Happy now?
 

RogerM began it with, "...none of this mamby, pamby cool 3oC-35C summers." Walkabout followed with,"....I'm all for it." Hope you're still happy and smug guys. Linzi.

Scientifically we are still in an ice age RIGHT NOW! It is defined by ice sheets at the poles (tick) and alpline glaciers (tick). We are in the fact in the middle of a warm period of an ice age.

BTW this neither proves nor disproves global warming, but it is a shame to see such bad science spoken on such a debate.

A good book for the layman that touches on this and much more is Bill Brysons a A Breif History of Nearly Everything. From my science interest and teaching I think all he says is correct, but I'm sure someone will argue different.

I'll await incoming flack ......

Scientific opinion on climate change - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

QUOTE:
Although there have been some individual scientists who have made statements opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming, with the release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 2007, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate changes.[65]

Bit off topic here Heat Waves, fires and Global Warming are all somehow connected.

My opinion.
 

Global Warming.
Do I think its happening?
Yes.
Has it happened before?
Yes.
What is different this time?
We are making it happen this time, or at least making it happen faster. A natural cycle such as this does not establish itself in 50- 70 years, and yet that is the time scale things have started to change: about the time its taken air travel, cars, industry etc to reach the level their at today, no?

How did this happen? Artificially boosting CO2 levels in Earth's athmosphere. Tens, if not hundreds of millions of years ago, continents were not where they are and parts that are now desert, sea, plain, or city were once forest, the same way that some mountain peaks were once seabeds.
These forests died out, and their combined organic matter was buried overtime, compressed, heated and matured into oil, coal and natural gas. That is billions of tons of organic matter.
The complete combustion of organic matter gives us, amongst other compounds, predominantly water and CO2. The combustions of these fossil fuels releases the carbon from a bygone era, that was completely locked out of our ecosystem by a couple of miles of rock, into our athmosphere.
So you now have CO2 from then being added to the CO2 from now.

Yes, cows fart and they put some CO2 out, but they are only putting out what they consumed from plants existing now: the carbon of now, rather than of then, hence cows are relatively carbon neutral. Volcanoes throw out all sorts, but lava is not made of organic matter: there you are looking at complex inorganic compounds: so not as many greenhouse gases as you think.

So all this means is that the nature around us that might have time to adapt if things occured at their normal pace does not have time now that things have accelerated.
Reason enough for us to change our ways, isn't it?

But let's say that is all wrong:
Why bother changing? Lets see... The same fuels that are mentioned above, particularly the first, are the lifeblood of every economy in the world, particularly the western ones. Those fuels are running out and we have not rationed ourselves in the slightest. So now if we carry on the way we are, without trying to wean our selves off oil and onto a renewable energy source we are basically going to catapult ouselves back to the middle ages, but not before having a few dozen wars over Antartica, the Arctic etc etc. What a bright future our kids are going to have, eh?
Reason enough for us to change our ways, isn't it?

No? Ok, how about the simple case of what is right and wrong?
Most of us on here have either travelled or want to travel or both. We will have collectively seen some amazing places, both man-made and natural. I think that should make us keenly aware of what is at stake from human activity. Which species are at risk because we want a mahogany dining table, which ecosytems are under the chainsaw so that we can grow more biodiesel crops instead of just getting a smaller CC car and which fish stocks are on the brink of non-replenishable collapse etc. Not to mention that the rainforests are the just about the only system in exixstence with the ability to fight CO2 levels by converting the CO2 to sugars through photosynthesis, but instead its chopperty-chop all the way to the bank.
Reason enough for us to change our ways, isn't it?

I'm an only child, and I don't know if I plan to have kids, so you could say that I don't give a rat's @rse about Global Warming or economic collapse through apathy: I'll be long gone, but I have seen a tiny bit of a planet that has taken my breath away and I certainly want to try and leave it in a slightly better state than I found it. If the first two scenarios are not enough to make a few changes to one's life I hope the last might be...

The changes needed to make a difference to any or all the above scenarios are remarkably similar, funnily enough...

My 2p, or judging by the word count, my £2.38...

Thank god global warming is over!!!
 

Patrick:
Just to make it clear,our country firefighters,except for adminastrator staff are volunteers(no pay).But we still have had one volunteer member that I know of who has been charged with arson,stated he liked the excitement of fires.
Ben

Burn him at the stake? :innocent:

But let's say that is all wrong:

Excellent post! :thumbup1:

Bushfires in Australia have nothing to do with climate change, but an awful lot to do with the lack of small man made bush fires every year. We just dont learn, in the aftermath of the 1939 bushfires there were years of "10%" controlled burning to reduce fuel at ground level. Then in the 1970s it all became too expensive and controlled burning ended and we had to suffer the 1984/5 fires so that a new generation could learn. The controlled burning started up for a few years then by the mid 90s the Greenies had got State and local Government laws in place to stop cool burning - who wants to look at black sooty trees for 6 months when green ones are just as good. Hence the 2009 wild fires - so we'll now go back to controlled burns for about 10 years, forget about these fires, and have another devastating wildfire in 2030. Its almost a natural 40 year cycle now.

