Author: Tess from the Library
Want To Learn More About Climate Change?
Wednesday, 20th January, 2010 at 7:24 pm, Isle of Wight
Green Issues, Library, News, Ventnor
Interested in climate change?
Did you know that there’s a collection of books and DVDs at Ventnor Library for you to borrow during January and February that might help expand your knowledge base.
DVDs are priced at just 98p per night. What a bargain!
Image: Peter Blanchard under CC BY-SA 2.0
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I suspect accurate unbiased information on this subject is now almost impossible to obtain. Every week seems to bring new evidence of no climate change. This week we heard the shocking news that the glaciers science claimed would melt in just a few years were not in fact melting at an alarming rate at all.
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for goodness sake, Shobba – the title is ‘learn more about climate change’ not ‘climate change is definitely happening and it’s all down to naughty old us!’. The best way of understanding a subject is to research it – so why not get your derrier down to Ventnor Library and make a withdrawal of some of these books & DVD’s – there may well be a good stock of ‘both sides of the story’ there – take a look, Shobba, learn something new today and stop being a….. well for the sake of this blog, I will go no futher.
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I think Shobbas point is that the debate has become so polarised that each side is now only presenting evidence that tends to prove their point. There are books and DVD’s (‘An Inconvenient Truth’ springs to mind) that seem to show conclusively that climate change is happening, and it’s all our fault, and other books that prove the opposite. You may learn more about climate change, but it will still come down to which group of scientists do you believe.
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There was an interesting case of misinformation recently. A scientist had expressed the opinion that Himalayan glaciers might have all melted by 2350. Another article misread this as 2035, and then we had a whole deluge of reports and media saying that if we didn’t mend our ways quickly then all the glaciers would have melted and raised sea levels catastophically within 25 years.
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Watchdog, please could you give us a link? Thanks!
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Rowan here is a link to the debate in question. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2
Although the date for the complete glacial loss of 2035 is inaccurate. The report states that the thickness is reducing by around 2-3 feet per year. This is still a huge amount of melting.
Some of these glaciers are around 120m (394ft) thick, therefore conventional logical suggest 200+ years before they are fully melted. However, for these scientists to suggest that glacial melting is a linear process is ridiculous!!
The rate of melting will be proportional to a function of the temperature and a function of the thickness of ice, therefore the more ice that melts, the faster the melting. Anyone who is familiar with the exponential function will realise that if the Earth continues to warm at current rates it will be far less than 200+ years before the glaciers have melted.
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Where did you hear that, Shobba? Could you
give us a link? Thanks in advance!
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Rowan you should surely know by now that Shobba doesn’t do research or links. She just translates her own hot air into something readable.
Joe, what about a debate with Shobba and her panel of experts, eh?
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Thanks to Joe for Times link. Here’s the New Scientist link quoted hy them:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18363-debate-heats-up-over-ipcc-melting-glaciers-claim.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=environment
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And here is the latest from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on this (not given as a link by the Times):
http://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/news_and_events.htm
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Rob you really hit the nail on the head. If you don’t join the (virtually) religious fervour you’re personally attacked. Some people seem happy to believe anything about the climate – as long as it’s bad, terrible, awful or best of all, catastrophic!
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Well done Ventnor Library!
And well said Superman.
Unfounded assertions and choosing to believe things without evidence or reason won’t help anything or anybody.
This display gives people a chance to actually find out about climate science and the debates based on the science.
We need to understood the evidence and the logical arguments, so that we can have informed opinions and informed debates.
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oops, perhaps I meant ‘to have understood’!
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Thanks for the link and summary Joe!
Sorry Shobba, I don’t ‘believe’ in climate change because I’m a pessimistic type who likes catastrophes. And please don’t take what I’m about to say as a personal attack – I would really like to understand why you’re so reluctant to listen to climate scientists.
I’m actually a born glass-brimming-over optimist.
But as a rational adult I listen to my ‘head’ as well as my ‘gut’.
I ‘believe’ in relying on evidence and rational logic to get as close as we can to the truth of what happens in the world.
I’ve read a lot of books, articles and website pages by climate scientists. Climate change has been researched for many years and I’ve been following the debate most of my adult life.
I’ll be very happy if everything in the world turns out dandy after all – that would suit my natural temperament just fine.
But whatever the observed facts and our rational interpretation of those facts – what science is for – we also need to make decisions. To paraphrase Father Jack, that would be a moral and philosophical matter.
We need an energy supply, and fossil fuel is by definition finite. So even if the world’s climate scientists turn out to be wrong, and burning fossil fuels doesn’t affect the climate at all (hooray!) then we still need to decide what to do to replace fossil fuel.
We ought to make decisions that won’t make the world a worse place for our descendants than the world we were born into. And we need to make decisions that will be good for as long as possible, not just a few generations. Your favourite, Shobba, nuclear power, can’t do it for long either, because uranium is finite too.
We should take the precautionary principle, as part of a mature assessment of risk.
Maybe you’re right and the climate scientists are wrong. Phew!
But what if they’re right?
For non-humans, the predictions include extinctions for thousands of species.
For us humans the predictions include possible starvation or forced migration and an uncertain future for millions because of drought.
Surely with those possible risks it wouldn’t hurt to stop using fossil fuel, just in case?
Or to go into a library and read a few books?!
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Proving climate change is both man made and a threat is like trying to prove the existence (or not) of God. It’s not possible. Nor is it possible to say with 100% certainty climate change as you see it isn’t happening.
At some point in the very distant future we will know for sure. Until then our limited resources are best spent on something we do know will have an effect. Reducing population growth would be my first choice. For those of you desperate to convince the doubters, I suggest you implore scientists to be a little more honest with their data in future. More fact less hysteria.
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Sorry Shobba, but there’s a gradation between totally unprovable things – existence or not of God, for example – and things which we can be almost completely certain about – existence of the Earth, say.
Climate science is very complicated because the climate is very complex, so it’s fair to say it’s further from the existence-of-Earth end of the spectrum than we might like.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t make some deductions based on our observations.
We will never know for sure or with 100% certainty to what extent the climate we observe has been affected by human activity.
But we don’t need 100% certainty. If we did need 100% certainty we would be unable to make most decisions.
That’s why I referred to the precautionary principle – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle.
I agree with you on the need for a population policy.
But I don’t know why you accuse scientists of hysteria. I’ve read a fair few things from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they’re pretty dry reading, actually.
As for honesty! I assume you’re expecting readers to think of the University of East Anglia scandal. But ir doesn’t follow from one case that all climate science has been discredited! There are dishonest people in all jobs, and as far as I’m aware scientists are far more honest than most. If you’ve got eveidence that they’re not, please share it with us rather than just making assertions.
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Another interesting link on glacier melting
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