Does not make much sense to me - WARNING - Heated Climate Debate in Progress.

[Shadylane]

allotmentlady
Considering the base level of carbon emissions from volcanoes is so vastly more than anthropogenic carbon, I think it's madness to suggest that we have any impact at all, let alone able to do anything. If the entire human race went carbon zero this very second, it would just take a single belch from a single volcano to put more carbon into the atmosphere than we saved by cutting the sum total of human activity to zero carbon.

.....

Yeah my hubby's a global warming sceptic and I'm kinda leaning that way myself. Not that it's a myth just that it's got nowt to do with us. I like to think that nature is pretty damn resilient ( I mean take nettles and couch grass for instance ) and can handle pretty much anything. This fragile earth thing - it isn't though is it? I think there's nothing wrong with trying to cut down on waste of anything and we should treat our environment with respect and consideration but it's not worth getting obsessed over- isn't it all cyclical anyway?

I mean when they say temperatures are at their highest since year whatever - so there was a time, way back, when temperatures were this high then. And the planet's still here and so are we. Hmm. I'm open to discussion but I just think if the earth decides she's going to have an ice age - or not - then there's very little we can do about it.

Oh and on the subject of fireworks - I think they're bloody dangerous and should be limited to organised displays. I was in town once when some kids were messing with some, one went flying into a wall about knee high. If I'd have been 30 seconds earlier, might have been missing a knee. Fireworks are great in the hands of people who know what they're doing. Ugh I sound SO old

[FionaH]

Anyhoo, how much fuel does it take to fill your Porsche tank, and how much is left in it when you get back?!! I suspect it has a bigger carbon footprint than a Smart car f'r'instance?!

Snigger, snort, giggle..........So you gonna trade the Porker in for a Smart car AL?

[snohare]

Mount Etna produces more carbon dioxide a day than all the cars in the UK do in a year

Considering the base level of carbon emissions from volcanoes is so vastly more than anthropogenic carbon, I think it's madness to suggest that we have any impact at all, let alone able to do anything. If the entire human race went carbon zero this very second, it would just take a single belch from a single volcano to put more carbon into the atmosphere than we saved by cutting the sum total of human activity to zero carbon.

Groan. Please don't consider this personal, but that comment sadly is a classic display of ignorance and misinformation. Literally laughable - as if a child compared a burning sparkler with a stick of exploding dynamite. Every patch of ground that has humans on it is constantly emitting carbon, often in large quantities. Everything we do nowadays, we burn carbon. Sometimes in twenty ways, when you consider the processes that go into using a product. How much carbon to get bacon to your plate ? Volcanoes are part time showboat amateurs by comparison.
http://http://www.realclimate.org/in...y-and-climate/
14 “One point that is also worth making is that although volcanoes release some CO2 into the atmosphere, this is completely negligible compared to anthropogenic emissions (about 0.15 Gt/year of carbon, compared to about 7 Gt/year of human related sources). ”
Some volcanoes cause climatic cooling due to sulfurous aerosols, eg Mount Pinatubo.
If humans are so insignificant, how do you account for the levels of CO2 rising from 280 ppmv in 1850 to 445 CO2e ppmv now ? We know that the tundra currently melting now has not done so for hundreds of thousands of years, since frozen woolly mammoth carcases and other biological artefacts would not have survived earlier warming events. Satellite thermal imagery shows things getting hotter...kind of hard to fake. So too does icemelt zones at the poles, lack of lying snow due to increased ground temperature, glaciers shrinking like never before recorded. Any comments ?

that "Hockey Stick" that Mr Gore threatens us with is BUNKUM

It is complicated, I'll grant you that. But attention to detail, or following the debate as it first happened, will show who said what. In essence, there is a "J" anytime there is pronounced warming over any scale, and the graph of this data is the same regardless of how the analyses are done. Hence a dozen groups all coming to the same conclusion with different methods. It's like adding up to 10 in different ways...in 1s, 2s, or 5s, the answer is the same.

http://http://www.realclimate.org/in...-hockey-stick/

Suggesting that mankind is warming the planet in a damaging way (if at all) is a real sign of just how arrogant a certain sectors of society are becoming...

