Village

Its not news that the globe has been generally and ever-so-slightly warming for the past 11,000 years. The temperature graph is not a straight line and the rate of change varies. The current rate of warming is well within the bounds of what has always been accepted as natural. The question that everyone should be asking is; why should the warming which has been occuring since the last ice age now be re-labelled as man made?

I personally think its a good thing to try to reduce our emissions relative to energy production. However, one must keep this in perspective. The best estimates currently are that 97% of the total increase in CO2 can be attributed to natural processes. CO2 is not a polutant, its quite the opposite and the more there is available then the more life there is and this leads to greater diversity also. Further, we must make sure that we dont restrict too much progress in doing so because ultimately its only progress which will ensure our future. If we do not progress we are most definitely doomed.

We will never be getting hotter summers and colder winters here in the UK.

The answer of course is that it could go anywhere. It could stay put, it could be lost to space or it could end up where it came from in the first place! We will be pleased of some of that energy back again to get our temps back up to normal and so will Scandinavia, Europe and North America where it came from in the first place.

These people are desperate to link every extreme weather event to Anthropogenic Global Warming theory because they need to fill the vacuum where real data and conclusive proof should be. Every time the data demonstrates that there is a problem with their predictions and theory then they change the theory to fit the data. This completely contravenes normal scientific procedure where the real data should support the theory. This is why the name "Global Warming" was replaced with "Climate Change". You see, they couldnt even support the theory name with the data, so they changed that too!

There is a real ongoing issue with temperature data over the decades. To be able to demonstrate that there is warming or cooling taking place one needs a level playing field and commonality through the decades in terms of site and method. There is no level playing field. The method has changed and the sites have changed and continually change. An extreme example of site alteration is the London weather center where the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect has completely altered the site location data. Further, this raises another problem because there must be an agreed formula for compensating for these changes at every site globally. There is not.

I dont buy in to this new age anthropogenic catastrophic story. Here is the link that you asked for, you will note that it was 100 years ago more or less as I stated when the ice was last at low levels to allow passage of a vessel, so its nothing new. It has been noted before. http://en.wikipedia..../Roald_Amundsen "In 1903, Amundsen led the first expedition to successfully traverse Canada's Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans" In terms of the CET table, If you pull out the CET's for 1989 thru 1999 and then 2000 thru 2010 and compare you should clearly see how much it has cooled this decade by comparison. Its no longer warming, that stopped many years ago. The predictions of an ever warming UK climate that were promoted widely at the end of the last century have been embarrasingly wrong.

I still feel that the process of documenting individual observations in quite different circumstances, locations and times early on in data sets and the fact that we now rely more on satelite data, therefore the method of colating data has changed, one should be warey. The same is true with weather data which in recent years has completely changed to be almost totally automated. But more than this is that I feel that the story of ice is seriously longer term than simply decades. This process of ice reduction may well occur over and over again. We do know that there have been other periods of reduced ice, however the detail just isnt there to compare. Lets not forget that one hundred years ago most of the extreme warmest winter temperature records were set here in the UK. Most of these have never been surpassed and it was also about one hundred years ago that the Northwest Passage was navigated and has been closed due to too much ice ever since. But if one listens too much to the global warming story one would be forgiven for believing that it is warmer now and getting warmer all the time.

Well I guess that is what is happening because thats all we know, just a few short decades of satelite data. But I question that this extremely limited period of data is enough to demonstrate that this level of Arctic Sea ice is unprecedented. Further, we just dont know enough to make future predictions that the Arctic Sea ice will continue to reduce based on one tiny snippet of data and time. One only needs to look at our own country to be warey of making such claims when one notes that the last decade has been cooler than the last decade of the 1900's when all the predictions from so called 'experts' without exception were for a warmer future here in the UK, now we can see that the opposite has been true.

Apart from one man's unproven theory about CO2 leading global temperatures; Does anyone know of any reason why anyone should even consider linking our ever changing weather to Mankind rather than the huge ever changing natural forcings? I have studied our weather and climate here in the UK for almost four decades. I personally can not find any reason to suspect that our climate and weather is any different than it has ever demonstrated to be over the past 100 years. In terms of extreme weather or in terms of long term averages. Further, the reduced levels of Arctic Sea ice have been noted a number of times in the past. During these other periods we were without satelite data. Therefore ancient records and references from mariners can only be determined as unconfirmed. This therefore does NOT mean that the reduced levels of sea ice are unprecedented today. It is much more likely that its the first time that we have had the tools with which to study the phenomena on such a huge scale in it's entirety.