Slashdot has an article about this article, which was related to a documentary I saw last night (it was British, I think from the BBC). I’ve never been comfortable with the current dogma that humans are causing climate change. At the very least, our ability to make such huge impact in such a short time always seemed suspect. I’ve no doubt that we’re having *some* sort of impact – we live on the planet and use resources. From a purely logical standpoint, we can’t *not* have an impact. But is human activity *causing* the climate change?
The documentary in question proposes that climate change is the result of – get this – the sun. In fairly plain terms is demonstrates data which correlates global temperature (from hundreds of years) with solar activity (charted for hundreds of years as well). The correlation is far closer than the relationship between CO2 levels and global temperature. The film showed a clip of Al Gore showing a chart of CO2 levels and global temperatures. In that clip the charts were fairly close in parallel, but it was also a small graph showing millions of years – cause/effect relationships would be hard to draw from that data alone. The first thing I did when I saw it was stop the TV (Lesley *hates* when I do that!) and state that Gore was stating CO2 is *causing* global warming just because it happens to correlate with temperature change. That’s not the only explanation. Starting the program again, they went on to show that many scientists accept that CO2 levels are a trailing indicator of global temperature, not a leading indicator nor a causal factor.
The last part of the documentary focused on the energy needs of developing African nations. In short, it labeled extreme environmental activists as ‘anti-human’ for their refusal to allow developing African nations to embrace coal and oil, instead trying to restrict those nations to solar and wind power (both of which are the most expensive and least efficient forms of energy at this point). The documentary itself didn’t say ‘anti-human’ – those were the words of one of the former Greenpeace founders (name escapes me right now).
Interesting fuel for the climate change debate, certainly…
