Over the last couple of decades we have had a concentration of warmest years, for the planet, which are now forming a pattern. Not every year, but a concentration. If you get much of your news from the BBC, as I do, your weather news will generally be dealt to you with the caveat that one event does not in itself prove climate change. Which is true. But when you start seeing a pattern, over decades, you'd have to be a fool not to take notice. On its own, the weather of the last few weeks could just be a chance event, but it isn't one event on its own. Things do seem to me to be changing here in the UK and across the globe. So it is perhaps now time to shed some of our reticence to see climate change in single events and say, with increasing certainty, that something is happening. We are not talking about individual events, we are talking about a pattern.Biospace wrote: ↑26 Jul 2022, 10:07pmSuggesting last week's two days of intense (for Britain) heat is a sign of possibly out of control AGW makes as much sense (which is some sense, I'm not suggesting this is non-sense btw!) as saying that the intensely cold winter of 1962/63 was a sign that the interglacial period we're in was fading back to much more glaciation, with half of Britain uninhabitable and the rest like Siberia. If we look at the records, without AGW we're due to return to this sort of climate any time now as interglacials typically last 10k years, with 70-90k years of glaciation before the next warmer period might be expected to return.
It's far too late for our behaviour not to affect climate for hundreds of years to come, even if we stopped burning fuel for energy tomorrow. In saying this, don't assume I'm suggesting it's pointless to do nothing. The terrible levels of pollution alone should be more than enough reason to stop using oil as we do. That fossil fuels will likely run out later this century, at current consumption levels, is probably less of a factor of change than the relative price of renewables to conventional energy.
It's worth reminding ourselves the planet has a constantly changing climate which is affected by changes in the planet's various geometrical anomalies, volcanic activity and other powerful, natural forces as well as Man. Also that Europe experienced a mini ice age for a few centuries until the late Victorian era and that our planet's normal (80%-ish of the time) state of being is not in a glacial period as we are at present.
The experts who study man-made climate change are the same people who tell us about natural climate change, and it is their judgement that man-made change is significant now. It is still possible that they are mistaken in that assessment and that an underlying part of the change is natural, and just by chance has run parallel to man-made impact on the atmosphere over the last two centuries, but that is looking less and less likely, and would you take a chance with the future habitability of the planet just because they might have misjudged it? We would have to be really confident in them being wrong before choosing to ignore their warnings.
(And some of those extreme heat readings last week were from non-urban locations).