Why it is Important to Know the Main Cause of Global Warming

When it comes to protecting our planet, there is no subject that is more important then that of the main cause of global warming. Although there is still a lot of work and research to be done in the science community it is important to know that a lot of people feel that the main cause of global warming is people. What we, the human race that depends on the planet, are doing to the planet is truly upsetting. Our actions and the chemicals that we use on a daily basis is said to be a big factor in everything warming up.

Unlike a natural cause of global warming, we are able to control ourselves in enough of a way that could potentially protect our planet from being hurt any further. The main cause of global warming is certainly something that we should all be ashamed of and therefore doing as much as possible to make sure that this is not the case for the future generations. We have to educate ourselves and then educate our children so that the situation does not continue to get worse over time.

Teaching Our Young People

By taking a few extra moments out of your week you could truly impact the way your child understands the main cause of global warming. If you start asking questions you may be surprised to find that they may not even truly understand what global warming even means. As shocking as that may be it is time to start looking towards the future and make sure that our young people know as much as possible in order to make the right decisions as they age in order to protect our planet, to protect their futures and the futures of their children.

If your school is not activity talking about global warming then that may be something that you would want to discuss with the teacher or the principal. There is no reason why there could not be small lessons every once in a while in order to truly teach the children about the main cause of global warming. In the end, even if just a few children are really reached with the message about the major problems with global warming then it was all worth it. Take your time and dedicated yourself to making sure that our young people know what they need to know in order to help the situation.

Global Warming Books: Some Support And Some Deny

Global warming is discussed in two main types of books. Some authors downplay the issue and insist there is no problem. Others speak of the compelling evidence, dangerous consequences, and solutions. Reading books with more than one viewpoint on the subject gives a balanced perspective.

Probably the most well-known book on global warming is Al Gore's book AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: THE PLANETARY EMERGENCY OF GLOBAL WARMING AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT. Gore's book shows reasons why people need to save the earth from the hazards of climatic change. It also implores world leaders to stand up and take heed of the warnings of an environment in crisis.

An opposing viewpoint is presented in a book titled UNSTOPPABLE GLOBAL WARMING: EVERY 1500 YEARS. The book, written by Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer, is an argument that global warming is a cyclical event that has happened gradually and systematically throughout history. Scientific data backs up their claims and demonstrates why no one, in the authors' opinions, should be concerned about global warming.

However, compelling scientific facts do exist that support the claims of the dangers caused by climatic changes. A book called GLOBAL WARMING: THE COMPLETE BRIEFING tells facts and theories about the foundations of a hotter climate. In it, the future of the world and ways to help minimize the problem are outlined.

Children can learn about the subject by reading a book called THIS IS MY PLANET: THE KIDS' GUIDE TO GLOBAL WARMING. Jan Thornhill, the author or the book, gives startling facts about the quickly occurring changes in our environment and tells how it is happening. Catering to the younger audience, though, she is careful to sprinkle the book with a lot of hope and ways for children to help improve the situation.

THE DOWN TO EARTH GUIDE TO GLOBAL WARMING, by Laurie David and Cambria Gordon, is a book that uses humor to discuss a serious subject. It not only has facts about the genesis of extreme warming, but it is full of vivid pictures. It is another book aimed at elementary-age children, and it tells ways for kids to fight the problem in every area of their lives.

A fun and interesting book is THE LIVE EARTH GLOBAL WARMING SURVIVAL HANDBOOK: 77 ESSENTIAL SKILLS TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE. David de Rothschild, the author, constructed the book to be a tongue-in-cheek survival guide for a hotter planet. At the same time, it offers important information about ways to improve the environment. It is a companion book to the Live Earth Concerts that took place around the world during a 24-hour period in July of 2007.

It is easy to find books about what is perhaps the most important environmental issue of the current century. Many are aimed at the children who are next to inherit the earth. Some focus heavily on scientific data. Others rely on humor to spread their message. Some are even a simple call to arms to anyone willing to help curb global warming. It is a subject worth studying, and there are plenty of books available to the earnest pupil.

Stop Global Warming

Global warming is the issue worrying one and all environmentalists around the world. It is now becoming quite imperative that be stop global warming fastest so that the effects of warming that have affected earth adversely are reversed and we are able to live a little happily than before.

There are many things that can be done on a personal level to stop global warming. Firstly, we should know how much heat and pollution is created by every family, this pollution is producing green houses gases and accelerating the process of global warming. One of the answers to stop the warming is that we should consciously start planting trees not just around us, we also ensure that the lost rainforests and tropical forests are restored back to their normal volume.

