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Climate change a hot topic at town summit

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"We chose Kettering because it goes some way to representing the voices of Britain. I was very impressed with how deeply people were engaging at the event. It went really well"
Simon Burall
Published Date:
28 September 2009
One hundred people from the north of the county were chosen to represent the UK in a global climate change summit on Saturday.
Residents from Kettering, Corby, Wellingborough and East Northamptonshire joined people from 38 countries to gather public opinion on global warming in preparation for the UN's Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December.

The day-long event a
t Kettering Conference Centre saw the Northamptonshire volunteers discuss four themes of climate change – the urgency of the climate change crisis, levels for cutting carbon emissions, funding of emission cuts and ideas for alternative methods for reducing carbon – and vote on each.

In the first vote, 58 out of the 100 said they knew something about climate change, 46 said they were very concerned and 40 said they were fairly concerned.


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Simon Burall, director of Involve, which ran the UK leg of the World Wide Views on Global Warming event, said: "We were looking for people who aren't professionally involved in the environment and haven't had a way of getting their voices heard.

"In December world leaders are going to be making decisions on what we are going to do about climate change. These decisions are going to affect all of us.

"The voice that is missing at the Copenhagen conference is citizens and it is us who are going to have to take action.

"We chose Kettering because it goes some way to representing the voices of Britain. I was very impressed with how deeply people were engaging at the event. It went really well."

Groups of 100 residents from nations including Malawi, Cameroon, Indonesia, Bolivia, Sweden, Australia and America gathered simultaneously to register their views.

As part of the process, Kettering spoke live via video link to the other summits in Australia, Sweden and America.

With the time difference, the Australian event was coming to an end as the British one was starting. Stuart White, from the Institute for Sustainable Futures, addressed the Northamptonshire residents live from Sydney to tell them how the event went on the other side of the world.

He said: "Everyone's been extremely pleased with the way it's gone and we wish the UK all the best on what it's about to embark on."

For more information visit www.wwviews.org.

The UN's Copenhagen Climate Change Conference takes in December 7 to 18.



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  • Last Updated: 28 September 2009 8:37 AM
  • Source: Northants Evening Telegraph
  • Location: Kettering
 
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Tony Sharp,

Wellingborough 28/09/2009 09:07:21
It is like a big patronising game. The climate is changing, as it always has and always will. But no one has ever produced evidence that mankind is the cause. It was and remains nothing more than a hypothesis. The claims we hear in the media are based on guesswork from computer models that do not include all climatic and environmental factors. Rubbish in, rubbish out.

How many of these 100 people were told, or knew, that there has been no warming since 1998? This is a verifiable fact published by the very people who continue to claim there is warming! Did the 100 know that cooling in recent years has cancelled out all the warming we keep being told about? Were they told that scientists have found that the climate on Mars warmed at the same time as Earth? That fact casts further doubt on man being responsible for the changes that have happened.

We keep hearing the last decade has seen the warmest years on record. But the official NASA GISS records disprove that. In fact five of the ten warmest years on record were before World War II - 1934, 1921, 1931, 1938 and 1939.

The focus should be on tackling problems mankind really is responsible for - pollution and environmental destruction. It is a disgrace that people are being made to fear an concept built on guesswork; and told that by paying more money to businesses for goods and services that somehow man can control mother nature and stabilise a climate that was never meant to be stable.
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NicB,

28/09/2009 10:44:36
I thought the "skeptics" would appear on this one.

Mr Sharp, please read http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html which gives a plain English guide on every innacurate point you've just quoted. Most of your pseudo-scientific statements have been discredited for years.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a skeptic too, as well as being a "scientist" myself. But the evidence is just too strong for anyone who understands how science works. My doubts are on the size of the impact humans have - I don't think we are 100% accountable for climate change or global warming (and please, learn to distinguish the two), but there is no doubt that we are WAY over 50% responsible and it's the greatest threat we face these days.
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Mark Winspear,

Kettering 28/09/2009 12:57:43
To the Tony Sharp's of this world, I would just pose the following questions:
As the human population continues to grow at such a phenomenal rate, isn't it at least possible that it has a bigger impact upon the planet than any other life-form?
As humanity seems to be only creature capable of inventing unnatural processes, especially post industrial revolution, isn't it right that that same intelligence should now be used to try to reverse or mitigate any known damage and pollution?
I must confess, as a child living in a rural area, I didn't particularly relish the "clean air act" which led to the demise of much-loved coal fires. Decades later, I realise the benefits of this particular piece of legislation banished smogs and has probably saved many lives in England alone. Just because the worst effects of practices bundled together under the "global warming" tag may impact people far more in distant lands is no excuse for rubbishing attempts to clean-up our act.
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Tony Sharp,

Wellingborough 28/09/2009 20:09:59
Nic, we can trade links all day long. The fact is what I have cited is only what has been reluctantly accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, GISS and even the Hadley Centre. Sending me to a link that is over two years old will hardly account for scientific observation and corrected data in that time.

I can direct you to the Watts Up With That? blog, the book by Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia, and a host of other more timely references that highlight fundamental flaws in the hypothesis. The fact is there is no evidence for the claims being made, save the output of computer models using arbitrary algorithms.

Mark, we should absolutely address pollution. That is something for which man is responsible and the solution to which rests in our hands. But kidding ourselves that we should be trying to control variations in climate that have occurred for millennia is just nonsense.
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Crassus,

28/09/2009 20:23:05
If the Met office with all its powerful computers can't accurately predict a wet summer a couple of months ahead, I don't have a lot of faith in the climate change predictions 50 years+ ahead.

We should cut back on oil and gas burning because they're finite resources that will sooner or later get expensive, and also with the climate it's best not to mess with a system we don't properly understand. But I would take the detailed predictions on the climate modellers with a large pinch of salt.
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Feline42,

Rushden 28/09/2009 22:04:12
Well it didn't rain last week, during Rushden fair. That's does it for me!
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Tony Sharp,

Wellingborough 01/10/2009 11:42:04
I would strongly recommend that people like NicB read the following article that was released this week. It explains how the data used in the infamous Hockey Stick graph used by Al Gore in an Inconvenient Truth, and by the IPCC, was cherry picked to manipulate the findings:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/

This reveals the 'evidence' you recommended I should read has been contrived. It is scandalous and it explains why climate predictions over the years have not been borne out by observations. If the evidence is so assured, why are scientists going to such incredible lengths to keep the data secret?
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