APRIL 2007

An hour and a half programme this evening devoted to the place carbon dioxide has in global warming. It didn’t dispute global warming was occurring but it did suggest that it is all due to the activity of the sun and our increased output of carbon dioxide was having a minimal part to play. Their main points were why did temperatures go down from the 1940s to the 1970s when carbon dioxide was increasing but sun spots were decreasing and why isn’t the upper atmosphere heating up faster as all the IPCC forecasts suggest it should be? It produced some neat graphs comparing the number of sun spots with the earth’s temperature and suggested that this correlated better than did the CO2 levels against the earth’s temperature. So why do so many scientists agree with the IPCC? Well the programme found several eminent ones that didn’t but it suggested that so many do because that is where the research money is. It went on to suggest that the climate warming scare is causing great harm by preventing Africa gaining electricity supplies except in the most costly ways - through wind power and solar panels holding back its development and meaning people dying much sooner than they should. Serious stuff - what do people think?
Response:

prunejuice Says:
March 9th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

I watched the global warming ’swindle’ too and if I hadn’t got a bit of science knowledge, would have found the evidence compelling. The science was poor and presented in a totally biased sensationalist way. Maybe sun spots do have an influence. But so too might CO2, methane, aerosols, water vapour etc. While we don’t know for certain, what’s wrong with the precautionary principle and reducing, as Pete says, human activity to restrict CO2 outputs? After all, we need to find viable and safe alternatives for fossil fuels anyway, so we can address more than one problem at the same time.

te Smith Says:
March 13th, 2007 at 7:18 pm

Monbiot does it again. I love the punchline “No one in [Channel 4’s] science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed scientific paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail”

What is happening in North-eastern Nigeria is happening all over Africa. While visiting my families in Northern Uganda recently, I witness the same thing. Forests that I remember as a kid are gone. Huge trees I use to play under as child have all been cut for charcoal. In Uganda at least the call it the Southern Sudan effect because most of the charcoals are being transported to Southern Sudan where they can fetch three times what they sell for in Uganda. In the case of people of Northern Uganda, one can at least attribute the problem to lack of mean to support once self given people have been in internment camps for the last 15year. Fire wood and charcoals have become the sold mean of earning income. Once can say that these people don't see the nexus between cutting tree and desertification and I too once though the same thing. But I conversation I had with some one on bus while travelling to Kitgum Town in northern Uganda shaded a new light on the reason why people do what they do. When I raised the issue of environmental impact of all the try cutting on the future, my friend quickly reminded me that once worries about environment if they think there is a future. And indeed in the case of Northern Uganda people, it is not hard to believe that such is the prevailing attitude of the day. Life in camps give any one very little hope of the future. Perhaps, that is the driving forces behind desertification throughout Africa. The only solution to this problem is to provide people with alternative means of survival and to offer them basic enviromental classes. Without quick change of attitude, Africa will burn and soon the rest of the world will follow. And none of the environment conservation going on in the western world will mean a damn thing without saving Africa or any other third world continents like South America.
Otika, Portland, Oregon USA

BOTSWANA
Climate change would and still gonna affect most parts of Africa, I mean in early 1980s it used to be heavy rain during the raining season but those day have gone, people no longer plough due to uncertainty of rain. Boteti river used to in full flood but more now.
kerimuine hevita, rakops, Botswana

HOW THE WE3STERN CITIZENS ARE LOOKING AT IT:

Wars of the world: how global warming puts 60 nations at risk

As scientists deliver a detailed report on the impact of climate change this week, an 'IoS' investigation shows it will spark a major rise in conflicts

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor ,Sunday Independent

Published: 01 April 2007

Scores of countries face war for scarce land, food and water as global warming increases. This is the conclusion of the most devastating report yet on the effects of climate change that scientists and governments prepare to issue this week.

More than 60 nations, mainly in the Third World, will have existing tensions hugely exacerbated by the struggle for ever-scarcer resources. Others now at peace - including China, the United States and even parts of Europe - are expected to be plunged into conflict. Even those not directly affected will be threatened by a flood of hundreds of millions of "environmental refugees".

The threat is worrying world leaders. The new UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, told a global warming conference last month: "In coming decades, changes in the environment - and the resulting upheavals, from droughts to inundated coastal areas - are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict."

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, has repeatedly called global warming "a security issue" and a Pentagon report concluded that abrupt climate change could lead to "skirmishes, battles and even war due to resource constraints".

The fears will be increased by the second report this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The result of six years' work by 2,500 of the world's top scientists, it will be published on Good Friday.

The first report, released two months ago, concluded that global warming was now "unequivocal" and it was 90 per cent certain that human activities are to blame. The new one will be the first to show for certain that its effects are already becoming evident around the world.

Tomorrow, representatives of the world's governments will meet in Brussels to start four days of negotiation on the ultimate text of the report, which they are likely to tone down somewhat.

But the final confidential draft presented to them by the scientists makes it clear that the consequences of global warming are appearing far sooner and faster than expected. "Changes in climate are now affecting biological and physical systems on every continent," it says.

In 20 years, tens of millions more Latin Americans and hundreds of millions more Africans will be short of water, and by 2050 one billion Asians could face water shortages. The glaciers of the Himalayas, which feed the great rivers of the continent, are likely to melt away almost completely by 2035, threatening the lives of 700 million people.

Though harvests will initially increase in temperate countries - as the extra warmth lengthens growing seasons - they could fall by 30 per cent in India, confronting 130 million people with starvation, by the 2050s.

By 2080, 100 million people could be flooded out of their homes every year as the sea rises to cover their land, turning them into environmental refugees. And up to a third of the world's wild species could be "at high risk of irreversible extinction" from even relatively moderate warming.

International Alert, "an independent peace-building organisation", has complied a list of 61 countries that are already unstable or have recently suffered armed conflict where existing tensions will be exacerbated by shortages of food and water and by the disease, storm flooding and sea-level rise that will accompany global warming, or by the deforestation that helps to cause it. The list forms the basis of the map on the opposite page.

Four years ago the Pentagon report concluded: "As famine, disease and weather-related disasters strike... many countries' needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression."

Many experts believe this has begun. Last year John Reid, the Home Secretary, blamed global warming for helping to cause the genocide in Darfur. Water supplies are seen as a key cause of the Arab-Israeli conflicts. The Golan Heights are important because they control key springs and rivers and the Sea of Galilee, while vital aquifers lie under the West Bank.

John Ashton, the Government's climate change envoy, says that global warming should be addressed "not as a long-term threat to our environment, but as an immediate threat to our security and prosperity".