Global warming: Fact or Fiction?

MIghtyG

What are everyones opinions on Global warming?

First off, do you believe that the planet is undergoing some sort of climate change?

And secondly, if you do think that something is happening to the planet. What do you think is the route cause?

Is man and the never ending march of industrialization the route of all evil or is it simply a planetary cycle we dont fully understand and something which happens naturally?

Personally I think that although man has had some effect on the planet I dont think that we are fully to blame. that being said I do think that we need to start moving away from fossil fuels where we can, it might be having an effect and I wouldnt want to be sitting in an ice age/melt down in 50yrs time thinking "if only we did something...." that plus fossil fuels are a finite resource and we need to move away from them where we can so that the world can keep going and we dont end up going down some sort of Mad Max route where Petrol becomes the thing we all fight over

jp_bl_68

This might be a more appropriate place to post this - Global Warming Forum at AVForums.com

Pincho Paxton

I think that the planet is about to die.

MIghtyG

Ahh, didnt know there was a seperate section for global warming under "politics and the Economy" I guess its semi relevant

johntheexpat

Well, I think we are going to find out if the scientists theories are right or wrong.  Seems at the moment that there is no way we are going to wean ourselves of fossil fuels before what some scientists may describe as the point of no return.

There seems to be huge amounts being spent on searching for alternative sources of fossil fuel and bugger all being spent on ways to wean us off.

There are huge amounts of money being spent on subsidising generating electricity on sunny days, but very little in the way of reducing our consumption on cold winter nights.

We subsidise 'green' electricity, but don't subsidise 'green' ways of using less.

Nuclear power is now less acceptable than ever.

America has recently revealed an effective strategy for obtain natural gas from hitherto unworkable deposits and has now declared enough reserves to keep herself going for 100 years.  And the rest of the world will also use the technology.

Clathrates (absolutely huge reserves of natural gas held under pressure at the bottom of the sea) will also, I'm sure, be tapped one day soon.  And Shell, for example, already have the technology for efficiently converting natural gas into liquid fuels, so no problems there for the rise and rise of the car.

Plane manufacturers have never had so many orders on their books, enough for 20 years or more and the planes will have a life of several decades, so air travel isn't going to stop.

Seems to me that the world is not short of fossil fuels and that there is no real political will anymore.

I hope the scientists are wrong.  But no-one has yet shown the theory to be flawed.  But we are definitely going to find out.

DPinBucks

YesThere is one for sure: increased atmospheric CO2 from mankind's consumption of fossil fuels.
There are other possibles (which may pull in opposite directions).  These include: solar cycles; volcanic activity; variable cloud cover; deforestation.  There are probably many others.Firstly, man is not the root of all evil.  We are as entitled to be here as anybody and anything else, and there is no moral imperative that says we have any kind of duty to the Earth, which after all is simply a lump of rock.  Nonetheless, we have many reasons, aesthetic, selfish, sentimental, biological, etc, for wanting to keep the Earth going in more or less the state it's in now.  Mankind's industrialization is undoubtedly at the root of climatic changes we probably won't like and would therefore seek to mitigate.
That being said, there are planetary cycles we don't fully understand, as I mention above, although we are gaining knowledge all the time.  What is undoubted is that mankind's contribution is significant and will have some effect.  What we don't know is how bad those effects will be, and whether we can stop them in time.Agreed - see above

pragmatic

Why?

Sees like a viable stop gap replacement for fossil fuels until we can find a better alternative, unless I'm missing something?

johntheexpat

Fukushima, scaremongering by 'greens', misinformation, etc etc.

Of course nuclear is one of the few viable options, along with serious moves towards reduction of usage etc.  But quite honestly, the political will to move away from fossil fuels just isn't there.  It seems the West is just happy to let 'Market Forces' change our habits, rather than pushing things along.

Stuart Wright

Global warming is a fact.  It's something all the (proper) scientists agree on.  It's indisputable.
It's seems very likely the cause is man-made emissions, but the thread title doesn't refer to the cause.

BISHI

This is ridiculous Pincho..! the world has gone through thousands of climate changes, all of them results of natural phenomena -  Solar flares, volcanic activity, meteoric impacts, tectonic collision and changes in ocean currents to name but a few. It is part of the Earth's natural cycles to experience these as well as the occasional mass extinction events associated with them - in fact without a whole succession of these humanity would not be here at all. The Earth whole eco system has built in feedback mechanisms that tend towards an eventual equilibrium given the conditions present at the time, this is why it still has life flourishing on its surface - most of which is different to that tens of millions of years ago. The modern industrial age is nothing more than a blip in geological deep time, the planets equilibrium may be in some flux as a new natural balance is found, this could take hundreds even thousands of years. It may even result in humanities extinction, but rest assured the planet and life in its millions of designs will continue to exist and evolve.