[baggygreen]

I'm sceptical of the global warming/climate change/whatever is next crowd, but I think my reasons are sound. bear with me if you please, while I attempt to explain my thoughts and position as clearly as I can.

The earth is essentially a living thing. the core moves, it is not solid. The plates on which land sits move around and grind into each other, sending some plates down to the core where they melt, and forcing others up, into new mountain ranges. relatively soon in a geological scale, Oz will be smack bang across the equator and joined to PNG! My point here is that it is a constantly changing environment.

This changing environment can be shown, for example, by looking to central oz - the arid, desert, 'red centre' of oz was a vast inland sea. Now it is among the most inhospitable places we can find. At some point in history, that sea retreated to the current coastline, leaving dry land in its place and (as best we can tell) permanently altering the type of landscape there.

Now, the climate is not immune to these changes. We have ice ages, it is logical to assume we have the opposite. Cyclical. Up and down. We obviously have no data as to how warm the earth can get, however there are tantalising little hints that emerge from time to time. For example, near where I live is fairly dry bushland. However, there is evidence that around 60,000 years ago or so, the region more closely resembled a sub-tropical rainforest. Another example is scientists drilling ice cores in a glacier in greenland found evidence that at one point Greenland was quite heavily wooded with your average north american pines. Most interesting point? The glacier was still there! it survived to some extent or other at a time when greenland was a heavily wooded location. Obviously we don't know to what extent, but it did exist.

We have no idea how long it took to become that, nor how long it took for the earth to enter (or leave) the last ice age. There simply isn't the data. We're flooded with reports about how quickly the world is warming up, and within a hundred years it might have risen by a whole degree celsius. For all we know, this could be the slowest temperature rise on record. For all we know, temperatures in the past rose 5 or 10 degrees celsius. My point here is we just don't know.

Now, before people jump on my back, I'm all for green change. I see no point in senselessly wasting limited resources. Show me a viable hybrid (or all electric) option for a car, within a reasonable price range, and you better believe i'll buy it. However I am completely opposed to the amount of rubbish being rammed down our throats. Stop logging? What shall we write on, sleep on, build with, eat from, sit on..... Stop eating cows?!? Humans are omnivorous creatures I'm afraid, neither our teeth nor our gastrointestinal tract are designed for a diet of rabbit food.

Promoting cleaner energy is in my opinion a good thing, wind power especially - believe it or not, making solar panels leaves an awful mess in the earth.. When my home is complete, it will have a 4000l water tank hooked up to the toilets and laundry, there will be a solar panel on the roof for hot water (standard with the home) and I shall be installing a small wind turbine similar to the one subman posted a while back. Partly these measures are for selfish reasons - I hate the rising costs, but the cleaner benefits overall are doing no harm to myself nor the environment.

What it comes down to in my opinion, is this: ramming guesswork down our throats is wrong. Enacting new laws and taxes, which will drastically affect peoples lives, based on guesswork is very wrong. The earth has remained through enormous impacts, countless meteorites, nuclear explosions, plagues, volcanic eruptions, solar flares.... almost anything that can be thrown at it. The earth will remain regardless of how we treat it, regardless of how long we stay on it, and pretty much the only thing that will destroy it is the death throes of our sun.