A direct blue-clicky to the article since it's dropped off the front page...

John, a BTW - if global warming happens, Britain will actually get _colder_ as the Gulf Stream is diverted away from its current course - in this case, Britain will get a similar climate to other countries on a similar latitude such as Norway...

I'm quite prepared to believe that human intervention is changing things. Whether it's the _main_ source of change, I couldn't say. At the time of the Romans, Britain was warm enough that it was a major wine-producing area and had a similar climate to the south of France today. Go figure. Climate change can happen naturally, and in a fairly short space of time; what's at issue is whether humans are the main source of the change.

Of course, there's any number of good reasons for not polluting anyway - so many I don't think there's any point listing them in a site visited by intelligent people. Trouble is, it seems to be easier to get things done on the basis of "there's a catastrophe coming and we'd better go balls-out even though it may be too late" rather than by saying "let's just behave sensibly and we'll never have to worry". So long as we lurch from one mock-disaster to another, and the disasters never seem quite as bad as we expected, we may just keep fighting the fire. As soon as there's a disaster that _is_ as bad as we expected, or worse (and Africa is in the grip of this with AIDS, cf. someone's comment above), then all hell breaks loose.

Re the article, I'd like someone to explain to me how this would cripple the industry of the US, when other major industrialised nations don't have a problem with it? The US is the richest country in the world, right? So where's this crippling going to come from? Or is it the realisation that the riches are just the money that other countries spent on cleaning up their acts and behaving responsibly - after all, it's much cheaper to shit in the street than to install sewers...

Graham.