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LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists, including from the United States and China, threw down the gauntlet to world leaders on Tuesday saying mankind was the major source of global warming and urging action, one month ahead of a G8 summit.

As leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations prepare to meet in Scotland -- with climate change and Africa at the top of the agenda -- a statement by the national science academies of 11 countries said: "It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities.

"The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action," said the statement from the science academies of the G8 nations as well as China, India and Brazil.

While most scientists agree the burning of fossil fuels for transport and to generate electricity is a major contributor to potentially catastrophic climate change, the United States under President George W. Bush is unconvinced.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has made tackling global warming, with its rising sea levels, increases in droughts and floods and threats to the lives of millions of the world's poorest people, a key goal of his 2005 presidency of the G8.

"It is clear that world leaders, including the G8, can no longer use uncertainty about aspects of climate change as an excuse for not taking urgent action to cut greenhouse gas emissions," said Lord May, head of Britain's Royal Society national science academy.

He called U.S. policy "misguided" and noted that crucial to the international acceptance of the statement was the fact that leading scientists from three of the world's biggest developing world emitters China, India and Brazil had also signed it.

SILENCE ON TARGETS

Blair has called for global action to cut emissions of so-called greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and insisted on a programme of action to emerge from the G8 summit at Gleneagles, some 65 km (40 miles) from Edinburgh, on July 6-8.

But a leaked draft last month of the climate change declaration due from the summit was silent on the science and contained neither targets nor timetables.

The national science academies likewise avoided talk of targets, calling instead for "cost-effective steps" to cut greenhouse gas emissions and noting that any delays would increase the problems and therefore the costs.

But they also noted the potentially devastating impact of global warming on the poorest nations which lacked the money or infrastructure to cope with anticipated crop failures and water shortages, and called for international action to help.

Environment group Friends of the Earth welcomed the increased pressure the science statement would put on the G8 leaders but lamented the lack of concrete goals.

"G8 countries must accept their historic responsibility in creating the problem, and show genuine leadership through annual reductions in emissions," campaigner Catherine Pearce said.

"It is crucial that the entire world -- including the United States -- recognises that there is a window of opportunity to avert potentially catastrophic climate change. Emissions must peak and decline within the next decade. The world must act now before it is too late," she added.

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Frankly, I'm sick of hearing about it, I'm still unconvinced by it all (Carbon Dioxide ending the world) and Bush's stance on this is the only one of his that I semi agree with.

Your thoughts on this?

It is absolutely crucial that he world severely curtails CO2 emissions within the next decade, otherwise absolutely nothing awful will happen, the computer models will be demonstrated to be no more than poor guesswork, these so called scientists will be in something of a chicken little situation, and their grant funding will dry up. Ho hum.

Actualy it is termites. There are one tonne of termites for every human on the planet. Each one eats its own weight in food every day. The methane produced os the largest contribution of greenhouse gas in the anumal kindom....beats humans hands down....

Here is a link to the EPA site if you want a read. Its reasonably impartial.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/climateuncertainties.html

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Speed camera policy Kills

After the millenium bug fiasco how can one trust "scientists" on threats to mankind.

It depends on which scientists you listen to. This lot for example are actively working against Man-made Global Warming Theory despite having no funding apart from individual donations: http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm. This is the "Oregon Petition" - I'll let them explain it themselves:


Note also that the largest Greenhouse gas is not CO2, it is water vapour, so if we all switched to Hydrogen cars immediately it would have very little effect...

Which fiasco would that be?

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Chris
www.chrishillcoat.net

Largest by volume, yes; CO2 is much more potent as a greenhouse gas, however.

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Chris
www.chrishillcoat.net

Remember January 1st 2000, all computers stopping, planes crashing, , phones not working and modern life ending as we know it? Rated as the worst prediction ever.

Thats because lots of us averted it by fixing it. If we had done nothing, there would certainly have been many problems. The fact that not much happened, does not mean it wouldnt have, just that it was fixed. Youre mistaking media frenzy and blood lust for a good disaster story to cloud the millions of man hours spent making sure they did not get there wish.

Well I was inside a major corp with the folk arranging to remove the old gear, it was a wonderful excuse for spending lots of money unnecessarily. My company spent >£100m. If it had existed some items would have been overlooked and stopped working. It didnt. The chap who was the main advocate for the bug theory was interviewed on C4 and acknowledged that he was wrong.

So if we hadn't bothered to fix everything and a few planes had fallen out of the sky, then all the billions of man-hours would have been worthwhile then?

There were a few over the top scaremongers around claiming cars would stop running and microwave ovens would blow up at midnight, which was pure nonesense. But I know for a fact that if nothing had been done then many people/companies would have had a financial crisis at the start of the year 2000. I'm sure you would have loved to have woken up that morining with no record of your bank account and suddenly a thousand years in arrears on your mortgage.

Homer and chrishillcoat , well I will take the advice of my IT brothers at the Register. The well known news site for techies.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/17/five_years_ago/


and I was there while normal business was disrupted, good eqpt was trashed, unnecessary software upgrades were bought and in the far off country I was in, nothing stopped working. I may even have walked by that CEO on another beach.

I beg to differ there.
Water vapour absorbs a wide spectrum of infrared radiation.
CO2 only absorbs IR in a very narrow band around 15um and, at current concentrations, is very close to saturation.
The radiative forcing of water vapour on its own is sufficient to heat the atmosphere to nearly eighty degrees celsius. The rather obvious fact that it doesn't indicates that there are very strong negative feedback mechanisms in operation.

Cheers
Peter

To add to Peter's comments, take a look at this:

From http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html, where there's a lot more detail and sources for that.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Our company produced a simple Windows utility to check for Y2K compliance, and sold it by direct mail for a few quid. My boss bought a brand new Ferrari on the proceeds...

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

Whatever is happening the media and politicians are ladling the old GW scaremongering on us now with some verocity. I don't think a night has passed since the election with some reference to it on the news or on that springwatch thing-Bill Oddie a global warmer


The 'dire' report last night on Newsnight was interesting, apparently an island in the outer Hebrides is in danger of being split in two-though not literally-just by rising sea levels. They then referred to a storm last Winter and asked some old bird if it's the worst they've ever seen (the usual scientific consensus-ask an old person if it's the worst they've ever seen)...she just mumbled and said "it didn't last very long" My god i've never seen a camera cut so quick from an interview.


They then had some Uni professor say IT'S THE WORST STORM EVER......in 100 years.


Very intersting stuff on CH4 news as well. Apparently about 2 words were 'doctored' on a climate change report in the White house-turns out the guy who done it was only correcting words to what the IPCC had used in their report like:

Conclusive evidence changed to a slight possibility!!:roll:


Regards


Andrew

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It's a scam........or possibly a scamola


Homer Simpson

I'm thinking of jumping on the bandwagon and conducting my own research.

Can anyone tell me the exact date that acid rain went out of fashion? I think it was late 1989 but can't be sure.

And now we are being told that the Winter we just had has been the driest since 1890's or thereabouts. I though GW was to give us wetter winters?

Regards


Andrew

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It's a scam........or possibly a scamola


Homer Simpson

Only if that's where the goalposts need to be. There are those who'll claim almost any even, climatic, mteorological or otherwise, as AGW evidence.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Yes, Scalextric sets did sell pretty well that year didn't they

The Y2K bug apocolypse was fed largely by peoples technological ignorance and willigness to belive any gunk the tabloid press and TV set regurgitates for them.
I have no firm stance yet on climate change but, that said, find it difficult to believe that mankinds activities have had no effect on the ecosystem.