millennia

Yes and I saw the latest theory that it was a runaway global warming event that may have caused this. However let's not discount the fact that the runaway global warming was said to be the result of massive volcanoes the size of Siberia that erupted for 40,000 years - that's a flippin lot of CO2, certainly more than the entire fossilised carbon reserve, probably by a factor of about 1000. Ice ages cause similar extinctions for species that can't migrate, and even ancestors of man succumbed to this - but made the result stronger for it. In epoch terms yes, but way bigger than any observed warming that has sparked such mass hysteria. "If it existed at all"? All the Dickensian post cards that still get sent out every year just a figment of our imagination then, what do you think inspired them? Yes it would, if it ever happened. We have survived SUSTAINED levels of over 2000ppm of CO2 and they were the most prolific for life - the Mesozoic - and there was no "runaway" global warming. CO2 is vital for plant life and therefore the rest of life on this planet, less than 200ppm and plants stop growing. An Ice Age would destroy the grain producing areas of the planet, the only reason modern man has triumphed is because of 6 species of plant that cannot exist in a cold arid climate an Ice Age would produce - never mind the 1km of ice sitting on top of the main grain producing areas of the planet! Blimey

Hence my 400 year lifespan statement B) - I wasn't suggesting that Canada has the ability to solve the world's energy crisis. However I remember as a kid there was a lot of speculation about the real reasons behind the Falklands conflict and the possibility of huge oil reserves as preliminary studies had shown a potential. However such was the nature of the area there was absolutely no economic point unless the price of oil rocketed to some barmy figure like $120 a barrel! Oh

In answer to the original question - not even remotely accurate. They couldn't even predict the intensity of this year's La Nina (or before you leap on me for the short time scale the complete stop in global temperature rise so far this century, as measured by satellites), so how the heck can they be expected to calculate the temperature 10, 20, 50 years out when their margins for error are at best 20% per decade (making them no better than a guess mid century). Do anybody believe they have successfully modelled this: with enough accuracy to base global economic decisions on? I don't think so....

Yep, at last count over 400 YEARS of reserves, plus another 33 billion barrel discovery by Brazil. Germany has 11 TRILLION cubic metres of gas it can't get at because at the moment it's in an environmentally sensitive area, but it only takes Gazprom to cut off their gas supply (they take 40% of their gas from Russia) over some dispute and you can forget the pretty countryside! So yes I can see us continuing to throw CO2 into the atmosphere for a while yet, it just remains to be seen if the current solar minimum / La Nina event produces enough cooling of the oceans to suck in more CO2. The warming up to the El Nino of 1998 made the ocean barf millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere through the simple and well documented (if not consensus B) ) process of solubility of CO2 in sea water being affected by the temperature of the water. Just how much of the recent rise in CO2 is dependent on us and how much on ocean temperature is about to be tested big time with the cooling phase we are now in. If the ocean is a bigger factor than humans then CO2 should drop in the face of massive increases from the developing nations. So we need to wait - we should see it well before any carbon reduction scheme could realistically make a difference - as the latest announcement from the USA showed only last week. With regard to 350; a typical made up number with absolutely no scientific basis except randomness. If you get all the CO2 data from the 20th Century, not just the ones the IPCC cherry picked for their report to produce a "hockey stick", you will see values up to 500ppm 70 years ago.

I thought this was an interesting "line in the sand" piece: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/OceansandC...rsAustapr08.pdf If the latest observed cooling produces a drop in atmospheric CO2 despite a runaway China now surpassing the USA in emissions it is going to take a heck of a lot of explaining. On the flip side if the CO2 continues to rise despite cooling SST it will show that at least we are responsible for the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and weakens the planetary self regulation arguement. I don't think the AGW lobby would like to deal with an atmospheric CO2 reduction, unlike temperature drops it's just not easy to explain away to the general public because so MUCH effort has been put into demonizing one of our most important life sustaining gases. The first headline to declare CO2 falls is going to cause a bloodbath in the climate change debate, and we are less than 2 years away from finding out..... We live in interesting times.

