You do realise that it is either that, or this? They all play a part in climate change. Scientists, you know, the people that bought you almost everything you use in modern life, all agree that the current climate change is man made. Nothing to do with Thunberg. But, I would be interested to know peoples views on what is causing the changes in the weather. Yes the climate dips and rises, but there has never been such of a dramatic rise before as far as they can tell. But isn't it worth trying to stop it anyway? Or should we all be living in caves and eating raw food?
EDIT: Geoffl got in before me but I'm still going to post below, because it takes me ages to type and I am not going to waste. the effort!!!!
NOT ALL scientist agree that climate change is man made. Nor do I believe we are heading for climate catastrophe and certainly not in the next 10 years as some alarmist claim.
Is man having an impact on climate? Maybe? Possibly? Who knows for certain? And if so, no amount of electric vehicles,
solar panels, wind turbines or tofu eating is going to change the possibility.
The only thing that can realistically change the possibility of man changing the climate is to reduce the worlds population to less than ten million! Quite how we get to that figure is open to debate - or not.
Some interesting reading below.
A Smithsonian Institution project has tried to reconstruct temperatures for the Phanerozoic Eon, or roughly the last half a billion years.
Preliminary results released in 2019 showed warm temperatures dominating most of that time, with global temperatures repeatedly rising above 80°F and even 90°F—much too warm for ice sheets or perennial sea ice. About 250 million years ago, around the equator of the supercontinent Pangea, it was even too hot for peat swamps!
Preliminary results from a Smithsonian Institution project led by Scott Wing and Brian Huber, showing Earth's average surface temperature over the past 500 million years. For most of the time, global temperatures appear to have been too warm (red portions of line) for persistent polar ice caps. The most recent 50 million years are an exception. Image adapted from Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Geologists and paleontologists have found that, in the last 100 million years, global temperatures have peaked twice. One spike was the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse roughly 92 million years ago, about 25 million years before Earth’s last dinosaurs went extinct. Widespread volcanic activity may have boosted atmospheric carbon dioxide. Temperatures were so high that champsosaurs (crocodile-like reptiles) lived as far north as the Canadian Arctic, and warm-temperature forests thrived near the South Pole.
Another hothouse period was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) about 55-56 million years ago. Though not quite as hot as the Cretaceous hothouse, the PETM brought
rapidly rising temperatures. During much of the Paleocene and early Eocene, the poles were free of ice caps, and palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle.
Around the time of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, much of the continental United States had a sub-tropical environment. This fossil palm is from Fossil Butte National Monument, Wyoming. Image courtesy U.S.
National Park Service.
During the PETM, the global mean temperature appears to have risen by as much as 5-8°C (9-14°F) to an average temperature as high as 73°F. (Again, today’s global average is shy of 60°F.) At roughly the same time, paleoclimate data like fossilized phytoplankton and ocean sediments record a massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, at least doubling or possibly even quadrupling the background concentrations.
Global surface temperatures were generally high throughout the Paleocene and Eocene, with a particularly warm spike at the boundary between the two geological epochs around 56 million years ago. Temperatures in the distant past are inferred from proxies, in this case, oxygen isotope ratios from fossil foraminifera, single-celled marine organisms. "Q" stands for Quaternary. Graphic produced using
data from
Zachos and
Hansen, with help from Dr. Carrie Morrill, Director of the World Data Service for Paleoclimatology.
It is still uncertain where all the carbon dioxide came from and what the exact sequence of events was. Scientists have considered the drying up of large inland seas, volcanic activity, thawing permafrost, release of methane from warming ocean sediments, huge wildfires, and even—briefly—a comet.
wildcamping.co.uk
www.forbes.com