These tropical and rain forests work as lungs for the entire world, creating oxygen and purifying the air. Therefore, when these are cut off, it can harm the entire ecological system of the Earth, this means there will be very less oxygen and lesser trees to provide us with oxygen. It will make us susceptible to many breathing disorders and other health problems.

We need to stop global warming, is that the scientists have been telling us for quite sometime now. The reason is obvious, if not stopped or reduced, the large snow mountains at the poles will start melting, and this will lead to a sort of catastrophe. World’s major population stays at the sea side. Once the ice starts melting it will increase the sea levels several feet above what it is now. It has been already reported from the countries near the North pole that the rising sea levels has caused them to relocate their homes a little farther.

Rising sea levels will mean destruction of huge numbers of human beings, animals, property, industries, flora and fauna. This will also mean flooding and increase in salinity of available ground water. This again is potentially harmful for human health. This will also mean millions of people will have to move from near the sea to interiors. This would also mean loss of life and loss of millions of dollars.

If you feel strongly against global warming you should try and make contributions to organization you feel has been working actively for the purpose to stop global warming. Your small financial contributions can make a lot of difference. Your contributions can provide boost to these organizations to find man power and monetary power to buy land and convert it from arid dry deforested land to a good sized forest.

You can also stop global warming at your personal level. You can try and plant as many trees around your home. You can also try and use minimum electricity, you can try and avoid usage of sprays, non-green products which increase toxic waste on the Planet. It is necessary to stop global warming so our children can live healthy and long lives.

Climate Changes Due to Global Warming

While the drastic effects of global warming has been discussed in many scientific circles, had their run on TV and even had major exposure through well-meaning (but sadly inaccurate) Hollywood films, it's a concern that has a broad political, economic, social and geographical significance to countries all over the world. Quite literally, for all of us, there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to run and we can't stop the climate from changing. It's just way too big for us.

How to recognize global warming
Whether or not it's brewing something good or something bad, Nature always tries to warn us through many signs. The slow process involved in global warming results in many different things and some of its signs include:

Melting of glaciers
Most of the mountain glaciers on our planet that have been monitored for the past 150 years are reportedly shrinking. The glaciers most affected by global warming those located in the lower latitudes and many of them are disappearing. If glaciers continue to shrink, it could affect water supply in areas that depend heavily upon mountain watersheds.

If the scenarios of global warming continue, most of the glaciers that still stand today will disappear by 2100.

Ocean warming
Sea level increase is attributed to warmer temperatures, which in turn result to the melting of ice glaciers. Over the last 100 years, sea level has increased from 10 cm to 25 cm. Projections over the next hundred years indicate that sea level will rise higher, from about 15 cm to 90 cm. Based on the higher figure, that's about 3 feet.

Translated, this could mean that beaches lose about 50 feet of area for every foot of increase in sea level. Some islands may even disappear beneath sea water completely.

Heat waves
Heat waves and periods of weather that are unusually warm are also signs of global warming. These may come about with varying degrees of their severity and frequency, causing concerns in the economics and health on a global scale.

How global warming brings climate change and what it means to us
The earth's climate has always been changing, although not at an abrupt rate. There had been periods of warming and cooling in the earth's 4.65 billion-year history. Strange as it may sound to some, this is the reason why life became possible on this planet millions of years ago. Unfortunately, not all of the changes in climate brought about by global warming may be beneficial to many of us.

For one, global warming will raise the temperatures in some regions of the Northern Hemisphere, causing the melting of mountain glaciers. This means that areas that are currently experiencing light snow may no longer experience snowfall anymore. Snowlines found in mountains in temperate regions may also be higher and packs of snow will melt earlier than before.

Spring may be experienced earlier and temperatures during night time and in winter will rise. The world will experience a more humid atmosphere since sea water will have a higher rate of evaporation. With greater humidity, rainfall is expected to increase on average.

Storms will also occur with more frequency and intensity. Ironically, water in the soil will evaporate faster, causing dryness between rains. Regions that are already considered dry will experience more dryness. Some semi-arid regions in the African continent, for example, may suffer more while areas that depend on their region's mountain snow packs for irrigation will not benefit from earlier melting between growing seasons.

With warmer weather, some hurricanes will be more severe and winds are expected to blow stronger. It is also possible that wind patterns may shift. Extremely cold periods may be experienced as well.

