Portsmouth Climate Action Network

The second episode of the BBC2 series 'Earth: The Climate Wars', presented by Dr Iain Stewart, proved to be just as absorbing as the first episode and continued to deal an even hand on the subject. Unfortunately, despite the equality, the sceptics still came off worse as each historical attack on climate change science was dealt with and brushed aside.

The programme showed the first sceptic attack was based on the early assumption that the earth was not warming at all. This proved to be incorrect after some adjustments to some satelite temperature readings.
The second sceptic attack was aimed at Michael Manns hockey stick graph, this time it was pointed out that other data showed a similar recent large increase in temperature and that such an increase had never occured previously over the last 1000 years.
The third sceptic attack covered by the programme was based on the assumption that the sun and cosmic rays were causing the warming (having excepted the earth was warming!), evidence showed this was not so.

Over a short space of time, sceptics have changed from denying that the earth was warming, to accepting that humans are responsible for some of it. Over time the shot gun approach to the attacks proved to be a failure, but also slowed down changes we needed to make to prevent further warming.

Link to online episode (iPlayer) Available until 21/09/08

Last update : 18-09-2008 16:45

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