It seems some people find any opposition to their viewpoint unconscionable - and the climatologists are the ones who are constantly checking up on each other, so it isn't them.
Since when was doing arithmetic arrogant ? You can work out how much carbon is emitted by counting the barrels of oil used, coal and gas etc - if volcanoes emitted that much every day, the most simple of calculations will tell you that Earth would millions of years ago have gone the same way as Venus due to runaway greenhouse warming. You can't challenge the science behind that greenhouse effect or increased carbon levels, it is as easily testable as gravity.
Does it not seem to you that having literally billions of vehicles burning hydrocarbons all the time, aircraft with three times the effect, plus all the industrial and domestic power usage that we now have that was not even there twenty years ago, will put out just a smidgen more carbon than what Mother Nature was doing prior to our "progress" ? Even without us screwing up carbon sinks by cutting down on jungles, forests and wetlands etc. Seriously, the mere fact of you being a global warming sceptic tells me that you do not appreciate the scale of any global processes.

wood, which is carbon neutral

Em, only until you burn it. Then it gets added to the mass of carbon moving about.
Still, chalk it up to Hill and Knowlton, eh.
http://http://mitchellanderson.blogs...-national.html

It's about political power, book sales and ideology.

We agree on more than just gardening ! Careful though, your friends are not who you thought...
http://http://www.spinwatch.org.uk/-...o-is-behind-it

it's not worth getting obsessed over- isn't it all cyclical anyway?

Well, it is cyclical, and we are all dead in the long run anyway Shadylady, but would you let your children die just because of that ? The current scale of change is about 10 000 times faster than usual, and the few previous occasions with changes like this are famous. Ever heard of the Permian mass extinction ?
Let me put it this way - do you remember the summer of 2003 ? London morgues so full of heatstroke victims they put them in refrigerated lorries. How do you like the idea of that 2 years in 5 ? That is being optimist; personally I am with Fraser from Dad's Army...
Me, I love winters with snow, and summers that don't run out of water, and I don't want to leave a worse world for my nephews.
Hmm, I was going to wax philosophical about how everybody has double standards, but maybe I should just change my log-in name to "Raving obsessive".... Sorry folks, but I've been reading about this since the days when climatologists used to say in every article, "Don't worry, it will take 5000 years for anything to happen." Even the formerly "keep cool, check the details, don't exaggerate" guys are running around making frightening statements now. If you can keep your head, while all those about you are losing theirs....you just don't understand the situation.

[zazen999]

Any comments ?

Yes, please can we discuss it without being insulting or rude to each other.

[grannymem]

I couldn't agree more with Snohare- although I couldn't argue it as clearly and cogently either.

Maybe if we lived somewhere like Bangladesh we might be aware more of the impact?

I have a feeling that those on this forum who confess themselves sceptics are actually doing more than their fair share in living environmentally friendly lives so I do feel a bit hypocritical as I'm personally probably more guilty than them in not doing all I can.

I agree about not being insulting or rude to each other - sometimes when we care passionately about something we can come over as aggressive - just put it down to fervour!!

[zazen999]

I have a feeling that those on this forum who confess themselves sceptics are actually doing more than their fair share in living environmentally friendly lives so I do feel a bit hypocritical as I'm personally probably more guilty than them in not doing all I can.

As far as I can see - what is 'doing all we can'?

I'm confused with this whole debate as as soon as we turn a light on, make a slice of toast or heat some water; we are damaging the environment in some way. We can't turn back the clock and suddenly live in medieval times again.

We can all pick figures out of the air to support probably every side of the argument; and we can all rant and rave but big business will always put profits before environment, which makes what we do into a drop in the ocean.

And all of us sit here on computers which makes arguing about the environment a bit of a moot point.......doesn't it?

[Two_Sheds]

Snohare: brilliantly put, and clearly written.

Sadly, the majority will just go on sticking their fingers in their ears and going "la la la" until the oil runs out, or until half the UK is under water (maybe not even then: people still don't make the connection between eg. paving over gardens and flash floods, or that building more roads= even more traffic, or that cheap flights = more flights = more runways = more noise pollution ).

People believe what they want to believe, and don't even care what is happening on the other side of the world. As one person said to me about the most recent disaster in Indonesia: "they shouldn't live there if they get earthquakes"

People who are living now don't care what state the planet will be in when they're dead and buried.