The phenomenon known as El Nino may occur in more frequency and severity. This is expected to affect different regions in many countries. All in all, scientists will have some difficulty in predicting weather patterns.

With changes in climate brought about by global warming, health concerns and risks may also increase. Heat stress and diseases may become common in places that did not have any problems with them before.

Global warming is an issue that requires immediate action. Even plants and animal species are adversely affected by it. While many of the changes that occur in our planet are totally out of our hands, we have been direct contributors to events that have had negative effects on our environment. This is why many leading social and scientific organizations have urged nations to cooperate in the move to counter this worldwide problem before it's too late.

Global Warming: Silencing The Critics

A recent poll of 530 climatologists in 27 countries showed 34.7 percent of interviewees endorsed the notion that a substantial part of the current global warming trend - which might see temperatures rise by a degree or two, on average, by century's end - is caused by man's industrial activities: driving cars and the like.

More than a fifth - 20.5 percent - rejected this "anthropogenic hypothesis." Half were undecided. The skeptics now include the 85 climate experts who signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration; the 4,000 scientists from around the world (including 70 Nobel laureates) who signed the Heidelberg Appeal, and the 17,000 American scientists who signed the Oregon Petition.

Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, who bought the sky-is-falling scenario until he bothered to check some of the numbers, which led him to do his own research, at which point he wrote the book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and became the Man The Greens Love to Hate, reminded the folks at Tech Central Atation last November that most economists believe the projected level of warming would either have no effect or be beneficial.

Cold weather kills people, Lomborg reminded us. "It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths." And that's before we even get around to increased food production. (If you want a real climate catastrophe, let's talk about the next Ice Age, which is due relatively soon.)

What's more, scientists at Ohio State University announced Feb. 12 that Antarctic "temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models." In fact, they went down. So why would one get the sense from the daily barrage of electronic news that "all experts now agree" the earth is heating catastrophically, and that mankind's use of fossil fuels is at fault?

First, pay attention to the wording. Just as many who want American taxpayers to provide welfare schooling and welfare health care for everyone who can walk here from Mexico and points south blithely lie and say their opponents "oppose immigration" - rather than acknowledging the debate is about "illegal immigration" - so are those who aim to cripple the industrial economies of the Western world careful to ridicule those who "deny global warming," instead of acknowledging that most skeptics agree there is indeed some minor warming going on, only objecting to the notion that this is a crisis and that mankind's activities are primarily "at fault" - along with the corollary nutty prescription that destroying every power plant and automobile in America and Western Europe would make much difference.

As demonstrated in the book "Unstoppable Global Warming - Every 1,500 Years," by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, based on the climate cycle discovered by Dansgaar, Oeschger, and Lorius (who received the Tyler Prize - the "environmental Nobel" - in 1996), those who attribute the bulk of the warming cycle to man's modern technology willfully ignore the similar fluctuations known to history as the medieval warming period (when Greenland supported Viking farms), the Roman warming period, and the Holocene Climatic Optimum, when SUVs and coal-fired electric plants were notably thin on the ground.

But the second reason a casual viewer could conclude the skeptics have disappeared is that "Spreading the global warming gospel with unified voice are 12,000 environmental groups controlling about $20 billion in assets," the Tucson-based Doctors for Disaster Preparedness reported last month. In comparison, "Truth seekers have at most a few million, lack the support of the press or Hollywood, and are generally shut out of government-funded schools and universities."

Which is where the foulest and most inexcusable abuses occur, of course. In direct contravention of the First Amendment guarantee that our tax dollars will never be spent to impose any "establishment of religion," our children are in fact being spoon-fed the Green doctrine of global warming - memory bytes in doggerel and song - when they're far too young to bring any critical faculties to bear on this hypothesis.

And some critical perspective sure is needed. Spiralling energy costs fueled by green hysteria "have caused the loss of 100,000 jobs in the UK over 18 months," report Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, again citing Tech Central Station. Al Gore's anti-global warming plan would leave the average person 30 percent poorer by 2100, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Singer & Avery book points out that scrapping every car, truck and SUV in America would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by only about 2 percent. Meantime, merely extinguishing all the coal deposit fires that continue to burn unchecked around the world would reduce those emissions by 2 to 3 percent. Which is a more sensible thing to try?

Clearly, those who want to cripple our industrial economy have some other motive. And maybe that explains how shrill they can get in their attempt to silence the hated "climate deniers," who they now liken to "Holocaust deniers."

