How soon is it happening, and if I drive more, will it happen quicker?

Everyone should drive a V8, thread closed.

Come on, you're not that naive are you? I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here The argument against there being 'global warming' has really been brought about by that name. Idiots like Clarkson then jump on the band wagon when it snows claiming it's not happening (how can it, it's cold? ). A better term would be climate change, one that's being used more now, but the phrase Global Warming still lingers, and will do as long as the nay sayers use it as an ironic phrase to defend their mostly selfish lifestyles.

I used to be a massive sceptic (funnily enough it was when I used to read the Daily Mail in the morning, go figure) but having read about it so much more, and looking at the data, there really is no argument against humans having an influence. Yes the Earth's climate changes periodically through history, but it's the rate of change that is so alarming. The last change wouldn't have likely been noticed by the then inhabitants of Earth, even if they could detect it. It would have taken place over many more generations than the current change we are experiencing. It really does take an ignorant prat to not see that the change in CO2 levels coincides nicely with the industrial revolution (when fossil fuels were beginning to be used in larger quantities) and since then has tracked our increased use further. Both are which are followed by an increase in average global temperatures. You can't argue with the science either, CO2 does trap heat. It's that simple.

Again, with every polarising issue, both sides will pick and choose the research that best back's up their claim, and neither argument will be free of spin. But even if there is no such thing as global warming, and even if we aren't polluting our world, just using less has to be a good thing, or do you not subscribe to the idea that we are running out of fossil fuels either?

Edited 21 January, 201313 yr by prankstar2003

I think this thread is more along the lines of:

It's bloody baltic outside. Whens some warmth due ?

Though climate change is an interesting discussion.

It's fine if you've been given the day off and have 'work' to do :-D

I was pre-empting (hopefully) a discussion, maybe., Wishful thinking probably

Humans have an affect yes but the affect is so small its stupid.

In the earths cycle its rotation towards the sun becomes smaller and then after this period is starts to circulate further away (this is a proven theory by the way).

The earth is currently in its most middle stage of this but is closing in to a tighter rotation this is where the extra warmth is coming from granted the title of "global warming", a 5 degree shift in the earths rotation is more than 100 years of industrial production and greenhouse gasses.

Now i am not saying its a bad thing that people take "global warming" seriously, people should take more care to preserve the barrier that helps keep the earth in the right balance of temperature after all in the famous words of "Horseco" as its now being dubbed, Every Little Helps, which is true.

But none the less our influence is so little that its like comparing the atom to a bulldozer.

As for the current snow situation..............Aliens .

Climate change is happening and has happened for millions of years.

I doubt we are the cause of 'global warming' as co2 isn't an effective green house gas as it doesn't absorb the suns radiation very well add the small quantity in the atmosphere under 0.04% and it makes very little difference to the temperature and the amount fluctuates naturally over hundreds/thousands of years anyway.

The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere makes a massive difference to temperature as it absorbs vastly more radiation than co2 and there is more of it, the amount ranges from trace it desert regions to 4% over oceans which makeup 71% of the earths surface.

We only have accurate temperature records for the last 160 years and thats not enough time to determine if we are to blame or it's a natural phenomenon.

One thing is apparent is despite no conclusive evidence governments and companies are using global warming/climate change as an excuse to increase taxes and costs.

Watch day after tomorrow.

Probably closer to the truth than the fact were going to get warmer weather.

The weather went tits up in the 14th Century, then settled down from the 16th onwards till now. Its just a constant cycle. We will have a shitty decade or two and then it will get better.

Watch day after tomorrow.

Probably closer to the truth than the fact were going to get warmer weather.

Or 2012, oh wait..... that's passed........or has it! .

Eddy: that's a new one on me. But I fail to see that the closer orbit will have occured in such a short time. And then there is the correlation of data between greenhouse gas production and the increase in global temperatures. Coincidence? I'm not convinced.

Polo45: CO2 does absorb heat very well (i can show you with a 100w bulb, two bottles and a thermometer if you like), granted not as well as methane and not as much as water. But even at 0.04% (closer to 0.05%) that's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere and a lot of trapped solar radiation. Again, you only have to look at the data to see the correlation. We do only have 'accurate' temperature measurements for 160 years, but a lot can be deduced from geology. Granted, its not as accurate, but it gives a pretty good picture.

The Earth is heating up faster than ever before (as far as our data can tell us) and this change has coincided with an increase in fossil fuel combustion. You may call it coincidence, but then I'd call that ignorant.

Watch day after tomorrow.

Probably closer to the truth than the fact were going to get warmer weather.

The weather went tits up in the 14th Century, then settled down from the 16th onwards till now. Its just a constant cycle. We will have a shitty decade or two and then it will get better.

Hollywood is hardly known for its factual content.

True it wont be that bad. But no transatlantic current = fucked. Lol

At the moment I'm stuck in an idling train on the outskirts of london along with a load of other trains elsewhere coming into London so hopefully that will help warm things up a bit.

