We're part of climate change process

One of the biggest misconceptions about climate change is that it results in rising temperatures in all regions of the world. Warming is an overall trend and not the basis for a region-by-region analysis. This is why climate change is the preferred academic term and not global warming.

Weather patterns are becoming more and more extreme, as evidenced by the increasing number of meteorological anomalies (if they can still be called that). It is unrealistic to cite individual examples of “some polar regions where the ice is actually spreading”, as the overall situation in the Arctic is clear from the many time-elapsed Nasa satellite images. The situation in Antarctica is more stable but there is increasing evidence that even this is changing. Attributing rising temperatures to solar activity is somewhat unrealistic given that solar activity has been on the wane since about 1985.

There is little doubt that human activity has become its own geological process, changing the surface of the planet faster than nature almost ever does. How is this not supposed to have an impact on the ecological processes that the composition of the atmosphere relies upon? An Imperial College study of satellite data between 1970 and 1997 of that part of the infrared spectrum trapped by CO2 found that the amount of radiation escaping back into space was decreasing, as was the case for the other greenhouse gases. This correlated positively with the overall global increases in temperature experienced over this period.

While it is true that the Earth’s climate has fluctuated throughout history, nothing accounts for the soaring temperature rises of the past 150 years. Also, evidence from drilled ice cores suggests we should be experiencing an overall global cooling trend.

There will always be dissenting voices against the political and scientific consensus but is it really such a bad thing – even if you don’t accept the scientific evidence – that we are striving to improve energy efficiency and diversify energy sources? Everybody enjoys living in a cleaner environment. Those in the building services industry can do more about this than most.