list of things that bother me:
1. climates change, that's what they do.
they were doing so long before we arrived, and will continue to do so long after we are gone.

we may be having some effect on that, we may not.

2. the focus on CO2 emissions and reducing them.
as someone rightly pointed out, one single international flight produces more than a car would in over £100 years.

I forget where I got this next nugget, but apparently the world's volcanoes produce more CO2 in a year than the sum total of the whole of human industrial history. Does that not give things a bit of perspective?

3. Reference to global climate models.
I make and run computational hydraulic models for a living. These are as accurate as we can make them given the lack of calibration data available, and the amount of assumptions that have to be made.

to base anything on a model of something as complicated as global climate, and to make predictions on the back of it is terrible scientific practice.

There is no way that all the factors that affect something that complex can be included in a model, and no way it can be calibrated to give results in which any faith can be placed.

as for Al Gore and his sensationalist, blockbuster science, the less said about that the better

I don't dispute that the climate may be changing, and it is obviously a good idea to do what we can to change our behaviour, but the more pressing concerns, in my view, are providing enough power for the years to come, and what we are going to do when the oil runs out.

Reducing my "carbon footprint" is not one of my concerns.
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Fri 30 Nov 2007, 12:08, Reply)