Thanks for representing us in Coppenhagen!! I'm really looking forward to following your posts!

Re: D.Shurvell's comment. He wrote: "We need more CO2 in the atmosphere, not less. Just ask any greenhouse grower... To this, I must point out that a greenhouse is a highly controlled, climate-manipulated place. (No matter what is going on outside of it's walls, the plants will thrive).

There are also very few insects inside greenhouses that would consume the plants. Does this mean we should mimic this environment in our yards and use chemical insecticides and herbacides for weeds? (I shudder at the thought).

The toads and birds (and bats thru the nite)take care of garden bugs amazingly well in my raised organic garden. The vegetables are fabulous, by the way.

An ever-rising amount of CO2 spells bad news. We have fewer (and shrinking) areas of greenspace all the time that pull and utilize CO2 and convert it to O2(oxygen); which is, the last time I checked, kind of vital to most life on the planet (except anaerobic lifeforms).

You may want to consider taking a few science courses, as you seem to lack knowledge in several areas and should not really be expounding on the benefits of high CO2 levels in the general atmosphere (especially when presently combined to form a lethal cocktail with sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide and the like). Hence: greenhouse gases form the 'greenhouse effect' and cause vast 'heat or smog islands'. Google some of those terms.

We can mitigate (lessen) some of the effects of climate change by reducing energy use in every facet of our lives and planting trees and fruiting shrubs vigorously. Flowering plants are great too, as they will attract butterflies, and some birds too. There are way too many endangered species. We have been poisoning them and their habitats.

Phone your politicians at every level and demand green roofs become the norm on buildings and that you want green (ecological)space preserved and wildlife conservation measures taken. Demand more from those that can create policy and have it enforced.

To ascribe modern climate change to one single variable (carbon dioxide) or, more correctly, a small proportion of one variable (i.e. human produced carbon dioxide) is not science, for it requires abandoning all we know about planet Earth, the sun, our galaxy and the cosmos.

In the past 100 years or so the scientific consensus has twice held that the earth was definitely cooling (1895-1930 and then 1968-75) and forecast that a catastrophic ice age was approaching.

Scientific consensus has also held on two occasions the contrary view that, instead of cooling, the Earth was dangerously warming up (1930-60 and 1981-now) to the imminent destruction of coral reefs and polar bears. Mankind has been blamed in each of these four separate alarms and thus mankind must do something about it. What a cavalcade of bandwagons these dire warnings have engendered.

Grapes were once grown in Britain as far north as Newcastle, crops and cattle were once raised in Greenland and the Thames has frozen over on occasions. The very same scientists who were forecasting in the 1970s the imminent disaster of the approaching new ice age are now forecasting doom by global warming. What a myriad of businesses this new religion of climate change has spawned and what a bandwagon on which to advance both careers and profit. En passant, an entirely new concept has been created - that of policy based evidence making.

The thinning of the polar ice caps has not just started to happen - it has been going on constantly but irregularly since the last ice age. The Earth's polar regions have had ice caps for only about 20% of the Earth's geological history. To parade precariously poised and puzzled polar bears as being the consequence of man's burning of fossil fuels is political gimmickry of a low order -- yet it sells, and how!

Yes, the Arctic ice is thinning but do we hear at the same time about the contemporaneous extension and thickening of the Antarctic ice? Why are some populations of polar bears actually increasing?

If it were not so serious it would be profoundly funny to witness the very building block of life, carbon dioxide, vilified as a pollutant. Nitrous oxide, nitric oxide, sulphur dioxide, the fluorocarbons and the particulates of combustion are all pollutants and do damage. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is an essential part of all life on Earth. Furthermore, atmospheric carbon dioxide is but 0.0001% of the carbon dioxide held in the Earth's oceans, rock, terrestrial structure, soil and life itself.

There is no notional greenhouse surrounding us. The Earth has an atmosphere composed of a number of gases, some of which absorb and impede heat re-radiated from the Earth but others do not. The atmosphere contains two main absorbers and retainers of Earth's radiated heat - water vapour and carbon dioxide. Water vapour accounts for some 70% of the retention whilst carbon dioxide accounts for less than 10%, with methane and ozone accounting for nearly all the rest. I.e. by far the largest culprit in so-called global warming is water vapour but do we hear anything about that?