You know, every so often a nugget pops into a discussion and seems to get overlooked. I'd advise a closer look at the second link. For the first time I can remember the BBC actually looked as though they might be trying to provide balance to the climate change debate and were subsequently brow beaten into watering down their article. Jo Abess actually wrote:

I think this warrants a thread all of it's own. Humans have only got to where they are because of the interglacial and the ability to specialise on 20 (and principally 6) species of plant instead of the 1500 they lived on for hundreds of thousands of years. A significant cooling would destroy the grain belts as the areas now most specialised for these species would become ever more cold and arid. There wouldn't be enough room left on the planet to move these areas south without wiping out areas that would already be under incredible stress due to the changing climate. I reckon that even with technology the maximum sustainable population of Earth in an Ice Age is about 750m people. I don't see 6bn people just starving to death to achieve that figure - we aren't built that way - it would precipitate unimagined migration until the friction sparked a massive resource war. With all the nukes lying about large scale population reduction would come pretty quickly, and the Nuclear Winter of a large scale exchange might be just the sort of tipping point we need to go into the next (and some say overdue) Ice Age. Fact is you can scare yourself silly about anything and there's precious little you can do about most of it. I just don't want my time on earth made more tedious by the hair shirt brigade when it won't do one jot of good and might even be completely opposite of what is really needed. Time to say f**k it and open a beer

Satellite data has shown NO warming since 1979 and also there is a complete absence of upper Troposhere warming (the GW hotspot) above the tropics - as predicted by the IPCC report for AGW to be the cause of any upward trend in temperatures. Ground based observations are heavily skewed to major population centres and therefore affected by urban heat island effect. There is plenty of evidence that many thermometers that provided data to the models used by the IPCC are situated in car parks and next to air conditioning exhaust vents and other completely unsuitable places, and that many truly rural sites have shown a significant cooling trend (some have warmed as well, the climate is a complex - in fact chaotic - thing). I can't see how the satellite data can be ignored as it's way more accurate that aggregated min/max records that are dispropotionatley scattered across the planet. The debate continues....

It's actually a SEA based shelf and it's ain't going anywhere this year at least as it's already refrozen with a full 6 months of Antarctic winter to go.

Assuming the ocean conveyer has a cycle of 1000 years, and the Medieval Warming Period ran from 1000 to 800 years ago (as well as the Roman Warming 2000 years ago), could it not just be part of a reaction to that? OK I throw my hands up, I'm not an Oceanographer, but my physics background tells me it takes more than the length of recent observations to significantly alter a heat engine with the inertia that the oceans have. Let's face it, we don't have more than an inkling of how the ocean and atmosphere really work, and yet we are making economic decisions on the back of this lack of understanding.

This is the great scandal - while everybody is fretting about credit crunches (despite record bank profits) and constant global warming drivel (I've put in an offical complaint to the BBC this week after the ridiculous 30 second slot reinforcing fears of ice loss in Antarctica with no balancing material) they are missing a MUCH bigger crisis developing with rainforests being cut down to plant palm oil for bio fuels, maize crops being turned over to bio fuels, and a potential for dramatic loss of production due to bad weather. We are screwing with the planet in the name of environmentalism and risking a starving population. Two back to back catastrophic grain harvests in the major NH producing nations would spark a level of food crisis that could also increase tensions and even spark a war. THIS IS A LOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN A BLOODY BIT OF ICE FALLING OFF THE TIP OF ANTARCTICA - WAKE UP!!!

Antarctic ice reached a record last October, based on Satellite images which admittedly only go back to 1979. However it is now the start of their Autumn, the area around the break that happened only a few weeks ago has now refrozen and the ice pack is currently 60% AHEAD of it's normal freeze rate for this time of year. The graph below is the 800 pound gorilla in the room for the IPCC - the difference between the end of the Southern summer in 1980 (when the "consensus" of scientists thought we were going into an new Ice Age) and this month is an increase of some 3 million sq km and although a small time to make assumptions on (although that never stopped Gore) the 29 year trend is up. Of course now we get the "climate change not global warming" brigade running around trying to justify how man has made both the world warmer and Antarctica colder (and produced a record breaking cold NH winter) - except all the satellite data states there is absolutlely no warming trend since 1979, and the slight warming trend to 1998 has been totally reversed to 2008 and now we look to be heading back to where we were in the 70s again.

