eddie

I went away and did some calculations and was quite suprised by the result I got: The mass of the earth is 5.97x10^24kg The energy that a 50 megaton nuclear weapon releases = 2.09 x 10^17 Joules (1 ton of TNT=4.184x10^9 Joules) From that I worked out that if the energy was used to accelerate the Earth in one direction it would be going 138 meters a year faster in that direction. 138 meters a year sounds a lot (in fact it sounds wrong so if someone who knows about physics could verify this number?)

We would need a daily average temperature of around 14.4C for the rest of the month to get to 13C and that seems fairly unlikely to me. Looking at the GFS I reckon it's going to come in somewhere around 12.6C.

While I agree that the dust and particles thrown into the atmosphere by nuclear testing could have cooled the earth, C14 almost certainly did not contribute to this. The figure you quoted of 8.4% of the carbon over NZ being C14 is far far far too high. All the nuclear tests in the world only created 1.75 tonnes of C14. Even if those 1.75 tonnes were released all in one go over New Zealand, C14 would make up only around 4.6 x 10^-9 % of the carbon in the atmosphere over NZ. "Carbon-14 is also a weak beta emitter (156 KeV, no gamma), with a half-life of 5730 years (4.46 Ci/g). Atmospheric testing during the fifties and early sixties produced about 3.4 g of C-14 per kiloton (15.2 curies) for a total release of 1.75 tonnes (7.75x10^6 curies). For comparison, only about 1.2 tonnes of C-14 naturally exists, divided between the atmosphere (1 tonne) and living matter (0.2 tonne)."

Given that only one out of every trillion carbon atoms is C14 I would think that it is unlikely that C14 could have any physical effect on our climate.

Nogin, the best I could find to explain why Antarctic ice is growing (or at least not shrinking) was this.... New Evidence Shows Antarctica Has Warmed in Last 150 Years "The main reason that Antarctica appears to have cooled during the 1990s is that a natural phenomenon called the Antarctic Oscillation, or Southern Annular Mode, was largely in its positive phase during that time. The Antarctic Oscillation is so named because atmospheric pressure in far southern latitudes randomly oscillates between positive and negative phases. During the positive phase, a vortex of wind is tightly focused on the polar region and prevents warmer air from mixing with the frigid polar air, which keeps Antarctica colder. Typically the Antarctic Oscillation alternates between phases about every month. But in the 1990s the postive phase occurred much more often, Schneider said. Without the influence of the Antarctic Oscillation, he said, it is likely the Antarctic would show the same kind of warming as the rest of the Southern Hemisphere. Before 1975, Antarctica appears to have warmed at about the same rate as the rest of the hemisphere, about 0.25 degree C per century. But since 1975, while the Antarctic showed overall cooling, the Southern Hemisphere has warmed at a rate of about 1.4 degrees per century."

According to Cryosphere Today, sea ice area is running slightly above average in the Antarctic when measured against the 1979-2000 mean? I appreciate it's not quite as simple as just the area covered by ice, and that some Antarctic areas have seen a big decrease, but still, if you are going to say something like that it would be helpful to provide some links so that people can see what you are talking about.

Appologies if this has already been posted but its video of a tornado spawned from the same storm system as the Greensburg Tornado. Amazing footage... 50 - 100 yards from tornado

I think you are missing the point completely, *I* could move house but that wouldn't really address the actual problem which is crap public transport. Are you suggesting that it's going to be easier for everyone in the country that doesn't live close to their work to move house or job than to add more public transport routes? The point you make about people maybe not using the public transport if it were provided does have some validity, however, they definitely aren't going to use it if it doesn't exist.

Interesting reading..... OFWAT Leakage Report

If it was expressed that the purpose of increasing tax on high poluting vehicles was to encourage people to buy less poluting vehicles and that was the end result how is that a con?

You are correct, if you managed to get everyone to buy a very green car then revenue from both petrol and road tax would drop and tax somewhere else would need to be raised. That doesn't change the fact that everyone would now be running a very green car. The policy would have been succesful in the respect that C02 emission would be reduced. Here is a similar paradox: Everyone says that being energy efficient saves you money. If reduce your usage by 50% then your bill goes down by 50%. However, if everyone reduced their usage by 50%, the electricity generating companies would have to put their prices up or face a 50% cut in profits. As for the develping world, obviously we can't tax them but by encouraging our economy down the green route by taxation (or other policies) the resulting fallout of new green technologies can only help give them a viable alternative to fosil fuels.