According to U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe's own Web site, she and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, sent a letter to ExxonMobil chairman Rex Tillerson in October of last year, demanding the firm stop funding "a small cadre of scientists" who question global warming dogma, instead insisting the heavily regulated oil company "publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it."

ExxonMobil, whose executives presumably know where gas taxes and offshore oil leases come from, cut off its funding for the Competitive Enterprise Institute last year.

Viscount Monckton, a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, in a Dec. 11 letter to the senators protested this heavy-handed attempt to silence critics, lauding the courage of the "free-thinking scientists who continue to research climate change independently - despite the likelihood of refusal of publication in journals that have taken a preconceived position; the hate mail and vilification from ignorant environmentalists; and the threat of loss of tenure in institutions of learning which no longer make any pretense to uphold or cherish academic freedom."
But when it comes to intimidating the opposition, the senators are pikers.

The British foreign secretary "has said that skeptics should be treated like advocates of Islamic terror and denied access to the media," Doctors for Disaster Preparedness report in their January newsletter. George Monbiot wrote in England's "Guardian" that "Every time someone drowns as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned."

Grist magazine has called for Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for those who deny the internal combustion engine is about to cause a global climate disaster. Heidi Cullen, host of the weekly global warming TV show "Climate Code," has called for the American Meteorological Society to strip its certification from any weatherman (or gal) who publicly questions anthropogenic global warming.

Meantime, European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas tells the BBC that people should view the battle against climate change as a war - accepting the privations of a wartime economy and expecting millions of casualties.

And we were wondering why we only seem to hear one side of the story, these days? Isn't that kind of like asking why no one ever stood up in church in early 16th century Europe and started explaining how unlikely it was that these witches were really flying around at night, causing other people's cows to go dry?

The Global Warming Cult – Back to Paganism and Onwards to Higher Taxes of Course

The Europeans in their desire to be relevant on the world stage, have erected some immoral and vicious philosophies. Fascism, Communism, Socialism and post modern nonsense and dialecticism exemplified by the Useless Nations, as well as other cults of utopian fantasy are obvious examples. Like its cousin the current Eco-fascist Global Warming cult is premised on non-scientific data; a belief in an all knowing kind technocratic elite that will lead the group; a belief in a new world order; a hatred of modernity; a hatred of capitalism; a hatred of US inspired liberalism and a disdain for work, ethics, virtue and reality. The Eco-fascist cult is nothing more than a sick offering of left over philosophical food, cooked with rancid Marxism, coated with moral superiority complexes, sprinkled with non-scientific platitudes, and garnished by an self-adoring elite who just can’t get enough of their own importance. Eco-cultism and the Global Warming baloney is another sad example of the Euro-trash elite trying to make itself relevant. Global warming does not exist; has no relationship with human activity and is based on natural cycles and trends.

Yet the current media fascination with the eco-cult knows no limits. The current uproar over Global Warming is one of the greatest intellectual frauds in history and one that will be paid for by tax payers. The Europeans are hell bent to decrease the energy cost disadvantage they have with the far more dynamic and prosperous US economy. The Euro-eco fetish mandates the increase in socialist meddling; more unions; more bureaucrats and more dumb standards. Taxes will rise; industry will contract and jobs will be lost – but the Euro and buro-cats will tell you smugly that you sacrifice all for your children. Other cults including Hitlerism, Communism and Islam say the same.

If the Eco-fascists have their way not only will oil be off-limits in North America to new drilling but nuclear power, clean burning coal plants and other carbon based systems will be torn down. Added to this dislocation we have the eco-fascist cult lead by all-knowing seers such as the Useless Nations and Al Gore, screaming that we must do something now! to stop the earth from collapsing thanks to man-made global warming. The fact that not a shred of evidence supports the idea that humans cause global warming is hardly important to the Eco-fascist cult. It is the idea that counts! Not only that but the immoral, bloody, dirty, degenerate and rich West will have to transfer to the poorer nations enormous monies under Global Warming agreements to limit CO2 and other Greenhouse gas emissions. So shout the Eco-fascists. The costs to industry will escalate, economic growth will contract and our society will become a whole lot poorer to appease a small, government funded lobby group that is divorced from reality and a threat to our own existence.

The nonsense surrounding the global warming theory is thick and dense. But here is quick overview of why it is eco-cult garbage.