Pedentic So substitute week for year or decade - fact is these models don't work backwards and tell us what we have already experienced. If a model can take data from 20 years agao and 10 years ago and without tweaking - just straight data input - and accurately show how the climate for the Earth was for those years then it makes it a lot more believable runnign forward. Things is all we ever see is projections, and usually for long enough in the future the the people doing it will have got their pensions by the time we find out how close they are. Some reason to formulate a tax plan and throw on the hair shirts whenever you start your car eh? Apologies for the typos, just running out the door to do a 50 mile drive

The current CO2 concentration is around the 400ppm mark. Over the whole of Earth's history we can measure from paleo-climatic measurements the average concentration of CO2 is about 2,500ppm. The world was not a ball of molten lead until a few hundred thousand years ago, and while important CO2 is NOT the chief greenhouse gas. Water vapour is by far more important and a change in concentrations of this make a far bigger difference than we can make cutting human output of CO2 a few percent. To see the doomsayers predictions you would think that a doubling of CO2 would see a runaway greenhouse effect and destruction of life on Earth, and yet when concentrations of CO2 were 10 times what they are now during the times of the dinosaurs it is likely that average global temperatures were only in the order of 22 deg C. Yes, a heck of a lot warmer than now but no sign of any "runaway" effect. Cloud cover has a far bigger impact on surface temperture than CO2 concentrations, and don't forget how much cleaner our atmosphere has become in the developed world in the last 50 years - more sunlight getting through. The fact we have been cleaning up our act over the last 50 years could even be contributing to the trend. You only have to see the effect on the US surface temperature after 9/11 - a 1 deg C rise in just 3 days because aircraft contrails weren't blotting out the sun, completely reversed when the 'planes returned to the skies. All this shows how much more massively complicated the picture is and can't be nailed to the emissions of one gas. There are reports of the sea heating up to 3000m down, and this is shown as yet another sign of GW. Yet nobody points out that to heat the sea at this depth involves currents and heat exchange cycles that can last over hundreds of years. This is far more likely to be a reaction to warming events that pre date the little ice age. Sometimes we do pander to our own feelings of importance when considering what effects we may be having on the planet and I do think the pessimistic views are more politically driven than factual. Also why do we never see the benefits of GW discussed to balance the arguements? In the 1998 El Nino year much was reported on the $2 billion of damage caused by floods and storms to the US. Yet very little was printed about the benefits, such as an exceptionally mild winter dramatically reducing the use of heating fuel? In fact it was estimated the benefits to the US economy amounted to some $17 billion - a net gain of $15 billion. I myself saved 25% on my heating bill this winter due to the exceptionally mild climate, and paradoxically saved a whole wedge of CO2 going into the atmosphere from my domestic boiler! This seems to have been missed by the scientists. So can we have some balance please? Yes, the world's climate is changing. Yes, we are producing more CO2 and the atmospheric concentration is increasing. No, plotting two graphs next to each other and declaring "correlation" is not proof. No, there is still little evidence that on balance the planet will be worse off as predictions of mass famines and great storms are based on climate models that not only can't tell what the weather will be next week, but when you put last week's data into them they can't tell you what the weather was LAST week!

I am an IT consultant and with broadband technology can't believe many of us commute at all! I had two glorious years working from home (carbon footprint = the walk upstairs from the kitchen after getting a coffee ) but the short sightedness of companies I have worked for since then means on average I drive 300 miles a week. The locations are varied and often away from resonable public transport links (1 such contract would have involved travelling 5 hours a day or the choice of not living at home for most of the week - the car took 3 hours a day and the chance to live in the building I pay a mortgage on!!!). C'mon employers (and particularly the Civil Service, who are still very much in bums on seats mode) if you REALLY have a commitment to reducing CO2 then promote teleworking for those that can do it. I reckon we could reduce traffic by 20% - no need to build more roads, more flexible working for families, reduced emissions, oh the list goes on and on....