Goodness what a sea change has come over the climate change debate. Healthy scepticism is breaking out all over. On Monday on Radio 4 Justin Rowlatt asked if the environmental movement is bad for the planet, & today even Frank Skinner has had a go in The Times.
Anybody who has ever looked at any kind of time series would be interested in the hockey stick graph.
I am reminded of a debate which used to rage over the future levels of car ownership in this country. In the 1970s the graph showed a similar hockey stick shape or J curve. The implications of a continuing upward trend for land use, road building, parking & housing design were profound.
But there were those who argued passionately that growth would probably follow the pattern so common in nature – where the handle of the hockey stick in due course stops growing & levels off, to produce an S-shaped curve.
I haven’t followed that debate for the last 30 years, & am not in the mood to see if I can find a graph to show what has actually happened since then. And of course the motor car has not been around for long enough to demonstrate cycles of natural up & down variation around a long term trend.
But one major worry about growth in car ownership was environmental pollution – don’t remember anyone mentioning CO2 in those days, it was the emissions to the atmosphere of nasties like sulphur dioxide, NOx, particulates and, of course, lead which we had to fear.
Well lead was eventually removed from almost all the petrol, without car engines knocking themselves to destruction, & NOx & sulphur dioxide emissions have been greatly reduced, despite the increases in traffic.
And OK, the fundamental law of physics tells us that more CO2 = global warming. But what other law of physics steps in to give us a very cold spell of weather – I am sorry that my science is not up to this, even though we learned about the difference between the definition of weather & climate at primary school.
And what about that law of human behaviour & ingenuity, the one that pushes engineers into finding more efficient & elegant ways of producing the same result, without having to sacrifice the function altogether? Steam engines may have their aesthetic attractions for the eye, but they cannot otherwise compete with a modern train.
Anybody who has ever looked at any kind of time series would be interested in the hockey stick graph.
I am reminded of a debate which used to rage over the future levels of car ownership in this country. In the 1970s the graph showed a similar hockey stick shape or J curve. The implications of a continuing upward trend for land use, road building, parking & housing design were profound.
But there were those who argued passionately that growth would probably follow the pattern so common in nature – where the handle of the hockey stick in due course stops growing & levels off, to produce an S-shaped curve.
I haven’t followed that debate for the last 30 years, & am not in the mood to see if I can find a graph to show what has actually happened since then. And of course the motor car has not been around for long enough to demonstrate cycles of natural up & down variation around a long term trend.
But one major worry about growth in car ownership was environmental pollution – don’t remember anyone mentioning CO2 in those days, it was the emissions to the atmosphere of nasties like sulphur dioxide, NOx, particulates and, of course, lead which we had to fear.
Well lead was eventually removed from almost all the petrol, without car engines knocking themselves to destruction, & NOx & sulphur dioxide emissions have been greatly reduced, despite the increases in traffic.
And OK, the fundamental law of physics tells us that more CO2 = global warming. But what other law of physics steps in to give us a very cold spell of weather – I am sorry that my science is not up to this, even though we learned about the difference between the definition of weather & climate at primary school.
And what about that law of human behaviour & ingenuity, the one that pushes engineers into finding more efficient & elegant ways of producing the same result, without having to sacrifice the function altogether? Steam engines may have their aesthetic attractions for the eye, but they cannot otherwise compete with a modern train.