The Eco-fascist cult, lead by chief hypocrite Al Gore, believes that CO2, water vapor and Methane emissions will cause the earth to warm. This increased temperature will have catastrophic environmental impacts; such as melting ice caps, rising sea levels, ecological devastation and species reduction. Al Gore and his friends predict that without a massive reduction of about 30 % of CO2 and Methane from human induced non-renewal energy burning sources, the earth’s temperature will increase by 1-5 Degrees Celsius by 2100. Apparently this would cause a massive calamity. The culprits are rich countries who burn non-renewal fossil fuels. Developing countries including China and India are not to blame. In addition to policies and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nations should use other mechanisms to meet their commitments in a cost-effective way. Such mechanisms include international emissions trading, the clean development mechanism and joint implementation. In other words, don’t reduce your emissions, just pay someone else to buy their ‘credits’.

The philosophy is badly flawed and utopian – like any fascist cult. The science behind global warming is so bad that 18.000 Climatologists and Scientists have signed a petition stating that it is junk science. Politicians tell you that the scientific community is united on global warming. It isn’t. Only 800 environmental activists and government scientists support the idea. The idea that somehow the earth is not going through a natural climate cycle has never been seriously refuted. Data seems to indicate that there are regular occurrences like the little ice age and the medieval warm period in a rough 1500 year cycle. This cycle has repeated itself endlessly over the past 140.000 years. For example the earth was much warmer during the Medieval Warm Period 900-1400 AD. This warm spell ended around 1350-1400 and the temperature decreased precipitating the ‘Little Ice Age’ [1400-1900]. IPCC models can’t explain these temperature swings.

In the 20th century any temperature increase apparently occurred in two phases, during 1910-1945 and from 1975-2000. The first period is impossible to align with greenhouse emissions. The second phase can be aligned with emissions but 25 years does not constitute a meaningful long term trend, especially when between 1945-1975 there were rising emissions but no corresponding increase in temperature. Dr. Tim Patterson, professor of earth sciences at Ottawa's Carleton University, Dr. Pat Michaels, professor of climatology at the University of Virginia, Dr. John Christy, Professor and Director, Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, and many others explain that these far more accurate and comprehensive satellite temperature sensors reveal only a very small temperature rise since measurements began in 1979. Dr. Christy says the trend is about 0.07C per decade, right at the edge of statistical significance and certainly far too small to be noticeable. As well climatologists Marcel Fligge and Sami Solanki demonstrated in the respected journal, Geophysical Research Letters, that the warming or cooling of the Earth during the past four centuries closely matches variations in the Sun's brightness.

Besides the above we have common sense. Most importantly -- Ninety five percent of CO2 emissions come from natural sources and the earth releases 210,000 mega tonnes each year of CO2 gas. Only about 5 % of this comes from industrial and human activity. Even if you wiped out the human race the effect on CO2 emissions would be only 5 % of the total released yearly. Why then worry about it? Then there is the catch all nature of the Eco-fascist cult. Much like other cults – everything is attributed to the cult of global warming. Cold winter? Damn that global warming. Hurricanes? blame CO2. More ice in Antarctica’s eastern fringe? – well that is global warming at work too.

Al Gore and the Eco-fascist club is Marxist and anti-capitalist. The basic idea of their creed is that capitalism - represented by the immoral United States - is a danger to our mother earth. The earth goddess cult is a cheap way to gain votes. By installing the earth goddess cult into political debate politicians are able to do a number of things. First, they can buy off the green, left wing and eco-cult vote. Second, they can raise taxes and hire more union members in the name of love, the future, our children's green space, saving the world, and other platitudes routinely employed to buy votes. Third, they can denigrate capitalism, growing economies and market dynamics by offering government as the only solution to solve an incurable 'market failure'. Lastly they can resurrect the sorry paganism of the noble savage, the stone age nirvana of the earth goddess cult, as they transfer monies from the rich immoral northern part of the world, to the corrupt, polluted and failing areas of Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. Apparently destroying your economy and ecology through socialist mismanagement as witnessed in Africa and Eastern Europe, needs to be rewarded.

Message to Gore and company - get lost and if you are so enamored of pagan cults, go live in Arabia.

Starting A Runaway Global Warming Process

Accelerated global warming could lead to a runaway methane global warming effect due to the release of methane currently trapped in unstable methane hydrate deposits in the arctic that could be destabilised by accelerated global warming effects.

Core samples taken from old ocean sediment layers have been used to trace back in time the climate changes that have occurred over the past tens of millions of years. By analysing the incidence of different fossil shell remains of sea creatures occurring in these sediments it is possible to track the changes in the sea water temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 occurring at the time the shells were formed and deposited. These shells contain carbon from the CO2 in the atmosphere which was dissolved in the sea water in which the creatures lived just as takes place today.

