© ReutersOn the agenda: World leaders will be debating climate change at the G8 summit in Italy this week
With Tony Blair launching his own plan to save the world (groans), and the G8 leaders also unveiling their thoughts about global warming, this is a big week for environmental fanaticism.
Whatever he or they offer, it will not be enough to quell the warmists' semi-religious fervour.
They are like medieval preachers, proclaiming to baying crowds that the end of the word is nigh.
Well, is it? There are two separate climate issues - the extent of global warming and the role that humanity plays in it.
Some facts help. The famous 1996 report by the International Panel on Climate Change predicted serious global warming and blamed mankind.
But, since then, the world has disobligingly stopped warming. And two years of global cooling erased nearly 30 years of recorded temperature rises.
Comment: A bit of spin, not necessarily for global warming per se, but for diverting attention from the opposite of "regularity and occasional abruptness of global warming", that is a new Ice Age. Nicely done.
The fact is, Earth's climate is in a constant
state of flux, of which we can observe only a small part:
"We have analysed the transition from the last glacial till our present warm interglacial period, and the climatic shifts are happening so suddenly as if somebody had pushed a button", says Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Professor at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen. There are other scientific theories, which try to explain these cooling and warming occurrences on earth including the solar activity model. The simple fact is we do not know enough about what causes changes in our climate to create computer models that can model all of the climate data that is available.
What everyone avoids saying is that the climate can switch back equally fast. Just think about flash-frozen
mammoths.
Comment: A bit of spin, not necessarily for global warming per se, but for diverting attention from the opposite of "regularity and occasional abruptness of global warming", that is a new Ice Age. Nicely done.
The fact is, Earth's climate is in a constant state of flux, of which we can observe only a small part: What everyone avoids saying is that the climate can switch back equally fast. Just think about flash-frozen mammoths.