Global Warming and all that.

Peter questions the recent media hype on Global Warming.

Can I join Ron Watts and also confess to being thoroughly fed up with being bombarded by the media on the Global Warming situation our planet now finds itself in. They (the media) seem to me on occasions to have pronounced themselves prosecution council, judge and jury in this matter regardless of the facts.

Firstly I'm not sure how a handful of GCSEs in subjects like Drama and English and a few years as a cub reporter on the Bugginsvill Times makes a 'twenty something' reporter an expert on Global Warming. Why should we believe them? Especially as the real experts who have studied the problem all their lives since gaining their Doctorate in a related subject, cannot agree? Where do these reporters get their insight into a problem that has beset the scientific community for decades? I sometimes get the feeling their articles have more to do with editor's deadlines and a couple of pints of Fosters at lunchtime, rather than known, quantifiable facts.

That said, a few 'facts' have emerged (or risen to prominence) in recent times, that are maybe worth taking into consideration.

As Ron states, CO2 is indeed one of the greenhouse gasses and one that I read last week, is less than 3.5% (or 2.7, or 2.0 depending on whose report you read) in volume of such gasses in the atmosphere. If you then take into the maths of the situation the 0.00001% that a 10% reduction in the C02 emissions from UK cars would make, it does take it into an area of micro- mathematics I never studied at college. It is minute to the extreme in a global scenario.

I also read last week, that following the cries from some quarters for air travel to be cut back, or even banned as some would have it, because of its emissions, we are now told that the international cement industry throws out more CO2 than all air travel world wide. As it has been in existence for hundreds of years more than air travel it seems rather odd the same tabloid reporters are not crying out for that to be curtailed or shut down. Have they have missed it? Perhaps they have not been looking?

Oh, and we now apparently know that a good sized volcano eruption sends out in one go more CO2 than mankind has produced in the last 400 years. Now in my lifetime I can recall quite a number of such eruptions, Mt St Helens, Helgafell, Pinatubo, Eldfell, Tristan Da Cunha and of course further back in time Krakatoa, Vesuvius, Mt Etna, Santorini....the list goes on.

I doubt we will ever get it, but a little honesty might assist us, the real jury, in this debate. What we really need is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth... an unlikely scenario I fear!

Peter Bodle