Without these heat-retaining gases Earth's surface temperature would be some minus 18°C and life, as we know it, could not exist. It is more accurate and meaningful to describe the atmosphere as a sweater round the earth, protecting us from the cold, rather than a greenhouse intent on boiling us and doing us harm.

I pity the partys in power when the public arrives at the full realisation of how completely misled it has been by its own Government and how many trillions of their money had been wasted (accompanied by falling standards of living) in vainly trying to pursue the deluded folly of stemming naturally occurring climate change. The two concepts of King Canute and the Flat Earth Society spring to mind. I can just imagine the wrath that will be visited on the party in power when the full realisation sets in.

To summarise: scares may come and scares may go but there is no universally accepted evidence that the burning of fossil fuels and the consequent production of carbon dioxide has anything whatsoever to do with climate change or even temporary global warming.

In ending may I commend and acknowledge valuable help from Nigel Lawson's book "An Appeal to Reason - A Cool Look at Global Warming": Professor Ian Plimer's book "Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: the Missing Science": Christopher Booker's "The Real Global Warming Disaster."

I fear that "climate change" has simply become a Convenient Untruth; now being peddled to conceal a hopelessly delayed and utterly inept energy policy for Britain.

--
"Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age"

- Professor Richard Linden of MIT.

"Global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that cannot be fixed"

- Doctor David Bellamy, Lecturer in Botany and wildlife broadcaster.

Ah but the blanket of ignorance is so comforting is it not? Nice try but no biscuit. Can human activity alter the climate? Why yes it can as proven over the last two thousand years thought granted on a localized scale, we still have managed to accomplish alterations.

How you say? By changing the flow of water for one, by deforestation another,think of North Africa and the Romans. Are we a part of the current climate changes - of course we are, do you think you live in a separate space than the earth?

Do you think what we do has no impact? Come on how ignorant can you be, the earth is not some sort of sponge ready and willing to absorb our pollution? I have before me the data on the ozone layer 1955-1975, the researchers of the report tried in vain to gain the attention of the political ear to bring to their attention a troubling discovery.

The response was like the above commentaries - doubting the data. The data indicated that human activity was altering the ozone layer in a negative way. If you lot had been around back then as vocal as you are now we still would be pumping aerosol pollutants into the atmosphere.

Has the damage done to the ozone layer altered anything? Why, yes, it has changed the amount of radiation streaming down on us to a higher level. Is this a good thing? Increased cancer levels suggests it is not. Perhaps we should talk about the ramifications of above ground nuclear tests which blanketed the globe in radioactive dust and the long term damage that is causing?

It is related to the increase of methane for example. Or perhaps we talk about our water in this country, which was tested in the 1990's right across this land. Samples were taken from all sources from above ground to below, from lakes, streams, rivers, wells, aquifers, etc.

Thousands of samples were gathered from the urban to the wilderness environments and not one was found without pollutants. The number one pollutant is particulate of diesel fuel a waste by-product of petroleum use. Will this alter the climate - yes of course it will.

The earth's greatest 'lung' is the soil, alter the microbes you alter the atmosphere, you alter the atmosphere you alter the climate, radiation amounts impact the microbes in a grand way, wiping out whole populations, giving rise to niches quickly repopulated by often 'inferior' species unable to 'digest' as completely as the previous populations did for gases like methane.

There is more to go over but I will stop here for now. You can snuggle into your ignorance all you want, it will not change what is happening, it will not go away, and when the time comes and you realize we have indeed caused a problem for ourselves, perhaps then you will mature enough to grow-up and join the rest of us in changing how we treat our home, the 'old ways' will not cut it, not if we want to remain as a species on this planet, it is time to take stock and realize that our gross inefficient means and ways can no longer go on.

It is time to beware of the resources of this planet, their limits and to take great care on how we use them.