Australian Aboriginals burnt small pockets of the land for 50,000 years as a method of hunting - its part of the ecology if it goes on that long. Cook's journals report fires on the Australian coast. Cool burning was a method of germinating seeds and improving hunting for wildlife, problem now is that there are so few man made fires and so much ground fuel that the wildfires are horrendously hot and completely incinerate everything and do exactly the opposite of what the Greenies want by killing everything in the path of the fires.

Post 1939 the small townships up in the forests around Marysville all had "dugouts" to protect the popualtion from wildfire - the Royal Commission into the fires advised that dugouts be built for all bushfire prone communities. Taking the old logging road upto to Matlock you can still get into some of them - one I used to visit has had road building gravel tipped over it!! Just a ditch with logs and earth over the top - really high tech (sic), would take a day to build now with modern machinery. Not one community had a dugout to protect their people in these recent fires. People who had built their own dugouts survived whilst neighbours perished.

Australians are used to fighting fires (every year) but this years were different because of a number of reasons such as high temperatures, strong winds which kept changing, multiple arsonists, build up of fuel, illegal to clear trees on your own property, these amongst others.

A couple of stories I read today, mostly in regards to the build up of fuel:

Angry survivors blame council 'green' policy | theage.com.au

Fined for illegal clearing, family now feel vindicated | theage.com.au

Also in response to Warthog I don't think there is a shortage of oil otherwise the price per barrel wouldn't have dropped with the financial crisis and certainly many scientists are working on renewable energies, I think research is underfunded but constructing useless structures such as wind farms is an incredible waste of resources and thats precisely what seems to happen when there are deadlines put on things.

In Aus the govt. wants to install insulation batts in everyones roof, when the minister for climate change was asked if it would use more energy to create them than they would save she was left stumped for an answer. This sort of thing seems awfully common at the moment, a whole lot of duck and weaving from politicians whom once elected seem to care very little and only come up with silly ideas that make them look like they're doing something.

Not running out? Why is Russia now the number one producer , rather than the Saudi´s (but producing less than Saudi did at its peak?)? Because the Saudi wells are drying up and with the Western world is not curbing its consumption one jot, as well as the Indian and Chinese economies picking up steam: how long do you think its going to last?

Oil prices fluctuate week by week, month by month dues to economic and political influences, ie OPEC getting the most they can per barrel at any given time (got to keep people on the habit...). They do this, also by setting production embargoes. You´ll more of those as the next successful wells dig get harder and harder to find. Fact is that it takes more drilling attempts to find new fields and they are a lot smaller than the were 30 years ago. Its running out alright.

As for windfarms and the like: I´m all for it. Its a new area of development so its bound to take time to get efficiency higher and higher: compare the petrol engine of the 1930´s with today: that improvement in output doesn´t happen over night. Meanwhile why aren´t solar panels a compulsory part of any new-builds or major renovation when applying for planning permission, any of a number of other easily obtained domestic improvements?

Bottom-line is oil price will fluctuate to meet market demands and renewable energy will stay on the back burner until we, the end-users, make it clear we want change: so far we just tank up as usual, buy 2.5 litre cars and bigger even though urban cars travel about the same average speed as a bicycle. You can´t wait for the governments to make the changes for you...

Almost all scientist say there is no thing as GLOBAL WARMING
 

I hoped that title may get your attention.
but it is true...

I am not going to get into the debate about if you believe it or not. (I am sick of arguing about it, and dont care if you do or dont.) The bottom line is that "Global warming" is a misnomer and a something the lay press can not get out of using. This does not help acceptance and debates like this run wild based a missunderstanding.

We (well most of us scientist , and yes i am one of them) agree that what we are looking at is CLIMATE CHANGE!



Yes the planet' s average temperatures are increasing, but it is not a global wide increase (hence the misnomer), some places are cooling (dramatically).

It is, however, all bad, it may or may not be exacerbated by the natural cycle of climate change but it is a fact the the oscillations in temperture variation (both hotter and colder) are greater then ever before (that we can tell from fossil records). This IS having an effect on weather patterns and ocean currents.



Beleive in it or not I dont care.. ..just PLEASE used the correct term, you will note that many aruments are nule and void when you use the correct term of CLIMATE CHANGE (and know what it actually means)!...



I am sorry if some one has already noted this.. I could not bring myself to read all the posts..