From these records it appears that there have been short periods of only a few hundred years in the geological past when rapid increases of the Earth's temperature have occurred superimposed on top of the rise and fall of average temperatures over the longer term. For these short periods temperature rises of up to 8 degrees centigrade appear to have occurred on top of existing long term rises of 5 to 7 degrees to give temperatures up to 15 degrees centigrade warmer than today. Temperatures then fell back to the long term trend, the whole rise and fall only lasting a few hundred years.

The most likely cause of this rapid global warming over such a short period is the release of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is 60 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas but only remains in the atmosphere for about ten years and so looses it's greenhouse effect quickly compared to CO2 which remains in the atmosphere for 100 years. CO2 would not be available in sufficient quantities to achieve the rapid warming and if CO2 was the cause then the raised temperatures would last a lot longer.

Methane hydrates occur extensively today all over the world. They consist of methane stored within unstable water bound deposits that if disturbed release the methane. They occur in major river deltas such as the Amazon delta and in old delta areas such as the Gulf of Mexico. Major rivers carry millions of tons of silt containing vegetable matter that continues to decay after the silt is deposited in the river delta. This anaerobic decay produces methane which gets trapped in the silt as methane hydrates until the conditions of water temperature and pressure change which can release the methane in vast quantities very quickly.

Another form is a frozen slush/ice methane hydrate where the methane is trapped in an ice/water mixture which releases the methane when it warms up or the pressure on the ice is reduced. Frozen methane hydrates can contain 170 times their own volume of methane. These frozen hydrates occur in the seabed deposits of the Arctic Ocean.

Methane can also be trapped by permafrost layers which over-lay lower unfrozen layers of vegetable material that is decaying and producing methane which remains trapped by the frozen permafrost on top. If the permafrost layer were to melt then the methane in the layers below would escape into the atmosphere. Given the vast areas of permafrost in northern latitudes there is a significant potential for methane to be trapped that would be released if the permafrost melted as a result of global warming.

The theory for these rapid rises and falls of temperature, based on the geological records from 55 million years ago, is that gradual global warming due to some natural cause had resulted in temperatures 5 to 7 degrees centigrade higher than average (i.e. higher than today's temperatures). At this point methane trapped in methane hydrate deposits started to be released into the atmosphere and accelerated the rate of warming. This would result in further warming releasing more methane.

As the atmosphere warmed different types of methane deposits would start to be released and so a cycle of methane release leading to increased warming leading to more methane release from other areas of methane deposits elsewhere in the world would become established as global warming effected different areas of the world.

There is an intriguing photograph of what appears to be a methane plume coming up out of the Arctic ice sheet which indicates that the phenomenon described above can occur. There have also been incidences of oil drilling inadvertently triggering large releases of methane from hydrate deposits. One theory to explain the loss of ships in the so called Bermuda triangle is that they have been engulfed in a sudden methane release which reduces the buoyancy of the sea water so that the ship sinks.

So, does methane pose a threat today? Let us review the situation. We know there are extensive methane hydrate and permafrost deposits all around the world. We have evidence that we are at the beginning of a period of global warming that is probably being made worse by the continuing build up of CO2 in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel burning. Recent computer modelling incorporating the feed back effects of global warming that has already occurred suggests that by about 2050 we may start to loose the beneficial effects of the Amazon rain forest as a carbon sink.

This could lead to temperature rises of 5 to 8 degrees centigrade by 2100. This would be uncharted territory and no one really knows at present how the world's environmental systems would change but we now have the evidence from the geological past. On the basis of this evidence global warming can lead to methane releases which once started would escalate. This would be the worst possible thing to happen because once started there would be no way of stopping a runaway methane global warming event.

We CAN reduce our CO2 emissions from fossil fuels but we COULD NOT reduce methane emissions once they started, huge natural forces would take over and change our world. This would probably result in the melting of the Antarctic icecap which would raise sea levels by 50 metres and would completely change the climates of the world.

So what should we do? We should be careful and not risk starting the sequence events described above. To do this we must reduce total CO2 emissions from now onwards and take measures to protect carbon sinks such as the Amazon rainforest.

If we all carry on burning so much fossil fuel as we do now we will be running the risk of starting an unstoppable runaway methane global warming event within the foreseeable future. Only major absolute reductions in CO2 emissions NOW will avoid this risk.