I'm not saying it that's dramatic, the climate changes very very slowly, in fact over the past few hundred years its increased at the pace of a snail on narcotics and will continue to do so.

At the end of the day all of the extra taxes and policies brought in over global warming are about as legit as Rudolph firing heat seeking missiles out of its nose while riding a shark which is coincidentally pulling Santa's modded Corrado VR6.

Watch day after tomorrow.

Probably closer to the truth than the fact were going to get warmer weather.

The weather went tits up in the 14th Century, then settled down from the 16th onwards till now. Its just a constant cycle. We will have a shitty decade or two and then it will get better.

Watch it? I feel like I'm fooking in it!

At the end of the day all of the extra taxes and policies brought in over global warming are about as legit as Rudolph firing heat seeking missiles out of its nose while riding a shark which is coincidentally pulling Santa's modded Corrado VR6.

Are they? Do you not believe in accepting responsibility for your actions? If you choose to polute the Earth, shouldn't you therefore pay for it to be 'cleaned' by use of more energy efficient means? I think we should. However, do all the tax dollars go into 'green' technology? I doubt it. Does all that re-cycling you sort through go to the right places or is it transfered elsewhere becuase quotas are full? Likely. The idea is great, and I don't mind paying a few extra pounds for a clean(er) concience. But I'm going to agree with you here and say that the money I contribute towards a greener planet in tax pounds likely goes elsewhere. I guess the other option is to use less, which I do anyway (currently I have only a single bulb on in the whole house!).

But I do drive a diesel, think of the Kittens, the poor cancer riddled kittens

Watch day after tomorrow.

Probably closer to the truth than the fact were going to get warmer weather.

The weather went tits up in the 14th Century, then settled down from the 16th onwards till now. Its just a constant cycle. We will have a shitty decade or two and then it will get better.

Watch it? I feel like I'm fooking in it!

I'm living it. Hahaha

Mankind in general has a bloated sense of self importance, and this is why the scientists can't accept that our part in this in minor. The earth has gone through cycles since its first days and it will continue to do so long after we have gone.

These same scientists are using the same models to wrongly predict the weather week in week out, yet we are expected to believe they can predict how the weather will be in 20 years? They recently had a bit of a shock when they realised that the earth temps weren't doing what they expected them to do and are still standing around scratching their heads trying to figure out why. some of them have even tried to blame China for this unexpected cooling for using more deoderents. The poor Chinese get the blame for everything, they were being blamed for the increase in global temps before this

The truth is that no matter how much we think we know we actually know very little, and no matter what you think you know, when you base a lot of your calculations on guess work and assumption how can you ever expect to get accurate results?

At the end of the day all of the extra taxes and policies brought in over global warming are about as legit as Rudolph firing heat seeking missiles out of its nose while riding a shark which is coincidentally pulling Santa's modded Corrado VR6.

Are they? Do you not believe in accepting responsibility for your actions? If you choose to polute the Earth, shouldn't you therefore pay for it to be 'cleaned' by use of more energy efficient means? I think we should. However, do all the tax dollars go into 'green' technology? I doubt it. Does all that re-cycling you sort through go to the right places or is it transfered elsewhere becuase quotas are full? Likely. The idea is great, and I don't mind paying a few extra pounds for a clean(er) concience. But I'm going to agree with you here and say that the money I contribute towards a greener planet in tax pounds likely goes elsewhere. I guess the other option is to use less, which I do anyway (currently I have only a single bulb on in the whole house!).

But I do drive a diesel, think of the Kittens, the poor cancer riddled kittens

NO!!! NOT THE KITTENS!!!

I drive a 1ltr the best i can do next to a diesel really, they can be so expensive for a decent one .

Which also brings the question why is petrol so much cheaper than diesel when diesel is one of the most common things to come out of refining crude oil and petrol is one of the rarest and requires a lot more work to obtain equaling more gasses etc realeased, makes no sense to me........CURSE YOU KITTEN HATING GOVERNMENTS!!!

Global warming is infact making our climate (the UK) colder

So the fact we currently have a bit of snow, is probably actually thanks to global warming

People can rarely see the wood for the trees. Blindly debating whether we're warming up the planet or not with car exhausts. I think the critics want us to stay down this mentality to keep us hopelessly lost, chasing our tails.

The big picture is usually more revealing. Anyone who's watched an entire continent move past their very eyes whilst staring out an aeroplane window for a few hours will tell you the world is not very big. We've seen acres of land collapse due to the coal removed from under ground. We've seen rainforest the size of various countries felled. We've removed more oil from the ground, and burned it into ash and gasses, than an entire sea. We've made thousands of square miles inhabitable for centuries due to radioactivity. We've set off a few hydrogen bombs. The nuclear waste we've dumped fills a bigger swimming pool than you can fit in Birmingham.

