny percentage of gases which are called greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases are a natural and normal function of the troposphere, where they trap the Sun's warmth, not - as some might think - harmful and/or manmade horrors.
Global warming has taken place over millennia. Global cooling has done likewise. The programme reminded us of the hysteria over perceived global cooling, with clips from earnest yet doom-laden BBC films from the early 1970s, after the Earth had been through some thirty years of lowered temperatures. It also reminded us that this period - from 1940 - coincided with the biggest surge in industrialised outputs of CO2 as Japan joined in with Europe, America, and Russia in going full out with car and machine production, and that the 1950s in particular saw a huge uptake in kitchen appliances such as fridges, freezers, etc., and the airways saw a boom in air travel, while on the ground, roads were being built at the rate of knots to accommodate the big surge in family car travel. And yet... this all coincided with a period of global COOLING.
I won't go into all of the techie detail provided, other than that respected international universities and other research facilities have noted that all of the Sun's higher energy outputs - cosmic rays or 'sun spot' activities - have coincided with periods of warming on Earth.
VOLCANIC ACTIVITY (I thank you - I did mention this but was howled down by Brian at the time, who'd seen Al Gore's film) is the highest, natural, emitter of CO2. Next in line comes animal activity, rotting vegetation (autumnal changes), and the oceans. However, no matter how much CO2 they all emit, none of it is a pollutant, and from the results provided by weather balloon monitoring, there is no rise in the level of CO2 found in the greenhouse gases.
More facts: don't worry about polar bears! Prior to the Medieval Warm Period (where Chaucer describes vineyards in the north of England), there was the Holocene Maximum which lasted some 3,000 years when temperatures were much higher than now, and the bears survived these hot millennia just fine.
Ice caps: there is a normal Spring ice break-up and while we now have satellites to show us the natural and normal melting and breaking-up of polar ice caps, they also show us the freezing-up periods, too. These, though, aren't by any means hysterical enough for the media - we are told the ice caps are melting and we're probably doomed if we live near the coast. However, they do this in every warming period of the Earth, without massively flooding the world, and then they eventually slowly get back to a period of cooling and building up again. All completely natural and normal.
To encapsulate the science, rather than the hyberbole, behind global warming:
It's a natural and normal cycle of the Earth, as is global cooling.
The Earth's climate is controlled by clouds.
Clouds are controlled by cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays are controlled by the Sun.
Ergo, Sun activity (higher or lower) impacts the temperatures on the surface of the Earth. When it gets hotter and drier on Earth, it's Sun activity.
What was thrown up by the programme, and against which several of the scientists - now including Africans - was the pernicious notion that industrialised development is bad and should be regressed. Africa is rich in coal and oil, yet because it lacks inward development throughout the continent, the horrific statistics are that some 2 BILLION - ONE THIRD - of the world's people have no electricity, and FOUR MILLION children and women die early from respiratory and carcinogenic diseases related directly to indoor smoke inhalation (caused because they cook on wood fires). INDOOR SMOKE is the worst polluter. I did make a point in our discussion about millions of wood fires burning throughout Africa, India, and many other poor places in the world, but again this didn't fit with the anti-capitalist view of industrialised nations. I'm glad to see I may have missed a Uni education but not just commonsense on this subject.
So, millions of people don't enjoy clean electrical power for lighting, cooking, keeping food safe, heating in cold weather, fans or a.c. in very hot weather, and are being lectured to by the so-called 'environmentalists' that they should try solar power or wind energy instead. No, don't dig up your coal, don't develop your oilfields, they shriek, banging their little drums and waving their placards in Trafalgar Square. No, poor people, go ahead and die in your millions because of dirt and disease and squalor, while we play plaintive songs on our iPods for you. Well, the programme didn't put it quite like that - but I have.
One scientist said the romanticisation of peasant life was killing the African dream of development and entering the competitive, if not just the cleaner, healthier, world. The co-founder of Greenpeace stated this was in fact an anti-human stance - that it was saying it was okay for them to go blind, be sick, die young, rather than become fully industrialised in case they caused further (fictitious) global warming. To me, it's an interesting slant on the argument and I feel strongly it sounds a curious mix of anti-capitalist rant and a form of do-goodery which is more like neo-imperialism.
As one African said, the rich countries can afford to experiment with wind and solar power. How can Africans become industrialised - and run hospitals and operating theatres - on a solar panel? He demonstrated a local clinic where solar panels had been fitted. It could run a tiny fridge, to keep vaccines cool, OR the electric light! Pretty much on a par with the farcical home wind turbines being fitted here. Electricity in Africa would be far cheaper than expensive wind/solar energy, but so-called 'Greens' are worried sick that millions more homes running tvs, fridges, freezers, lights, will blight the world even more. And that's the really disgusting lie - it is not being blighted at all. CO2 is not damaging it, and it's not a polluting, malign influence. The lies and dissemblance are.
Of course we should all seek to see all of the world's vehicles not pouring out leaded petrol, of course we should all try to recycle as much of everything that we can, not litter, not befoul the seas, not do a lot of things which are wasteful and trashy and unnecessary. But one thing we can do right now is stop believing the pernicious lie about us causing global warming. Come the next Ice Age - maybe only a few decades away - you'll believe it.
What I found scary, too, was how these scientists said that if you wanted to get funding quickly - and big time - for any research, all you had to do was to tag 'into global warming' in the proposal and it went through double-time! There were some incredible figures being bandied about, too. Research funds had gone from tens of millions into billions now, and everyone was supposed to come up with conclusions which supported the theory that human activity was the sole reason for global warming. As you say, Betsmate, thousands of new jobs would be threatened if it were accepted (it's already proven) that GW was just a natural and normal occurrence. One person (the ex-editor of the New Statesman) said his council now had a 'Global Warming Community Officer' ffs!
