OzTennis

What is good for you and your family may not necessarily be good for another family or mankind.

There are many roads to a strong prosperous economy, not just one and remember:

'Private affluence and public squalor'?

There's no easy answer to the energy conundrum. I would also lean towards less fossil fuels and more renewable sources of energy. In the beautiful area where I live, one of the main issues of debate at the present time is an application for a 20+ wind turbine 'farm'. It is being opposed on aesthetic grounds by a group of nimby's. That's their only argument, it will spoil the view. I personally think they are an interesting example of industrial architecture. They don't want fossil fuels, they don't want nuclear and they don't want wind farms (well if they have them somewhere else).

Garrett is the voice of a lot of people and a lot of consciences although obviously not yours.

You're the voice, try and understand it, make a noise and make it clear.

Garrett's making a noise and making it clear. I think I'll get my old mate JF to record those words.

OzTennis

Wol

Some of you sound as if you think the ICCC report was written overnight on the back of a fag packet when the bar closed.

It is the result of several decades of research by literally thousands of scientists in dozens of disciplines. Ten years ago the data were sometimes questionable - for example the satellite temperature measurements - but the models and the data are now far more exactly known.

As all good scientists will, the report says that nothing can be known with 100% precision: I believe the report says they are at least 90% confident on the conclusions.

The largely successful efforts of the American administration and some of the oil industry to suppress the very alarming conclusions are well documented in the scientific press. The drafts were almost bordering on the catastrophe worst case scenario and the only way that the report could get approval was by leaving out many of the worst models.

And before I'm accused of being a pinko tree hugger, I'm probably well to the right of Genghis. This is far more important than politics or posturing.

Anyone who seriously thinks that *any* planet can indefinitely support an ever increasing and consumer-driven population without buckling under the load at some point needs his head examining. It just can't happen.

OzTennis

A very well written post! I predict the last paragraph will provoke the 'how dare they try to affect the living standards of me and my family and cut jobs and harm economic prosperity' type 'head in the sand'ism'.

OzTennis

OzTennis

What Garrett was shouting as far back as 1993 (Earth and Sun and Moon). Excellent song, well worth a download BTW.

"In the morning we will wake up and take to the air
Look back at the planet - I'm glued to my chair
Southern half is burning as we climb through the sky
Sea-birds softly falling, smoke way up high

There's the contours of the mountains, the deserts and the plains
And a hurricane is blowing, and it turns once again
Now there's oil spills in the water where Columbus once sailed
And there's history and mystery and it's rolling away

I wish you could see this great mystery
Earth and sun and moon human tribe, thin blue line
Earth and sun and moon will survive

Sediment is plowing from river to sea
Now where are the mighty nations, no lines to be seen
An axe upon the broken ground, the sigh of the trees
And its floating in the ether, it brings me to my knees

Too messed up to care,
Anyone got a wing and a prayer,

In the blink of an eye
Thank you and good night

Earth and sun and moon human tribe, one thin blue line
Earth and sun and moon will survive, will survive, we will survive"

OzTennis

NedKelly

I watched a very interesting program on the National Geographic channel last night. I am sure it will be repeated (Austar repeat everything, many times) so you must watch it but the gist was that the recent global warming will cause a new ice age. It was very convincing and they had a whole array of scientists who were convinced that we would be in a new ice age within 10 to 30 years. I have more faith in the National Geographic than anything the IPCC put out because it is not political although I suppose you could argue they are looking for ratings.

OzTennis

I'll look out for that we get NG channel (and a new NG Wild channel) in the UK.

I must comment on various comments in the thread which imply that it is wrong for global warming to become a 'political issue'. For goodness sake, are we going to leave it to private individuals and big business to do something about one of the most important issues facing mankind (and women as well!)? Private individuals and businesses generally speaking won't alter their activities (sufficiently) because of the harmful effects on others.

It is only governments and politicians who are in a position to address negative externalities. It would be silly and naive to think that politicians only get involved in the issue to win votes (although I'll exclude David Cameron on his mountain bike with the chaffeur driven gas guzzler following behind and flying by private jet to an Arctic area for a photo opportunity about the melting ice cap from that).

OzTennis

NedKelly

O.K. lets politicise global warming. What do we get? We gets hundreds of
politicians flying first class all over the world going to conferences to discuss/agree targets that their parliaments will never meet. They stay in 5 star hotels eating the best lobster and drinking the best wines. They agree carbon trading which means that if you want to pollute you still can, you just have to buy a few credits. And to pay for all this nonsense what does the poor sap taxpayer get. CLimate change levy on electricity bills, extra tax on cars, air travel tax (which of course the politicians don't pay), a whole industry dedicated to shuffling carbon credits so there is no reduction in CO2 anyway (not that .005% of the atmosphere balance will have any effect anyway). And then all these politicians set up companies on the side to make profit from the carbon trading regime. And the biggest CO2 emmiters, India & CHina, are exempt anyway.

IT"S A COMPLETE LOAD OF OLD COBBLERS.

