Global Warming Videos - What you can do

Global Warming Videos by Dr Patrick Dixon - truth about carbon trading, offsets, what companies and consumers will do. Carbon neutral lifestyles. Recorded 2007

The evidence for human-linked global warming is overwhelming. We now have convincing scientific data for the last million years showing how carbon dioxide levels and temperature have changed together.

Every year, snow and ice form in Antarctica, trapping tiny pockets of gas, and by drilling cores deep into several kilometres of ice we can extract air pockets which have been perfectly stored for up to a million years. We can analyse these samples, not only for carbon dioxide, but also for isotopes of hydrogen in the ice, which give an indication of how warmer cold the earth was when the ice formed - global warming is a highly complex subject.

We know these methods are reasonably reliable because we can compare other data we have for the timings of recent ice ages, and these fit very well with predictions we can make from the ice cores. That gives us confidence to look further back into ice core history to discover patterns of global warming and global cooling over hundreds of thousands of years.

Carbon dioxide levels are probably higher today than they have been for the last million years. Global warming may take generations to fully impact our world. Even if carbon dioxide levels remain as they are today (impossible) we could see sea levels go on rising slowly for a thousand years. Expect global warming to be a major issues, in company strategy and consumer choices, with many billions of dollars spent to try and reduce future impact.

One of many steps to tackle global warming will be to capture carbon dioxide in power station emissions, and store it underground. This sounds difficult but is already happening routinely. One gas pipe supplies fuel, and another gas pipe carries back products of combustion. Carbon sequestration doubles the cost of power generation, but when you add in other costs such as distribution, marketing, account handling and so on, using today's technology, the actual increase in retail prices is no more than 20%. It is a practical response to global warming.

Even if the technology fails to improve, it would mean the equivalent of a 1% increase in electricity prices each year for twenty years. Such a modest increase would be more than offset by reduced power use due to energy saving. A single power station in Norway, run by Vattenfall, captures so much carbon dioxide that it fulfills almost 30% of Norway's 2007 targets for global warming action by reducing carbon use under the Kyoto treatey.

Here is a video that was recorded on this site about global warming threat around 10 years ago. There is NOTHING new about global warming as an issue, although the scientific data is stronger now than before.

Many more Global Warming Videos by Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.