Climate change
This is the first in a series of articles on climate change. The articles are based on climate change talks that I have given to various Mole Valley groups over the past two years. I know from the feedback from these talks that, despite climate change being in the news pretty well every day, most people still have only a hazy idea of the risks facing us and of the sorts of measures we need to seriously tackle the problem. It’s much more than changing light bulbs and insulating your house better.
I will start by explaining why we should be seriously worried. What are the possible impacts of climate change? When might they happen? How many people could be affected? I’ll then cover the scale of greenhouse gas reductions that are needed and why present efforts are woefully inadequate. That then leads to the actions we really need to take: individual and government actions, immediate and long term. Amongst other things I’ll explain the importance of positive feedbacks, why biofuels are not the answer, how you can measure your individual emissions, and why we need a farming revolution
I hope this whets your appetite for what’s to come and that the articles will help you decide on the best actions you can take to protect future generations.
All this assumes of course that you agree that man-made emissions are causing climate change. In practice a recent opinion poll indicated that much of the UK population is still not convinced. So if you’re one of the doubters, the remainder of this article is for you. I assume that you’re not a climate scientist – neither am I. So like in many areas of life we have to rely on experts. The overwhelming majority of experts are telling us with increasing certainty that global warming is man-made. That is not to say that there is yet 100% certainly. But we are dealing with risk and probabilities here. What we can be sure of is that there is a high probability that global warming is man-made. Because the predicted consequences of global warming are so severe, the risk is enormous and we have to act to reduce it.
A small number of experts disagree. When they were all given their say on The Global Warming Swindle TV programme they were pretty convincing. But you need to appreciate that this was a shamelessly one-sided programme. Worse, it presented some highly dubious ‘evidence’ which has since been comprehensively debunked. Perhaps the worst example was the graph that seemed to show how increased sun activity is linked to periods of warming. This graph is quite simply wrong – disproved by various scientific papers. A final thought: George Bush and the USA government now accept that global warming is man-made.