Mike wrote in message ...
In article , Tumbleweed fromnews@myso
ckstumbleweed.freeserve.co.uk writes

He would set up a task force to find out which bunch of international
terrorists were causing global warming.
--

Well, that'll be anyone who uses fossil fuel, directky or indirectly. Which
will be you and me typing these messages in, for example.

Not me though. Unless I count as using fossil fuels by using up
calories which I got by eating food which was delivered to a
supermarket by a lorry ...


'anyone who uses fossil fuels'.

It is being said time and time again that anyone who uses fossil fuels
add to Global Warming. Right?

Well that depends whether you think it's their fault they used fossil
fuels. An awful lot of people could decide to use an awful lot less,
but the fact remains that many things are quite hard for an individual
to avoid if s/he wishes to have a "normal" economic and home life.

I'm not saying there aren't plenty of practical steps which an
individual can take to reduce their impact on the environment, and
should. It doesn't really cost that much to use only renewable energy
at home - maybe 100 pounds a year, less than 0.1% of a typical
household income. Short air journeys are pretty unnecessary and iirc,
each flight is about as pollutive as a year of car use by all the
passengers - I don't think anyone's got an excuse for that.

Can someone please explain to a simple bloke like me, why the
temperature of this globe didn't go sky high during the Industrial
Revolution and well into the last century?

Basically, if the population in Victorian times had been what it is
now, we would currently have the unenviable pleasure of living
(dying?) in very different environmental conditions.

Factories in the Midlands belching out smoke from coal fired boilers.
Kilns in the Potteries belching out smoke,
Even ships at sea. Take a look at the Grand Fleet when steaming, could
be seen for miles from the coal fired boilers.

We now have more efficient house heating methods, how often do you see a
coal fired chimney smoking on a house.

The latter is considerably more important than the former; (if most
people now use gas, it's about 3 times "cleaner" than coal - although
I don't expect that specifically means CO2). But air and road travel,
and other energy uses, the out-of-date power in ex-Soviet/developing
countries, and the fact that populations have multiplied, even since
the fifties, make up for it. iirc, CO2 emissions have never stopped
increasing year on year and the increase was quite dramatic over some
of the latter half of the 20th C. Some of the more poisonous gases
have decreased in the last 20 years mainly as a result of legislation
by European governments.

More efficient cars and commercial transport, OK more of it, but look at
a motorway hold up, dozens of cars, not much of a smoke screen over it
;-)

Are we being conned?

Fraid not. There is one other reason that past performance is not
necessarily a straightforward guide to the future anyway, which is
that environment and ecology are highly nonlinear systems. Hence the
room for wide disparity of predicted temperatures depending on whether
the scientist was funded by a petrol corporation or not.


Warwick Dumas

www.members.tripod.com/ecuqe

"If Adolf Hitler were here today, they'd send a limousine anyway."
- the late Joe Strummer