I suppose we Brits complain but where I live (Bedford) it normally doesn't get normally below -10°C in winter or above 28°C in summer. Having said the last few winters have been very mild with -6°C being the minimum and the summers have been hot - it got to 36°C last year.
Somehow I don't think the media are putting across a very ballanced argument.
I feel it's my duty to readdress this.
**broken link removed**
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globa...ons_by_opponents_of_the_global_warming_theory
For those who don't have time to read the pages linked above, my favourite points are:
- Estimates at CO2's effectiveness as a greenhouse gas vary, but are generally around 10-100 times lower than water weight for weight, leaving a "net" greenhouse effect of man-made CO2 emissions at less than 1%.
- The relationship between historic temperatures and CO2 levels, based on ice-core samples, shows that carbon dioxide increases have always followed a rise in temperature rather than the other way around.
- The concern about global warming is analogous to the concern about global cooling in the 1970s. The concern about global cooling was unnecessarily alarmist. The concern about global warming is equally alarmist. So industrial pollution was cooling the earth by blocking out the sun back then but now it's heating things up!
- Of the 186 billion tons of CO2 that enter earth's atmosphere each year from all sources, only 6 billion tons are from human activity. Approximately 90 billion tons come from biologic activity in earth's oceans and another 90 billion tons from such sources as volcanoes and decaying land plants.So given that it'a a fairly weak greenhouse gas anyway, it's not going to make that much difference anyway.
People then point to deforestation and claim that we won't have any oxygen if we chop down the reforests but they forget that nearly all the world's oxygen supply is produced by algae in the sea. I can accept that human activities can effect the climate but CO2 is a big misnomer, deforestation of rainforest causes desertification, building on floodplains increases surface run-off causing more flooding in winter and drought in summer, heat from buildings and vehicles in cities increase the temperature locally.
The main thing that annoys me is they claim their computer models are accurate when they can't accurately predict the weather for the next month, let alone the next 100 years!
Don't forget that scientists have been wrong many times before, remember the millennium bug and how everyone overreacted to it?
The only reason why I support taxing petrol, natural gas and oil is because ceasing our dependence on fossil fuels is the only way we can secure our furure prosperity.