While you could be forgiven for thinking, on your blog rounds, that there's absolutely no change going on, no siree, meanwhile the climate is actually ...
... er ... changing.
In countries like Russia where it's as obvious as the lack of snow until the new year and the severely contracted winter, in Australia, they're also
feeling the heat:
Thousands of demonstrators have rallied across Australia to demand greater government action to protect the environment from climate change. Scientists have warned that Australia is particularly vulnerable to the effects of a shifting climate.
In countries like Australia, where it is more accelerated, naturally the clamour will come more quickly than say, in Britain, where Brit bloggers still churn out stats to 'prove' that what is happening elsewhere isn't happening and anyway, even if it is, human agency is in no way involved. When pressed, they say well, let's wait and see. Yeah, really good. Let the house of cards come down and then watch them falling. Great policy.
And these are otherwise intelligent men and women. Fortunately, there are
actual experts who are trying to get people to
wake up:
New data was presented in Copenhagen on sea level rise, which indicated that the best estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made two years ago were woefully out of date.Dr Katherine Richardson, who chaired the scientific steering committee that organised the conference and issued the six "key messages", said the research presented added new certainty to the IPCC reports. "We've seen lots more data, we can see where we are, no new surprises, we have a problem."
More than 2,500 researchers and economists attended this meeting designed to update the world on the state of climate research ahead of key political negotiations set for December this year.
What about the actual science?
New Scientist says:
Rising CO2 was not the trigger that caused the initial warming at the end of these ice ages - but no climate scientist has ever made this claim. It certainly does not challenge the idea that more CO2 heats the planet. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas because it absorbs and emits certain frequencies of infrared radiation. Basic physics tells us that gases with this property trap heat radiating from the Earth, that the planet would be a lot colder if this effect was not real and that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will trap even more heat.
The issue is with the political process before any sort of carbon footprinting of the ordinary citizen takes place. So far, global policy has been to make you and me feel guilty and allow governments themselves to continue along the same path they had been before, with the situation steadily getting worse and worse.
Just on sheer population growth alone, let alone all its associated evils and leaving climate change out of it, governments have shown no inclination to offer more than lip service to radically address the question.
When global warming re-enters the discussion, the first fingers need to point at
China. Next, the U.S. dependence on the internal combustion engine and the
chemical pollutant releases need to be seen to. On the other hand, plant emissions themselves are perhaps causing
cooling in some parts, along with added pollution. Bio-fuels seem
hardly likely to help either in attempting to alleviate the uneven temperature increases.
Above all, my advice to her is not to get too pregnant until after July 2009 when it's possible we'll hear wedding bells according to a little bird who told me.