OzTennis

Agreed, the obscenity of it as you describe but we do nothing? Countries try to act alone? As the Oils song says, when you get up in the air and look back at the planet there are no lines to denote national boundaries. Australia didn't cause (much of) the hole in the ozone layer. It requires international agreement and hence the conferences and the travel and there are security issues with PM's, Presidents travelling economy with the punters and staying in B&B's I'm sure you'll agree?

This one you can't dismiss as cobblers!

OzTennis

Wol

>>I must comment on various comments in the thread which imply that it is wrong for global warming to become a 'political issue'. For goodness sake, are we going to leave it to private individuals and big business to do something about one of the most important issues facing mankind (and women as well!)? Private individuals and businesses generally speaking won't alter their activities (sufficiently) because of the harmful effects on others.<<

Of course, the possible antidotes to global warming *must* be political in the end. But what *I* meant was that the scientific facts should not be subject to political pressure - and that includes pressure from lobby groups masquerading as scientific institutes but funded by the oil industry.

Facts are facts. Where the facts are unclear this should be known. There is certainly legitimate debate as to the extent of manmade warming, because of the extremely complicated feedback mechanisms, overlying natural cycles etc. But when the conclusion of thousands of scientists and millions of man years of work says that it is 90% certain that the planet will warm by at least x degrees I frankly prefer to believe that, rather than a channel four - or NG - TV program.

I learned many years ago that the media knew an awful lot less about my own particular profession than they thought they did, but it certainly didn't stop them from pontificating a lot!

OzTennis

The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors has commissioned a report on the issue. The government has a target to reduce CO2 emissions by 60% by 2050. It was reported on the news last night what this would mean in Scotland. A city the size of Glasgow for example would either need to have 2 nuclear power stations or 1,300 wind turbines dedicated to its inhabitants by 2050.

http://www.rics.org/NR/rdonlyres/0C2...full180906.pdf

OzTennis

Dolly

I'm not a particularly political person and I'm not a scientist, but even i can see that we have had an effect on the world we live in. Can any of you seriously believe that we have had no effect at all? We've cut down a large percentage of the world's trees (which convert co2 into oxygen - so thats not exactly helping matters) we are belching out loads of chemicals into the atmosphere, we have massive amounts of rubbish piling up all over the place. Temperatures are rising and sea levels are going up, and while some of it is natural, I'm sure that the rapid rise of temperature is not.

Even if what we are doing isn't contributing to global warming, we are still trashing the place.

We started recycling about five years ago, and we recycle everything that we can, glass, plastic, cardboard, paper, tin cans, aluminium, tetra packs. I'm now shocked at what we were just throwing away into landfills. We've insullation our house so that we use less heating oil. Really what we are doing are just small things, but I feel better doing something rather than nothing.

In the long run there is nothing wrong with conserving what we have (even if it was proved we aren't causing global warming) managing our rubbish better, putting less chemicals into the atmosphere, replanting trees etc etc, we can only benefit from it. We live here, we should be treating the place better.

The Murphsters

A cut 'n' paste from the wiki entry on the IPCC...
There is plenty more out there for those that can be bothered to look, just because the daily mail says they are "thousands of the worlds leading scientists" on the IPCC does not mean it is not floored. The members of the IPCC all have vested interested in their own field of research, some are into weather, some into sea levels etc.. they are all fighting for budget and to see their own agenda elevated to the top of the worry list. It is all about cash and politics. There is no such thing as independent, it is hopelessly naive to think that there is, everybody is motivated by something.

Christopher Landsea resignation

In January 2005 Christopher Landsea resigned from work on the IPCC AR4, saying that he viewed the process as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound because of Kevin Trenberth's public contention that global warming was contributing to recent hurricane activity Chris Landsea Leaves. Roger A. Pielke who published Landsea's letter writes: How anyone can deny that political factors were everpresent in the negotiations isn't paying attention, but notes that the actual report maintain[s] consistency with the actual balance of opinion(s) in the community of relevant experts [21]. See IPCC Fourth Assessment Report for more details.

[edit] Unavailability of Supporting Data

Stephen McIntyre, an IPCC reviewer on the IPCC AR4, found that portions of the report were based on unpublished data. When he attempted to obtain this data, the IPCC threatened to remove his accreditation as an IPCC expert reviewer. McIntyre recommends that the "IPCC should require authors who submitted papers for citation to consent to provide data." The IPCC has declined to do so saying that this would interfere with the journals.[26]

[edit] Use of the "Hockey Stick" Graph

The third assessment report (TAR) used a climate reconstruction by Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH98[27]) often referred to as the "Hockey Stick Graph". This graph was the first quatitative reconstruction of hemispheric temperature over the past 1000 years; it differed radically from an unsourced schematic in the first assessment report which depicted higher temperatures during the the Medieval Warm Period than the present day. The appearance of MBH98 in the TAR was widely construed as demonstrating that the current warming period is unusual in comparison to temperatures from 1000AD until 1900AD. The methodology used to produce this graph was the target of criticisms[28]. In a 2006 letter to Nature, Bradley, Hughes and Mann pointed out that their original article had said that more widespread high-resolution data are needed before more confident conclusions can be reached and that the uncertainties were the point of the article. Critics of the IPCC claim that it has damaged its credibility by promoting this graph as proof of historically unusual climate change. For more detail see: hockey stick controversy