• Question: Do you thing there is such thing as global warming, or is it just the natural fluctuation in the earth's core/sun ray temperature?

    Asked by charliehook to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 16 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Peta Foster

      Peta Foster answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      I do believe in global warming and i think it is really important to remember that with the sort of changes that have been measure in recent times we can see a clear changes and it’s the rate of the change that is important rather than the starting or ending point.

      I also think it comes down to one point… we have one planet… maybe we are on a path to destruction or maybe we’re not but if we take action now just in case we really win either way 🙂

      Also there was a big deal made in the press some years ago called ‘climategate’ the said scientists had fabricated data to make the problem look worse than it is. This made people worry that they couldn’t trust scientists… since this time that data has been proven and shown to be entirely accurate and that has only made it to a few small publications and none of the main stream papers.

      I believe it is really important that people take this seriously and do whatever they can to minimise their impact to the planet for our short stay here so others can enjoy it in the future. 😀

      http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/3rd-major-climategate-investigation-vindicates-scientists-again.html

    • Photo: Andrew Cairns

      Andrew Cairns answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Building on what Peta has said, yes I do believe humans are having an impact on our climate and we must do something to stop catastrophic changes to the world.

      How much we can do, and what real impact changes in how we live can do, remains to be seen.

      I think it is interesting to put climate change into context in the media. The BBC were recently praised for their coverage of science, but were told off for giving too much time to people who held views not in line with current accepted thought. This is because the BBC has a public duty to show all sides of arguments (as a public broadcaster). However this means that in every story about climate change, someone who doesn’t believe in it must be invited to speak, resulting in half the story on the media being about how the research is wrong, when in reality very, very few scientists actually do not believe in man-made climate change.

    • Photo: Daniel Scully

      Daniel Scully answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      There are many natural cycles of temperature changes which the Earth undergoes, one example of which are the changes in the Sun. But climate scientists do know about these effects and take account them in their climate models.

      I’m also of the belief that changes in the atmosphere from human activity are having an effect on our climate.
      I’ve been to a few talks now from people working in this area and the data has always looked pretty convincing.

    • Photo: Hayley Smith

      Hayley Smith answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      I think the data that can be seen on global warming is quite convincing. I don’t think it’s particularly suprising either. If I think of the technological advances in the past hundred years or so there have been many – and many that have required power. The power sources we used for these weren’t always clean (they are becoming greener) so it does seem understandable to me that:
      a) we’re using more fuels / creating more pollutants / generally putting more bad stuff in the environment than the population ever has before
      b) the world’s population has continued to grow, so, in general, there are more people that are exposed to such technologies
      These combine in my head to suggest that man-kind driven global warming has occured, and probably will continue to do so, especially as other countries continue to rapidly develop (which is fair enough!).

      But to be honest, even if in another hundred years times scientists say “oh, it wasn’t driven by man-kind, it was just natural” well, does it really matter? It still seems fair to suggest that we’d want to protect the world we live in and there are sensible ways of doing this then we might as well!

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