Scientists sign petition denying man-made global warming

[EternalOptimist]

Dixon of Dock Green?

evening all. mind how you go.


I wonder if he isn't harking back at all, maybe he's harking forward

[VectraMan]

It is proven. Step outside your front door and listen. Silence, or cars?

All I can hear is bloody birds singing. No wait, I can now hear the distant sound of a train.

[EternalOptimist]

Then again, one of my great uncles was run over & killed by a horse & cart, playing outside in Water Street, Neath.

my point. I remember seeing a programme on the beeb that did a lot of harking. They harked about this and they harked about that, then they started harking about tractors. So they tracked this guy down who used to plough with a team of shire horses.
They asked him 'how much do you regret the introduction of the foul tractor and the destruction of the rural idyll ?'

'Well if you think spending 15 hours a day looking up a horses @rse is idyllic then you're a bigger fool than you look. try doing it before you start spouting'


i put the last bit on myself

[BrilloPad]

Then again, one of my great uncles was run over & killed by a horse & cart, playing outside in Water Street, Neath.

Those horses should be made to wear bells so you can hear them coming.

[gingerjedi]

It is proven. Step outside your front door and listen. Silence, or cars? Go for a walk down the road. Can you cross the road any time, or do you have to stop and wait for a gap in the traffic? Look at the state of the tarmac. Nice and smooth, or worn out and full of potholes? Look at any hedges or trees next to the road. Verdant green, or covered in sooty dust?

It's not jumping on the environmental bandwagon. Cars are damaging the environment, blatantly and openly. (The environment being the general state of world around us - not necessarily "global warming" etc.) If you want to carry on damaging that environment then you get charged to do so, because very few people will stop doing it voluntarily. The high cost of motoring is already be keeping millions of people off the road, and hopefully it will get a few million more off the road over the next few years as it goes up and up.

I think you'll find that road tax is based on co2 emissions which encourages people to buy diesel cars which output much of the nastiness you talk about yet it penalises people who drive much cleaner petrol cars because they emit more co2, so by any stretch of the imagination they are using the current environmental hysteria to cash in, I think they call this 'jumping on a bandwagon'.

Its obvious you have an easy time getting to work on public transport but many don't, when you can honestly say that there is a clean, cheap, reliable integrated service across the country then you may have a point, until then the government has no right to excessively penalise people for trying to go about their daily business.

[The Lone Gunman]

Danq: I see a couple (at least) of problems with your utopian view of the world.

House prices in the cities. If everybody has to live where they work then those prices will rise.
There are not enough houses in the cities for the people who work there so we will have to build over the green belt.
Public transport at peak times is running at or near capacity. We would need to build more track (possibly on the unused roads).
There are other infrastructure issues too.

There are no easy solutions. I am a cynic and believe that Govt. knows we cant give up our cars so they are fleecing us for every penny while they can.

[Platypus]

Danq: I see a couple (at least) of problems with your utopian view of the world.

House prices in the cities. If everybody has to live where they work then those prices will rise.
There are not enough houses in the cities for the people who work there so we will have to build over the green belt.
Public transport at peak times is running at or near capacity. We would need to build more track (possibly on the unused roads).
There are other infrastructure issues too.

There are no easy solutions. I am a cynic and believe that Govt. knows we cant give up our cars so they are fleecing us for every penny while they can.

I believe one (partial) solution would be to encourage as many people as possible to work from home. Easy for IT folks, not so easy for others I grant you. This would lead to reduced government fuel tax revenues so will never happen.

[NickFitz]

This petition is complete garbage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition

At one point they added "Geri Halliwell PhD" to it

Having Googled five uncommon names chosen at random from the "A"s listed on the website, one is a microbiologist (not a climate scientist then), and the other four don't appear to have published anything at all (their only science-related appearance in Google being the petition itself) which makes one wonder how their scientific careers could have stalled so badly

[dang65]

I think you'll find that road tax is based on co2 emissions which encourages people to buy diesel cars which output much of the nastiness you talk about yet it penalises people who drive much cleaner petrol cars because they emit more co2, so by any stretch of the imagination they are using the current environmental hysteria to cash in, I think they call this 'jumping on a bandwagon'.

Are you sure about this? I've got a petrol car (Citroen C1) and my 2009-10 VED will be 20 quid. I've never felt encouraged to buy a diesel car. Filthy things. (Not that a petrol car's much better, but still.)

It's obvious you have an easy time getting to work on public transport but many don't, when you can honestly say that there is a clean, cheap, reliable integrated service across the country then you may have a point, until then the government has no right to excessively penalise people for trying to go about their daily business.

Well, I don't know how I have it easier than other people. I've been working for 25 years now - in different parts of the UK, the Isle of Man and Europe -
and I've never used a car to get to work other than odd days here and there. Maybe I've just been incredibly lucky to be able to cycle or use trains.

[dang65]

This petition is complete garbage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition

Oh dear, oh dear. And then it gets given credibility in a major newspaper and confuses people who make comments like, "I do wish the experts would make up their minds!"

The experts have made up their minds, just as the experts have made up their minds that god didn't create the universe and everything in it in six days. It's just that some people won't accept the experts verdict, in either case.