Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > Friday Rant - Hot topic

[keith888]

[quote=jerryz]Global warning is total ****.....the world was much warmer 2000 years ago when the Romans grew vines in UK and also at the time of the Vikings Greenland was covered in crops and trees that why they called it Greenland."

And what happened to those Vikings in Greenland when the climate cooled again? They died off due to climate change!!!!! Surely that proves the converse to what you are saying?

Climate changes have been a factor in killing off (and encouraging) many human civilisations. Before humans, climate change has been responsible for global mass extinctions due to a variety of triggers. Fossil evidence sugests that at least some of these mass extinctions have been due to dramatic and very sudden shifts in global temperature. There are fossil forests in Antartica dating from when it was still over the South pole (~40 million years ago). The majority of climate scientists agree that AVERAGE global temperature is currently rising and if more than a few degrees wil cause pronounced disruption to the global climate. As I understand it, we do not know for absolute certain that the post-industrial CO2 rise is responsible for the current warming period but if it is we are in big trouble if we continue to pump CO2 into the air.

Keith

[RXS748]

I,m with the sceptics on this - global warming has become a huge industry which is making a lot of people a lot of money and virtually all the people who campaign on the issue of global warming generate a bigger carbon footprint in a week than I do in a lifetime! There seems to be a lack of honesty about many of the issues such as the nonsense of carbon trading and "zero emission" electric vehicles which are powered by electricity generated by coal-fired power stations (as well as all the toxic metals in the batteries). The only real way to assess the environmental impact of any technology is over the total life cycle so you need to measure the energy used to manufacture something instead of just the energy used to run it - I suspect that in the case of wind turbines the energy they produce during their short lifetime does not even pay back the energy required to manufacture, install and maintain them.
The disturbing thing about the global warming lobby is how easily it has distracted attention from the real issues such as the extinction of other species and the damage that man is doing to the environment by uncontrolled development and the rapidly expanding population.

I,m off to take my medication now and dream of dry roads and vee twin noises!