This barely scratches the surface - thanks to the industrial revolution it's likely we've done more damage to the planet during the last 300yrs than the previous 3,000yrs, if not the 30,000yrs before that.

The ice caps have shrunk massively. So much so, that as Antarctica has melted, it's revealed stuff from life a very long time ago - there's a big operation there, and it is not open to the public. The north cap will be gone in our lifetime. So it does look like the earth is experiencing climate change. But is this our fault, or was it happening anyway..?

Well, we can only speculate on the effect our damage is making. But there's no speculating the truly impressive amount of damage we've managed to do. And it doesn't take the best brains on the planet to work out that what we're doing is fast becoming unsustainable, with our efforts to address it so far being useless.

I have no doubt that driving your kid to school today, will mean you won't even be able to have central heating tomorrow. We need to stop wasting, so we can spend the energy we have left on finding genuinely sustainable measures.

Polo45: CO2 does absorb heat very well (i can show you with a 100w bulb, two bottles and a thermometer if you like), granted not as well as methane and not as much as water. But even at 0.04% (closer to 0.05%) that's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere and a lot of trapped solar radiation. Again, you only have to look at the data to see the correlation. We do only have 'accurate' temperature measurements for 160 years, but a lot can be deduced from geology. Granted, its not as accurate, but it gives a pretty good picture.

The bottle of co2 and a light bulb experiment has very little relevance to atmospheric composition, you cannot compare an atmosphere of 100% co2 to earths breathable atmosphere the only purpose that experiment serves is to scaremonger people into believing anything some misguided scientist says.

Nobody knows for sure what is going on and are puzzled by the drop in average temperature, in recent years it's funny a few years ago in the news you'd hear about global warming and how it's going to be the end of the world but now nothing. Even if we reduced carbon emissions the drop in fuel cost would make energy cheaper in places like china and they will use more negating any saving we made.

Do you know who started the research into climate change?

Margaret Thatcher, as she wanted to build nuclear power stations because the coal miners where striking all the time and without coal there's no electricity. her plan was to build nuclear power stations to secure our country's power supply, but the coal board (very powerful at the time) apposed her plans so she sponsored research into the damage coal fired power stations where doing to the environment and her scientists came up with global cooling and she used the 'evidence' she obtained to push her plans through parliament.

Thats only one example of how sponsorship has been used by governments, companies to promote whatever agenda they have, and don't think they won't manipulate the results, after all who pays the scientists wages?

^^ She said coal was imminently unsustainable, which it was. She said the ground would collapse before long and people would be killed. And that's exactly what went on to happen there in Wales, whilst your precious Labour government were fucking up the country.

Gas is gonna be phased out before long. But the most immediate thing to phase out is coal - whilst your feet are still above the Irish channel!

Ah yes, global cooling. I remember that being all over the news as a kid, then when the planets temperature started to rise they changed it to global warming, now that its cooling again they have given up and started calling it climate change.

As Mr polo45 says "Nobody knows for sure what is going on"

We have accurate data that covers a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the time that the earth has existed and we think we get any useful info from that? Everything else is just guess work and assumption.

Just enjoy it while it lasts, everyone's in the same situation, you can be cinciencious about it for sure, but I won't live my life acting like if I don't throw a plastic bottle in the right bin everyone's gonna die 10 years sooner.

There is SO much waste and pollution from industry it's disgraceful, if it was so bad a lot tighter rules would be enforced on it.

Also didnt winters used to be a lot worse than currently with a lot more snow? Isn't really bad is it, just the country can't cope like others because it isn't the norm

As already pointed out the climate changes at its own accord, but the impact we have as a human race with regards to the industrial increase and the mass by-production of CO2 it is going to change or climate, and thus more unpredictable.

Now this is where you could call me ignorant, or mental or whatever but as with many things i feel the underlying problem is money, and the effects it has on a human being, I'm not claiming this to be the correct idea or some massive conspiracy, but fundamentally if burning fossil fuels is the easiest way of getting getting useful energy and it makes shit loads of money, its not going to get any more 'clean'. There is programme which i cannot remember the name of, but will try and find sums it up quite well, albeit in a very american and conspirational way, which basically says when the banks really started to lift off in the late 1800's? the likes of the morgan's rothchild's and rockerfella's managed to acquire between them a vast amount of the money in america, then going on to say when someone has got all of the money, they naturally want to have all the power, and how to do you control power? you take control of the energy sources, and at that time those energy sources were gas, coal and oil. And they arent going to stop making money just because it may be having negative effects on the planet.

So basically providing that these companies want to make money, they are going to do what they want to make it, no goverment is going to stop them, because most goverments are funded by them. Even if we are changing the climate at an alarming rate, theres not a lot we can do.

I know this may sound like I'm a nutter who sits in his room, with a half tonne of canned food waiting for a nuclear war to commence, but it just makes sense to me that although we get told all manners of scary stories its all just so we can be robbed blind for just living our lives

Now you all have a pleasant day haha