[grannymem]

As far as I can see - what is 'doing all we can'?

And all of us sit here on computers which makes arguing about the environment a bit of a moot point.......doesn't it?

Which was my point about 'not doing all I can'.

At the end of the day, it seems to me that most of us would agree that many things in our world today are environmentally unsound. It's a moot point how much trying to change this is gong to make to global warming BUT if we know it's environmentally unsound we have 2 options: try to make a difference or shrug our shoulders and say 'nothing I can (or want) to do about it'.

It's our choice - and again it seems to me that there are an awful lot of people in the world who don't have the luxury of making such a choice - they just live with the consequences of rising sea levels, climatic change etc. whatever the causes are.

Again, I throw my hands up in saying I could do more - but this thread has made me want to do so even more - thanks to Allotment Lady for setting up the debate.

[pdblake]

Mount Etna produces more carbon dioxide a day than all the cars in the UK do in a year, bonfire night/xmas/new year lights, drop in the ocean comes to mind.

And they'll continue to ignore that fact until they work out a way to slap a tax on vulcanism.

[grannymem]

Have to agree to disagree, Pdblake.

[bluemoon]

I will not do without my household appliances - the more labour saving I can do then more time I can spend with my children.

Yes, I used to feel like that when my kids were little. But now they're grown up and it's not children it's grandchildren, so I spend less time with them, but suddenly the people I love are going to be around for a LOT longer than I am and it made me very eco-obsessed very quickly. I don't know for certain if anything I do or do not do will help one iota, but these little ones are way too precious to me for me to take the risk. I hope that everything is just panic, but if not and it all goes pear-shaped in future at least my grandson will know that Nanny did all she could.

[annacruachan]

Thank you, Snohare, for your clarity. I am with you 100% on this, but do feel that the small changes most people are able to make to their own production of CO2 are but a drop in the ocean when compared with that produced by big business. When more roads and runways are being created, more oil fields exploited by the powers that be with apparently no awareness of the consequences, it is small wonder that ordinary people throw up their hands and say 'Why do I bother?'

It is incredible to me that anyone can look at what is happening to our planet and not accept that devastating change is upon us. Conspiracy theory is the last resort of the gainsayers. Ostriches and sand come to mind!

[HayleyB]

The whole carbon footprint thing is very emotive and I'm a leaning to the side of cyclical change as it's been rammed down throats in this country far too much while other countries increase theirs - China for instance. As a country bumpkin who drives a..... wait for it......

LAND ROVER * hides behind desk

I've had to battle for the gas guzzlers many a time (anyone here tried driving up a very very steep muddy slope in a Smart Car?) and sometimes when my daughter misses her bus at school I actually break the unspoken law of picking her up in my Defender And our Land Rover Club is part of the county's emergency response team in case a train derails in a difficult to get to place then it's 4x4s to the rescue. God only knows what a farmer would do without a trusty Land Rover and some of the places I have to get to for work would break most 'normal' cars

But still I am an avid recycler and anti oceanic pollution and still haven't turned on our central heating (sorry oil-fired, gas doesn't exist out here) yet, buy local - meat direct from my farmer friends and veggies in season from my garden or UK grown etc etc etc so am doing "my bit" even though I am not a Carbon believer.

By the way I'm anti fireworks - they should be banned except in organised displays. Lost a foal 'cause of an eejit who lived next door to us at our old place, he had a party with fireworks right next to my small turnout paddock and I was late getting home......

[Sue]

I know the arguement is that our individual changes make no difference, when global companies, countries etc emit huge amounts of carbon, effluent, waste etc.

But we have to start somewhere and if we each make enough changes then the idea will spread and become part of the norm (always optimistic) You can see a similar thing with GYO, what a huge change in 5 years, a long way to go but there has been a significant change.

And even if the worries over climate change turn out to be unfounded ( and I don't think they are) then I still think it a good thing that we are forced to think and act on how our actions impact on our environment. It surely isn't right to waste the earth's resources, carve up forests, force extinctions and land waste on other countries, dump our rubbish on them etc climate change or no. And it isn't just climate change, there's water shortages and oil running out to worry about too.


Sue

[PAULW]

have a read of this
Meanwhile, back in cold reality... - Telegraph