• Question: what are your thoughts on global warming

    Asked by anon-214679 to Helen, Farah, Dave, Cheryl, Bastian, Alun on 13 Jun 2019. This question was also asked by anon-214181.
    • Photo: Cheryl Williams

      Cheryl Williams answered on 13 Jun 2019:

      In my opinion, global warming is happening, and it can be shown to have happened over the last few decades. I think it would be very difficult to stop it now, or even reverse it. Human life and habits have changed over hundreds of years, we live the lifestyle we are accustomed to, and that will never change.

    • Photo: Dave Underhill

      Dave Underhill answered on 14 Jun 2019:

      We can see global warming, we now live in a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, defined by humans being the dominant driver of climate and nature. We have, are, and will cause the extinction of many living things. However, this is all set against the backdrop of climate change – climate change is different to global warming, the earths climate never stops changing – look at the April showers we had in May, look at the creep of snow not starting until into the new year. our ‘records’ only go back 150 years – geologically speaking that’s absolutely nothing to a planet that has been in existence for 4,540,000,000 years! We live in a warm period of the present ice age, we call this an interglacial, before this we were in a glacial phase where the ice caps had expanded locking up an awful lot of water and meaning that the arctic ice sheet extended down to the middle of the uk! And that wasn’t even a particularly big glaciation, earlier ones would have seen Britain covered by as much as a mile of ice!! At some point in the future this inter-glacial will end and much of our culture will be swept away by progressing ice and dropping sea levels – indeed rising sea levels at present (due almost certainly to our pollution) threaten to wipe out many of our key cities (London is in great danger being just 11 meters above sea level) – this could have major implications for the nature of our societies – hopefully something like that would wake us up!!!

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