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Over the years, I've taken a passing interest in climate issues, not to a point of being able to claim expertise, but enough for me to consider the issue as a whole. My impression is that the studies of climate change tend to focus on the recent past, generally correlating with the industrial revolution, rather than focus on the more distant past, and as result it seems to me that conclusions are drawn on too narrow a set of data. This is not to say that there are not studies of the distant past, but rather that those don't appear to me to inform the discourse on this subject at the present time. To give an example, towards the end of the last period of glaciation, about 12,000 years ago, the earth began to warm, but suddenly plunged back into bitter cold for a period known as the Younger Dryas. This lasted for about 1000 years, and towards the end of this time, the earth suddenly warmed by 4 degrees C in 25 years!! Nobody, as I understand it, claims to understand what might have caused this rapid warming through any natural phenomena, yet according to the record of the Greenland ice cores, it definitely occurred. This is just one example of variation that is not well understood, yet which must undeniably be ascribed to anything other than man's activities. Hence, it may be that today's warming may be nothing to do with Man. When I add in the obvious fact that climate science is very much statistical in its approach, and relies on a great deal of interpretation for its conclusions, I find myself sceptical about the conclusions. This is not through any dogma on my part, but simply because I like scientific conclusions to be based on verifiable facts and the replicability of experiments to demonstrate a position, and this is simply not easy to do with climate science. My position, therefore, is that I don't deny the facts of climate change: increased CO2, sea temperatures and levels, glaciers melting etc. but I remain unconvinced that Man in his arrogance assumes it must be because of us. Now stands back to await the brickbats!!

Come on guys. Remember this is a Coin Forum and don't get personal. Leave it to Rebecca Vardy and Colleen Rooney.

I enjoy reading the different viewpoints and evidence but I don't enjoy personal attacks.

Try changing "oil" to "tobacco", "fossil fuels" to "smoking", and "climate change" to cancer"......

The other thing that was once shoved in our faces as evidence of global warming, was pictures of wooden houses in Northern Canada, some of which were leaning at a crazy angle. It was said that they were sinking into the ground because the ground beneath was melting. I later discovered from a Canadian that the real reason was because the heating/cooking stoves inside the dwellings, were not properly insulated from the ground and/or the stilts were too short/non existent. So the melting was purely down to that. Hence why only some of the houses were affected.

And two of the big poster-children for global warming have crashed and burnt: Second record year for coral cover (since records began 36 years ago) in the Great Barrier Reef. Polar bear populations are now estimated at 25-30 thousand up from 5-6 thousand in the 1960's. Neither of these observations is disputed, but both these iconic images were used to scare people into thinking that climate change was makng polar bears go extinct (no sea ice you know) and coral reefs bleaching then dying out. What was never mentioned was that coral reefs usually recover quickly from bleaching episodes - where was that comment in all the doom? This is how it works - we're given only the partial information that fits the narrative. Other information or factors that don't are ignored or downplayed as much as possible. This is not to say climate change isn't happening, it's just that the evidence for it that was shoved in our faces to produce an emotional reaction turns out to be wrong.

Fair point, I understand not wanting it to get too snarky of course, but this discussion involves winter heating payments and thus its climate change rationale which is trying to remove or minimise fossil fuels from our lives. This is in a part of the forum which is not specifically about coins and which I personally find interesting and a very important discussion to have. We're all grown-ups on here, and no one wants the discussion to get bad-tempered, but it's important to get your point or points out there, and not allow the political discussion to be dominated by people who, in your opinion, are talking nonsense.

Oh, c'mon, that is BS writ large. Considering that the orthodoxy on Co2 emissions being solely responsible for higher global temperatures, has got a complete and total strangle hold over the MSM and political leaders worldwide, I truly cannot lend credence to your link. Genuine scientists disagreeing with the current climate change opinions are not "conspiracy theorists". They just disagree with other scientists.

Stumbled across an interesting article on the subject.

Here's a personal experience of science and politics mixing, and guess which came off worse? 35 years ago, the cloud from Chernobyl was crossing the UK and a bloke in my shared house worked in a junior position for an environmental monitoring company. They were contracted by the government's MAFF to pick up sheep droppings in the Lake District and measure their radioactivity. So off he went, bagged it all up and sent his samples off to be measured and then the company wrote a report to MAFF on their findings. Some time later the report got returned by MAFF and large chunks of it had been crossed out in red! I remember my housemate talking about resigning (he didn't in the end). He was not at all happy about it. Presumably the actual radiation figures were deemed politically unacceptable by MAFF so the report had to be altered to play down these levels, like missing out the higher levels found and just concentrating on the lower readings. So no one would have worried too much about the radiation in the fall out, as the government would have assured them that all the research showed how low level it all was. Moral in that case - if science and politics mix, science comes off worse. And for some reason, both climate change and Covid are now political footballs.

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