Public transport in this country is a joke if you don't live (or work) in the middle of a city. My journey to work is about 11 miles. Too far to walk and a bit too hilly to cycle comfortably (although I might start having a go at this if I can build my fitness up a bit) It takes just over 20 minutes to drive (this doesn't vary much even during rush hour because it's all semi rural roads). To do the same journey on public transport takes, according to the West Yorkshire Metro journey planner, 1 hour 19 minutes with 2 bus changes. So thats almost 2 hours a day I would loose. Now I don't know what price all of you put on 10 hours a week of your life but they would have to make driving *considerably* more expensive than it is now to get me to use public transport in it's current state. The main problem is that bus routes all converge in the centre of towns. If you want to go somewhere that isn't on the bus route from your home you have to go right into a town, change buses and then come back out again. If I was in charge of public transport policy, the first thing I would do is create a database that had the home and work address of everybody in the country. I would then work out (in both time and distance terms) how long people's work journeys would be by car and by public transport. It would then be a simple computational excercise to see what extra bus and train routes would need to be added to give more people a real alternative to their cars.

Well the increasing taxation on cigarettes is one policy that has run through successive governments. It's hard to pick a similar environmental tax but then in reality AGW has only become a big issue during the current Labour government. I do think taxation will work in practice and not just theory though. The problem we have at the moment is that renewable energy supplies and green technologies are more expensive than their C02 based equivalents. Now if everybody started to buy green energy the cost would go down because increased demand would drive economies of scale and also the technology would advance more quickly because more money would go into R&D. However, this won't happen if everybody buys the cheaper carbon generated electricity. I see taxation as a way of overcoming this initial hurdle. You make green electricity as cheap (or a bit cheaper) than the carbon based equivalent via taxation. This will level the playing field until green technology matures enough to stand on its own merit. You could argue that this price 'leveling' should come via a carrot (subsidies) and not stick but in reality that money has to come from somewhere. As for Cameron or Brown, well I won't be voting for either of those two but I think both of them now realise that climate change has to be addressed and I wouldn't be suprised, after the next election of course, to see new green taxes delivering results.

I'm not sure if I understand exactly what you are trying to say jethro. Are saying that 'everything' should have more tax applied to it and this will reduce consumer demand and therefore our use of resources? If that is what you mean then i'm sorry but that won't work. Inflation already increases the price of everything but that doesn't have the effect of reducing demand. If you increase the cost of *everything* then in reality everything still costs the same except the value of money goes down. Also, I don't think anyone on here would argue that we don't need to reduce consumption. How that reduction is achieved is what is being debated. My appologies if that isn't what you mean. I happen to think that taxation does work as a way to reduce C02 emissions but it has to be balanced, carefully targeted and introduced slowly. What I mean by balanced is that if taxation is increased in one area then is should be reduced in another. Increase VAT on non efficient appliances, decrease VAT on more efficient appliances etc. I also think the government needs to go beyond tax in some areas. Why tax the top poluting cars when you can just ban them altogether? Introduce tougher efficiency standards for new cars. If a car doesn't meet them, it doesn't get sold. Gradually increase the minimum MPG allowed. This also removes one of my main problems with taxation which is that it allows rich people to pollute. Just because you can afford to run a 4.0L car that does 12mpg doesn't mean you should be allowed to. I also love the idea that someone mentioned of marking everything sold with a carbon index. That would certainly start to get people thinking about their impact on the world.

Sometimes I wish I was unaware of CET records and statistics because I am actually starting to find it quite frightening how fast we are warming up. I went outside the other night to move my wheelie bin and it felt strangely warm. This was about 9pm. When I checked, depite the fact it was dark and raining, it was 16C! Sixteen degrees! At night, in the rain, in April! That's just crazy. How much longer can this warming continue? If some of this warming is due to synoptics then surely we must hit a point soon where it just can't get any hotter and things will either even out or cool down, at least for a little while?

I'm going for 11.5 with lots of rain.

The fact I am cycling coast-coast early April means we are guaranteed a cold and wet start. The rest of April will be warm and sunny. 8.7C

Thanks for the link P3. A very interesting read. The report does give a very good account of current thinking on solar varition but, as you say, it also highlights there are still a lot of uncertainties. It mentions there are consenting views among climatologists with respect to how much solar activity affects climate and also that very little work has been done trying to work out non linear reponses to solar forcing. It seems to me there is still a long way to go to understand the impact of the sun on past and future climate. The report also highlights this but doesnt speculate what impact it may have on climate..... Possibly a link between cold periods and solar minima... However, no clear link between cosmic rays and cloud formation.....

Late to the debate here. I'm one of those people that thinks we probably are causing the climate to warm but I still enjoyed this program and thought it had some very important points to make. Firstly, it addressed the point that we (the west) are trying to force our green politics on the third world. We should not deny them their industrial revolution and even if some of the dire predictions do come true many less people will die in Affrica if they have electricity, hospitals, clean water and industrial scale mechanized farming than die today. I don't care how much sea levels rise. Also, what if it turns out that the warming is natural? We will still have to deal with the consequences of that warming and the world will be in a better position to do so if 3rd world countries have been developed. Secondly, it addressed the mass hysteria and frankly awful journalism that surounds the GW debate. Reading some of the scare stories in the media you would think half the cities in the world will be under water in 20 years and civilisation will end. People underestimate mans ability to adapt. Just look what has happened in the last 200 years in europe. Whole cities have been near bombed to the ground. Wars have been fought and entire populations displaced. Flu pandemics have killed millons. These events took place over a period of days and months yet we bounced back. Global warming is a slow gradual process measurable over decades. Lets not wreck or slow down our economies trying to rapidly switch from carbon based fuel. Thirdly, it addressed the point that alternative theories to global warming have not been fully explored yet and any scientist who dares to question AGW is effectively shouted down and dismissed. This is not healthy. The earth has warmed and cooled before we came along and it's just as important we understand why this happened as it is that we understand how CO2 can cause warming.

X-rays, Gamma rays ,visible light, UV light, infra-red, radio waves etc. are all just terms that describe frequency ranges within the electromagnetic spectrum. All electromagnectic radiation can be described by its wavelength. The sun emits energy that covers a wide range of wavelengths. The earth's surface (being solid!) is much denser than the atmosphere. Wavelengths of radiation that can pass directly through the earths atmosphere are absorbed by the surface. When an object absorbs any frequency of electromagnetic radiation it heats up. At the kind of temperatures that you find at the surface of the earth, objects will radiate their heat energy in the infra red spectrum. Through this mechanism, energy that might have arrived at the earth in the form of visible light (or UV light or whatever) can be emited from the earth's surface in the infra red spectrum. The CO2 in the atmosphere is very effective at absorbing/reflecting infra red radiation. Some of the energy that would have been radiated straight into space is now reflected/radiated back down to the surface again. This results in the earth's surface/atmosphere having a higher temperature than it would have if the CO2 was not there. /edited because I am rubbish at typing.

Well my 4.7 punt for Feb looks like it's going to be at least 1.3 C too low, January was very warm and 2006 was the hotest year ever. I'm starting think it would be crazy to bet on any month being much below average. I am therefore going for a March CET of 9.0C. Let's hope I am wrong.

Awesome photos! Thanks!

You don't need to fully understand fourier analysis to know that isn't a magical thing that will tell you all about natural climate cycles. Fourier anaysis is ok but you need have to have a data set worth analysing in the first place and you also need to know what the results actually mean. We haven't been recording acurate, global temperature records/ocean currents/wind direction/cloud cover/etc/etc. for very long at all, certainly not long enough to spot some of the more subtle cycles. Also, just because you think you have isoloated an individual temperature signal from the climate 'noise' doesn't mean you have any idea what caused it or if it will continue in the same way. I'm sure the climate models do try and take some natural cycles into account but I bet they aren't doing a very good job. Please understand that I'm not arguing against the existence AGW or the need to do something about it. I just think we don't know very much about natural climate cycles.

Bacup and especially the surounding villiages usually do pretty well for snowfall due the altitude. If there is any snow in the area at all you will get it there. I remeber when I was a kid there would quite often be 6 inches of snow in Weir and and nothing at all in Burnley.

There is only one solution I can see to global warming and that is nuclear power. Wind, wave, and solar power all have their part to play as does using energy more efficiently but the true 'green' energy sources just can't provide enough energy and being more efficient is only putting off the invevitable. As some have already pointed out in this thread, China and India are going through a period of huge develpment. African nations will probably soon follow so basically it doesn't matter how efficient we make cars or televisions becuase there are going to be billions more of them. What actually matters is where the energy to power them comes from. I think the west should now be spending huge ammounts of cash on building new fission reactors so we can stop burning fossil fuels in the short term as well as pumping as much money as possible into researching nuclear fusion as safer, longer term solution. Nuclear fusion has the potential to be a much cleaner/safer form of nulclear power and doesn't require or produce atomic bomb making material. This would make it safe to export that technology to developing nations to help them stop CO2 emissions. I believe the most developed nations have a duty to provide developing nations with an alternative to fossil fuels. We can't just preach to them about being green.